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In recognition of Black History Month, Magnum looks back through its archives to spotlight the Black American community, featuring its leaders, activists, artists, musicians, and scholars, while celebrating their achievements, resilience, joy, and love.

February 2025: Black History Month....

"On the morning of September 5, the dramatic hostage-taking at the Olympic Village begins. Nine athletes from the Israeli team are taken hostage by a Black September commando. There are already two dead. A very brief passage through the houses of the Olympic Village allows photographers to catch a glimpse of the balcony where negotiations between the German authorities and the Palestinian commando are taking place." - Raymond Depardon

September 5, 1972: Munich Terror...

In 2024, Larry Towell travelled to Guererro, one of the poorest and most violent provinces in Mexico where villages are under the control of organized crime. Of the estimated 200 cartels and sub-groups now operating in Mexico, sixteen are in Guererro, including Los Ardillos (The Squirrels), which controls the region around Ayahualtempa where local poppy production for opium has been replaced by fentanyl.

“In 2015, the cartels started coming,” said Luis Morales Rojas, a local town leader. “In 2016, they became more visible. In 2017, they visited and offered me a bag of money. I told them we will give them nothing. They said they would kill me and my whole family…. We either had to join them, or resist them.”

Villages that organize self-defense units (auto defensas) and fight organized crime live under constant intimidation. This small Nahua community of 686 persons, where 70% of the population speaks an indigenous language, has no hotels, restaurants, grocery stores nor gas stations. Since there is no high school, children cannot attend beyond primary education. Leaving town would endanger their lives, including entering Hueicantenango, which physically touches Ayalhualtempa’s perimeter. In May 2024, 60-year-old Rayes Bolando Domingo was shot dead near his cattle at the town’s edge.

Local residents have been be kidnapped, tortured and mutilated. On January 2, three local members, plus one civilian woman, disappeared. All four were found decapitated. A year ago, Pablo Morales, brother on one auto defensa member was taken and later found mutilated. Thirty-five villagers from Ayahualtempa have been murdered since 2015.

All men must serve in the auto defense units for a year, rotating on 12 hour shifts with .22 caliber rifles and 16, 20 and .410 gauge single shot shotguns. When asked how they were able to resist cartel machine guns with such small firearms, Luis said “We’re good shots. The cartels with their machine guns make a lot of noise, shoot wildly, and miss their targets….”

Auto Defensas: Fending Off Mexican...

On assignment for Harper's Magazine in July 2024, Rafal Milach documented several Holocaust memorials in Poland, such as the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jewry in Warsaw and the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, with a special emphasis on Oświęcim (Auschwitz in Polish). At the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim, tourists with headset guides flock to the infamous site every day. The site includes the main concentration camp at Auschwitz I and the remains of the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

From following the tour to visiting Jewish neighbourhoods and specific places such as the remains of the set design for the 1993 film Schindler's List, produced by Steven Spielberg, next to Krakow-Płaszów - a Nazi concentration camp operated by the SS in Płaszów, a southern suburb of Krakow, in the General Governorate of German-occupied Poland - Milach and Harper's contributing editor Tanya Gold paint a complex picture of the Holocaust remembrance in Poland.

Holocaust Memorials

On January 20, 2025, President Donald Trump was sworn into office in Washington, D.C. Supporters of the new president gathered in the nation's Capital on January 18 and 19, to mark the occasion in the streets of Washington D.C., and at the Official Hispanic Inaugural Ball.

President Trump's Inauguration...

Leonard Freed

80 years ago, Soviet forces
liberated the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in southern Poland. Auschwitz was the largest Nazi concentration camp and at least 1.1 million prisoners died there.

January 27th, 2025 : 80 years Since...

Canadian musician Garth Hudson has died at the age of 87.
Best known as being a member of The Band, who's sound he helped define, Hudson mastered a number of musical instruments but most notably the organ. In addition to his activity with The Band, he was also in high demand as a studio session musician.

Garth Hudson: 1937 - 2025

Groundbreaking American filmmaker David Lynch has died at the age of 78. Best known for his blend of surreal movies, "Eraserhead" (1977), "The Elephant Man" (1980), "Dune" (1984), "Blue Velvet" (1986), "Lost Highway" (1997), and "Mulholland Drive" (1999), Lynch also changed the face of television with the broadcast of "Twin Peaks" (1989-1991). He was nominated for four Oscars and received an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2020.
In addition to his film work, Lynch explored a variety of other creative outlets: writing, acting, music, painting and other visual arts.

