The Magnum Digest: September 14, 2018
Alec Soth photographs urban diversity in Minneapolis, Cristina Garcia Rodero has a museum named after her, and Carolyn Drake captures her hometown through a new lens
Alec Soth documents an eclectic Minneapolis street for Topic
Taking inspiration from Walker Evans’ seminal photobook, Message from the Interior, Alec Soth photographed the varied homes along a four-and-a-half mile stretch of Minneapolis’ Franklin Avenue.
The street is home to a wide variety of residents, encompassing a broad spectrum of living-situations, from students to East African immigrants, Native Americans, millionaires and the destitute. As with Evans’ work, Soth insists that the project’s images are the whole of the message and that they convey much about the home’s inhabitants, even when they themselves are not in the frame.
See Evans and Soth’s images together, here.
El Pais cover the opening of the Cristina Garcia Rodero Museum
Famed for her work on religious and esoteric rituals, and her near-anthropological approach to documenting cultural heritage around the world, Cristina Garcia Rodero’s lifetime of work has been recognised in her hometown of Puertollano, Spain, with the Municipal Museum being re-named after her. Around 200 of her photographs populate the space, at present the focus is on her iconic work from Haiti, but also included in the collection are photographs from Ethiopia, Macedonia, and of course her iconic book project on Spain, Espana Oculta, among others.
Spanish language subscribers can read the full article here.
Carolyn Drake: Fine Art, Every Day
When Carolyn Drake was invited by Samsung to create a series of images celebrating ‘Fine Art, Every Day’, she took her hometown of Vallejo as a starting point, looking at her day-to-day surroundings in a new way: through the lens of jet-lag. You can follow Drake as she shares a new image each day for the next week on her Instagram.
Drake’s images are part of the new Magnum Photos collection for Samsung’s TV, The Frame, and will be available digitally via the Samsung Art Store.
Erich Lessing’s New York Times obituary
The New York Times’ obituary of Magnum photographer Lessing, who died at 95 on August 29, opens with a reminder of the horrors of his youth: fleeing the Nazi regime which murdered his mother and grandmother, and the unlikeliness of his photographic success given early adult life spent farming carp and driving a cab in Israel. Lessing returned to Europe after the war to document the trauma and damage inflicted on the continent, before joining Magnum in 1955.
Read the full obituary, here.
The Portrait of Humanity Award purses a focus on universality
The Portrait of Humanity is a new award created by 1854 Media – the publisher of the British Journal of Photography – in partnership with Magnum Photos. With three Magnum photographers – Alessandra Sanguinetti, Newsha Tavakolian, and Jacob Aue Sobol – on the judging panel, the award will focus on work which highlights the multitude of human experiences. With photos to be submitted by photographers of all levels, 1st, 2nd and 3rd place will share $10,000 in grant awards to create projects that explore their interpretations of humanity.
Read more about the project and how to submit work, here.
