2015 Magnum Nominees : The Future of Photojournalism is the title of a post by Laurence Cornet yesterday on L’Oeil de la Photographie (The Eye of Photography) which looks at the six new Magnum nominees for 2015, Max Pinckers, Lorenzo Meloni, Newsha Tavakolian, Richard Mosse, Carolyn Drake and Matt Black.
It reminds me that I failed to mention the announcement by Magnum when I first read it at the end of June on PDN News. and PetaPixel.
There was a time when becoming part of Magnum was every young photographer’s dream, and though perhaps that has now passed, it remains a significant achievement.
It has been some years since Magnum was really about photojournalism, although it still has many fine photojournalists on its books, past and present. And certainly some of the current crop have proved themselves fir to join that elite. There are links to earlier features about four of them on L’Oeil and I mention the other two below. Some have work already on the Magnum site, and there are more links in the PDN and Petapixel articles.
My browser doesn’t seem able or willing to run the javascript on Lorenzo Meloni’s own web site, but you may be luckier. All I see is a single image, but there are plenty of his images elsewhere, such as the 20 images in A Dark Descent: The Streets of Yemen at Night on Time Lightbox from 2011.
Richard Mosse also has a web site where my browser appears to be unable to find more than a single image. You can watch the film Richard Mosse: The Impossible Image and read more on his Wikipedia entry, which describes him as “an Irish conceptual documentary photographer.” I’ve never been able to feel any interest in this work, perhaps because in the past I played with infra-red film and it failed to arouse much interest in me. Far from showing the ‘future of photojournalism‘ it seems to me a rather trivial and annoying dead end, but others obviously see something in it which I don’t.
“Photojournalism is being redefined in terms of writing and market, and our agency is determined to follow this trend,”
There was as a time when Magnum set the trend, or indeed was the trend.
“They are all photojournalists but that label has not held them back”
Reads as if Magnum has lost faith in the label itself.
“Photojournalism is being redefined in terms of writing and market, and our agency is determined to follow this trend,”
Magnum following, times have indeed changed.
Quotes from: Antoine Kimmerlin, Editorial Manager at Magnum Paris
Yes, a great comment.
Of course there are still many in Magnum who are producing work I admire, but I think the agency has lost its direction rather. Perhaps inevitably as the world of publishing has changed.
I’ve just been struggling through part of the report from SCAM Photojournalist, a sacrificed profession but my French isn’t really up to it:
http://odlp-staging1.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2015/09/150816_photojournalisme_64p-avec-cahier-photos.2.pdf