David Lynch: 1946 - 2025

In 2008 Bruce Davidson began exploring Los Angeles from the point of view of its exotic plant life. The arid climate, normally hostile to life, allows for an exceptional botanical diversity in L.A. County that reaches from the surrounding foothills and mountain wilderness to the Pacific Ocean. Davidson’s images reveal both the beauty and banality of urban existence in L.A., and the unexpected interactions between the natural and man-made environments.

68 pages, 30 Photographs
Tritone
Hardback / Clothbound
29.5 x 29 cm
English
ISBN 978-3-86930-814-2

Nature of Los Angeles 2008-2013...

At the start of 2025, Emin Özmen documented the living conditions of children in Damascus for the Washington Post during a period of change following the fall of the Assad regime. Many children are traumatized by the long-lasting war they endured.

The photographer traveled to Damascus' southern suburbs of Douma and Daraya, areas of Goutha where a chemical massacre took place in 2013, destroying many schools and causing overcrowding in those that remained viable. Children play on soccer fields as barrel bombs from the Assad regime's chemical attacks on the Syrian people are still visible, while NGOs are helping them cope with trauma and physical injuries caused by the war.

Ozmen also documented the struggling health care system, reliant on outdated equipment due to international sanctions imposed as a result of Assad's rule. "Before the start of the conflict, the local pharmaceutical industry covered up to 90 percent of the needs of the local market. Since 2011, the various sanctions packages have made it very difficult for those who produce or import medicines," Samir Kattan, a 65 year-old Damascus-based pharmaceutical worker, told the photographer.

Children in Damascus

The war in Gaza is a conflict with little chance of escape — even for the thousands of Palestinians who have been grievously wounded in Israel’s attacks. But a small number of the sick and injured make it onto a list of critical cases to be treated by doctors abroad. The price to leave can be high: a missing leg, a lost arm. But for these few, there is a way out. More than 8,000 Gazans have been brought to a floating hospital off the coast of Egypt run by the United Arab Emirates for treatment since the start of the war in October 2023.
In May, Israel entered Rafah, and the border was closed, blocking access to the hospital there. By the end of the summer, the U.A.E. had found a new way out for the wounded -- a humanitarian flight aboard a converted passenger jet to a housing complex in Abu Dhabi.
Every few weeks now, desperate families depart Gaza in the early morning hours, making their way on buses to an airport just across the border in Israel. Their destination was the Emirates Humanitarian City, a custom-built housing complex. If there is a place to return to a normal life after Gaza, it is here.

Escape from Gaza: UAE Evacuations...

On assignment for The New Yorker, Moises Saman documented the trail of Captagon-smuggling from Syria to Jordan.

Captagon Smuggling

Magnum photographer Constantine Manos passed away after a long battle with Alzheimer’s on January 2, 2025. He was 90 years old.

Constantine “Costa” Manos began his photographic career when he was just 13, joining the school camera club in 1947 — incidentally, the same year Magnum Photos was founded. Within a few years, he was a professional photographer working at his local newspaper, and well on his way to becoming one of the most influential documentary photographers of his generation.

Born in 1934, in Columbia, South Carolina, USA, to Greek immigrant parents, Manos developed his love for photography in his early teens, but it wasn’t until he was 18 that he garnered a more substantial understanding and appreciation for the greater world of photography.

In 1952, he enrolled at the University of South Carolina. While there, he read an article in a magazine about the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who, unbeknown to him, would become Manos’s mentor from afar. The young photographer went so far as to acquire the same equipment — a Leica rangefinder and Ilford film. That same year, Cartier-Bresson published Images à la Sauvette, or The Decisive Moment. Around the same time, Manos made his first serious photographs and “began a lifelong search for beautiful and poetic images.”

Manos was led by a concern for the social conditions of people in the American South. He had heard about an island off the coast of South Carolina, between Hilton Head and Savannah, Georgia, that sounded like the right subject matter for the kinds of pictures he wanted to take. Daufuskie Island, was and still is, the home of members of the Gullah Geechee, an African American community whose relative isolation allowed them to preserve some of the culture and language of their enslaved West African ancestors. While a student at his then-segregated university, Manos wrote and published anti-segregation editorials featuring several of these images.
His parents, Dimitri and Aphrodite (Vaporiotou) Manos, were from Avşa Island in the Sea of Marmara in Turkey. After the end of WWI, they were forced to Greece during the 1922-23 population exchange. They then emigrated to Columbia, SC, and eventually ran the Washington Street Cafe, which served only to a Black clientele during segregation. Dimitri was known as “Big Jim” and cooked what is known today as “soul food.”

