Magnum Digest

The Magnum Digest: December 20, 2019

Peter van Agtmael photographs for The Marshall Project, TIME’s photos of the year, The Guardian’s photobooks of 2019, Creativity Works on the BBC, and more from Magnum this week

Peter van Agtmael Chuck Coma in his room at his mother's home. Chuck Coma suffered a “hypoxic” brain injury when he was strangled by his cellmate at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Since then he (...)

Chuck Coma Comes Home

Cristie Thompson’s feature – a commission for The Marshall Project, NPR, and Mother Jones – focuses on Chuck Coma, a military veteran with PTSD who was jailed for armed robbery and then assaulted by his cell-mate in prison. Left with life-changing injuries, Coma’s hard earned freedom is, as the article says, ‘not so free’. Coma is but one of the thousands of prisoners assaulted each years in federal prison’s in the US. Peter van Agtmael’s photographs accompany the investigation, which you can read here on The Marshall Project, here on Mother Jones, and here on NPR.

Peter van Agtmael Chuck Coma takes a regimen of pills daily to help mitigate the effects of his brutal beating in prison and the PTSD from his combat experience. Chuck Coma suffered a “hypoxic” brain injury when he (...)

TIME’s Photos of 2019

Six Magnum photographers feature in TIME Magazine’s run down of the Top 100 Photos of 2019. Peter Van Agtmael’s images from a Trump rally and his documentation of the grieving family of a US soldier killed in Afghanistan, Moises Saman’s images of Kurdish fighters and refugees, Christopher Anderson’s informal portrait of French premier Emmanuel Macron, Newsha Tavakolian’s photograph of a Yazidi boy abducted by ISIS, an image from Patrick Zachmann’s extensive work in the ruins of Notre Dame, and Lorenzo Meloni’s photograph of government-aligned fighters in Tripoli all feature in the list.

You can see all 100 images here, on TIME.

Newsha Tavakolian This 12-year-old former child fighter “S.K” tried to return to ISIS several times, and was so violent to his family that his own uncle kicked him out, along with his mother and his two sisters. NGO (...)

The Guardian‘s Photobooks of the Year features Sohrab Hura, Gregory Halpern, and Dennis Stock

Sean O’Hagan’s Guardian list of the best photobooks of 2019 features three Magnum photographers’ monographs. Sohrab Hura’s The Coast – Winner of the 2019 Paris Photo & Aperture Photobook of the Year Awards – is included, alongside Gregory Halpern’s Omaha Sketchbook, and the Reissue of Dennis Stock’s portrait of America’s countercultural west-coast heyday – California Trip. You can see the full list on The Guardian.

You can learn more about The Coast,Omaha Sketchbook, and California Trip on Magnum. Signed copies of The Coast and Omaha Sketchbook are available on the Magnum Shop.

Gregory Halpern Card game at Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility. Omaha, Nebraska. USA. 2005-2018. © Gregory Halpern | Magnum Photos

The Coast, continued

Sean O’Hagan also featured The Coast in his BJP run-down of 2019’s photographic highlights. The book was also included in LensCulture, 1000 Words Magazine, and The Financial Times’ lists of photobooks of 2019, as well as being covered this week on Amercian Suburb X and Art Reveiw. You can read those two features here, and here.

Sohrab Hura Kerala. India. 2014. © Sohrab Hura | Magnum Photos

Moises Saman’s photograph from Greece featured on The Guardian

The Guardian’s list of inspiring, hopeful images of the year included Moises Saman’s photograph of smiling young refugees disembarking from a boat on Lesbos, Greece. You can see the full article here.

Moises Saman Refugees disembark an inflatable raft on the shores of Lesbos island. They had traveled from Assos, Turkey, in inflatable rafts to reach the European Union in the hopes of being granted asylum. Les (...)

Create Jobs workshop on BBC

The work of eight participants on Magnum and Create Jobs recent Creativity Works: Visual Storytelling workshop has been featured on the BBC. The seven-week course saw industry experts, and Magnum photographer Sohrab Hura, working with 24 young photographers who were set the brief of ‘What is Your London?’ to react to with a final project. You can see the selection of eight projects here, on the BBC.

The cover image for Creativity Works course’s final publication, Please Mind the Flash
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