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Education 

Magnum Photos Now: Photobooks One-Day Symposium 

May 11, 2017 
by Magnum Photographers 
Explore photobooks with Martin Parr, Fred Ritchin, Susan Meiselas, along with other Magnum photographers, critics and publishers in New York.

From Henri Cartier-Bresson’s creative partnership with the publisher Robert Delpire, to Alec Soth’s experimental publishing house Little Brown Mushroom, the photobook as a means of expressing a body of work has been a critical preoccupation of Magnum’s membership since the agency’s inception.

As part of our 70th anniversary celebrations in New York in June, Magnum is offering the opportunity to explore photobooks with Martin Parr, Fred Ritchin, and Susan Meiselas, along with other Magnum photographers, critics and publishers in a special one-day symposium in partnership with the ICP.

The next in our Magnum Photos Now talks programme with the ICP offers four panels covering the history and future of photobooks, the photobook in relation to social and political conflict as well as the trend of personal narratives invigorating the form.

Tickets will be available soon.

Speaker details

Susan Meiselas

Susan Meiselas received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.A. in visual education from Harvard University. Her first major photographic essay, focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs, resulted in the book Carnival Strippers (1976). She is best known for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua, published in Nicaragua (1981). Meiselas served as an editor and contributor to the book El Salvador: The Work of Thirty Photographers (1983) and edited Chile from Within (1991).
She has co-directed two films: Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family (1986) and Pictures from a Revolution (1991). She completed a six year project curating a 100 year photographic history of Kurdistan, integrating her own work into the book, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997). Additional works include Pandora’s Box (2001) and Encounters with the Dani (2003). She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2015.

Martin Parr

Martin Parr (1952) was born in Epsom, Surrey, UK, he studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic, from 1970 to 1973. Since then, he has developed an international reputation for his innovative imagery, his oblique approach to social documentary, and his input to photographic culture within the UK and abroad. Martin Parr has published over 80 books of his own work and edited another 30. Bad Weather (1982), The Last Resort (1986), and Life’s a Beach (2013) are among his most notable books.

Along with Gerry Badger, Parr has edited The Photobook: A History Volume I (2004), The Photobook: A History Volume II (2006), The Photobook: A History Volume III (2014) and more recently, The Chinese Photobook (2015).

Fred Ritchin

Fred Ritchin is Dean of the School at the International Center of Photography. Previously he was professor of Photography and Imaging at NYU, and co-director of the Photography and Human Rights program. He was picture editor of the New York Times Magazine (1978–82), executive editor of Camera Arts magazine (1982–83), founding director of the Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Program at ICP (1983–86), and in 1999 co-founded PixelPress, an online publication and collaborator on human rights initiatives.
Ritchin has written numerous essays and books, including In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography (Aperture, 1990); After Photography (W. W. Norton, 2008); and Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen (Aperture, 2013).

In 1994–95 he created the first multimedia version of the New York Times, and in 1996 the website “Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace,” nominated by the Times for a Pulitzer Prize in public service. He also initiated the Four Corners Project to provide context and ethical grounding for the photograph online.

In 2012 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Argentinian Documentary Photography Festival in Tucumán, and in 2017 received the John Long Ethics Award from the National Press Photographers Association.

More speakers to be announced soon.