Together, they encouraged Manos and his siblings to pursue their creative hobbies, from learning instruments to allowing Manos to use the basement of their house as a darkroom. Manos played the flute and his sister and brother played violin and piano. Becoming a lover of classical music, he was hired as the official photographer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at its summer festival in Tanglewood when he was 19. His book, Portrait of a Symphony, about the orchestra, was published eight years later in 1961.

After graduating with a BA in English Literature in 1955, Manos became a Private in the U.S. Army, serving his draft time in Germany as a staff photographer with the Stars & Stripes for two years. Aside from his assignments for the newspaper, Manos found time to make pictures for himself during weekend leaves and longer furlough time. Over the course of a year he shot approximately 60 rolls of film, which were processed and put away. In 2010, Manos pulled the forgotten rolls of film from his files, made contact sheets, and edited the work for the first time. After military service, he moved to New York, where he worked for Esquire, Life and Look. A portrait of a grieving woman at the funeral for a Black soldier killed in Vietnam was one of his most emblematic images, published in Look magazine in 1966.
His parents were Greek refugees, and after hearing stories about life in his father’s home village, Manos obtained a grant to pursue a documentary project in his familial home. From 1961 to 1963 he lived in Greece, where he made the photographs for his book A Greek Portfolio, inspired over the three years by the people he encountered there. A Greek Portfolio was first published in 1972. The book won awards at Arles and at the Leipzig Book Fair, and exhibitions of the work took place at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Art Institute of Chicago. It was in 1963, during his time in Greece, that his attempt to join Magnum Photos was finally successful. He became a full member two years later.
Composing his photographs with patience and serenity, Manos always sought to capture the magic of life as it is lived. “I am a people photographer and have always been interested in people,” he said. The Bostonians, his document of the diversity and dynamism of life in the city, was one such project, preoccupied with people. “Going out into the city with a small camera and making hundreds of pictures of people doing hundreds of things is a dizzying odyssey,” he said. “It’s like gathering the bits of an intimate mosaic.” In Boston, where he settled following his Greek travels, assignments for Time-Life books and the 1974 multimedia project Where’s Boston? fed initially into his larger survey of Bostonian people.
Manos was interested in capturing freedom and joy in celebratory moments. His first self-led project after joining Magnum was a survey of color in the United States, ranging from the leisure habits of California’s beach dwellers, to beer-drinking bikers at Daytona Beach, to Mardi Gras and Gay Pride festivals. Though he was from South Carolina, Manos reflected that his life-long fascination with “the Americans” in this project arose from an outsider’s perspective, having been brought up in a Greek family. Images from the work first appeared in his book American Color, published in 1995, and later in American Color 2, published in 2010. Lyricism defines all of his work: “I hope I can create a book of photographic poems, each unique yet all connected,” he said.
The first gay Magnum photographer, Manos closely documented the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in 1993, as well as the 25th Anniversary of Stonewall in 1994. On May 17, 2004, Manos photographed the very first legal same-sex marriages in the US in the small Massachusetts town of Provincetown, a long-time favorite gathering place of artists and LGBTQ+ people.
Since 2008, Manos had lived in Provincetown with his husband and partner of 61 years, Michael Prodanou, a Greek /Canadian architect and painter. Their relationship began in Rome on May 16, 1963 — the same year that Manos joined Magnum. At the time, Prodanou lived across the street from the Pantheon on Via della Minerva and the pair met in a fish restaurant called “Mare Nostrum” around the corner. They married on December 11, 2011 in their Provincetown home.
In the last few years, Manos stopped making new photographs and teaching workshops, but a large body of work remains in his studio. Hundreds of images from the American Color series, all printed by Manos himself, remain unseen.
Manos is survived by his husband, Michael Prodanou; his sister, Irene Constantinides of Atlanta, GA; his brother, Theofanis Manos of Greenville, SC; as well as three nephews and a niece.
Manos’s photographs are in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Benaki Museum, Athens; and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, which presented a retrospective exhibition of his work in 2013. In 2003, Manos was awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence for his pictures from American Color.
In 2022, in a reception in Washington, DC, the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, on behalf of the Hellenic Republic of Greece, awarded Manos the Knight of the Order of the Phoenix. This honor is bestowed to Greeks who have excelled and who have helped raise Greece’s international prestige. Of the 10 people awarded this honor, Manos was the only one in the arts and letters.
“It is with deep sadness that I reflect on the passing of Costa Manos, an extraordinary photographer and a cherished member of Magnum Photos,” writes Magnum President Cristina de Middel. “Costa belonged to an earlier generation of Magnum, yet his work continues to inspire many of us who never had the chance to meet him personally. His ability to capture the poetry of everyday life with unmatched sensitivity and a keen eye for light and color has left an indelible mark on the history of photography.”
“As president of Magnum, I feel we have lost not just a remarkable artist but also a fundamental part of what makes our collective unique. Costa’s unwavering dedication to photography and to Magnum’s mission will remain an enduring example for us all. My heartfelt condolences go out to his friends and family. His legacy will live on in his images and in the inspiration he has provided to so many.”

Constantine Manos: 1934 - 2025

Sabiha Çimen has been photographically documenting the USA since 2019, capturing images of the country and its people through the lens of a Turkish immigrant.

Viewing the United States - Ongoing...

Antimicrobial resistance is likely to kill 8.22 million people a year by 2050, according to a study published in The Lancet in September 2024, making it a major health concern, especially in war zones. The health realities of conflict are often not seen in their full complexity. War means that victims are wounded with weapons full of microbes, and those who survive often scar in unclean areas, making the spread of infection more likely.

"As wealthier countries bomb poorer ones, devastating essential infrastructure, they have created the tragic social conditions that foster antibiotic resistance. The public-health fallout knows no borders and can carry on indefinitely, even after the bombs stop," writes Francesca Mari for the NYT Magazine.

Enri Canaj traveled to Beirut and Baghdad to report on antimicrobial resistance and research in the two cities' major hospitals. He followed Omar Dewachi, a medical anthropologist who studies antibiotic resistance and war, in his quest to understand the mechanism and significance of this health phenomenon. With a first stop at the American University of Beirut Hospital, at the time starting to be a place of refuge for Palestinian refugees fleeing Gaza, they met with Antoine Abou Fayad, a researcher in conflict medicine since 2017. Adam Afana, a 5-year-old Gazan boy being treated in Beirut, was one of the first to arrive in the capital. An infection in his severely wounded left arm required intravenous antibiotics. Writer and photographer then travel with Dewachi to Baghdad, the researcher's hometown, where microbial resistance is also a growing concern in a healthcare industry still reeling from the ravages of Saddam Hussein's reign.

Antimicrobial Resistance in Wartime...

On assignment for Die Zeit, Myriam Boulos shares images from Syria following the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s government on December 8, which marked the end of more than five decades of the brutal al-Assad regime.

On assignment for Libération, Emin Ozmen has been documenting the aftermath of the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus since 13 December, capturing the celebrations in Ummayad Square and the people's search for the fate of their detained relatives after thousands of prisoners were released.

Syria, December 2024

Patrick Zachmann has been documenting the reconstruction of Notre Dame's Cathedral for the last five years.
Find here a selection of the last chapter of the reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral, capturing the meticulous efforts to finalize the restoration of this iconic Parisian monument, until its first religious mass.

Rebirth of Notre Dame de Paris....

On Saturday, October 7th, Israel was taken by surprise in an unexpected and severe cross-border assault by Hamas from Gaza, resulting in the initial deaths of 900 people. The BBC reported that included in this number were 260 individuals attending a music festival. With many still missing or abducted by Hamas in Israel, families are left desperately seeking information as the conflict unfolds.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared war on Hamas, vowing to use “enormous force” by launching strikes in Gaza and imposing a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip, freezing the flow of essential supplies. According to the BBC, as of October 9th approximately 690 people in Gaza had lost their lives and more than 120,000 had been displaced from their homes.

The result of this has triggered the latest outbreak of fighting in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, drawing in outside powers and echoing across the broader Arab region.

Israel and Palestine from the Archives...

Ukrainian President Vicktor Yanukovych’s cabinet abandoned an agreement on closer trade ties in the EU, favoring closer cooperation with Russia. What began as small protests escalated to the Revolution of Dignity, also known as the Maidan Revolution, a violent protest with at least 88 deaths. Following the Euromaidan protests and removal of Yanukovych, partnered with pro-Russia unrest in Ukraine, Russian annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea.

Demonstrations in the Donbas area of Ukraine escalated into a war between the Ukrainian Government and Russian-backed separatist forces. Russian military vehicles crossed the border in several locations of Donetsk Oblast, which is believed to be responsible for the defeat of Ukrainian forces in early September of 2014. In November, Ukrainian military reported intensive movement of Russian combat troops into separatist-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine.

In October 2021, Russia reignited concerns of a potential invasion after moving troops and military equipment to the shared border with Ukraine. The buildup continued until Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February, 2022.

Russo-Ukrainian Conflict

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