Shadows and light give form to Jeremy Snell’s atmospheric images, which nod to both the beauty of the lakes and rivers and the humanitarian issues that plague it.

Jeremy Snell is a cinematographer and humanitarian photographer. Though originally from Hawaii, he spent much of his youth living throughout Asia. He has photographed numerous campaigns for NGO’s to help bring an end to the world water crisis and modern day slavery.

“Shadows, more than anything, reveal the light; you can see the light in people’s eyes and their faces,” says Snell. There is a sense of tranquillity but also tension, which runs through the frames; an uneasy quietness. And the effect is amplified by the artificial lighting, which Snell often employed, switching between observational images, and more staged shots, for which he collaborated with his subjects. “I wanted to raise awareness about the humanitarian issues in the area but also celebrate the beauty of the people there,” says Snell.

In other news, Rick Owens Fall 2021 Men's. “I’m always conscious of my own aggression. And the older that I get, I feel like I should have reached a level of serenity that I just haven’t; I get impatient, I get itchy, I snap at people sometimes… Aggression is something that I’m fascinated with because I’m constantly conscious of wrestling with it, personally. And I think that that’s true of every man.”

“Shadows, more than anything, reveal the light; you can see the light in people’s eyes and their faces,” says Snell.

Honey Long and Prue Stent’s practice is a merging of photographic and sculptural disciplines. Grounded in experimentation between bodies, materials and environments, there is a pervasive desire to play with and entangle these spheres- seeking a greater sense of connection to them. Informed by processes of foraging and chance encounters, often cultural debris will become reconfigured within fluid and dreamy contexts, triggering subconscious associations while also aiming to avoid classification.

Honey and Prue have been working together since 2010 and are currently based in Melbourne.

The element of water is a vital force that defines planetary geography, etching the landscape and defining the continents. It moves through disparate sectors of the globe as precipitation – mist, rain, sleet and snow.

As humans, we are bound within nature’s water cycle – perspiring and transpiring. It is the main component of our bodily fluids, which carry essential nutrients to the organs and remove toxic wastes. Our physical and psychological states are, like the tidal movement of rivers and oceans, affected by the moon’s gravitational forces. Water flows from the environment into the body and vice versa.

This two-part exhibition explores the aesthetics of water, its ebb and flow as a global life force. In Prelude to Oceans From Here the aerial views of tidal movements, by Julia Davis, create mesmerising patterns on coastal sands. Dean Cross symbolically returns to Country through the act of apply and removing ochre to his half-immersed body. While the ‘Instagram perfect’ photographs taken by Grant Stevens represent a solitary quest to witness the power of cascading water.

Our response to water, from visceral and cerebral to sacred and somatic, is the focus of Oceans from here. The influence of lunar forces on the counterpoise of euphoria and depression underpin Chris Bennie’s Mood swings. In Honey Long + Prue Stent’s performance-based works human forms emerge from, and are subsumed by, watery environs.

HONEY LONG AND PRUE STENT: OCEANS FROM HERE

Caribbean-born, Copenhagen-based photographer Denisse Ariana Pérez uses photography and storytelling to subvert narrow depictions and attitudes regarding men of color that are rooted in colonial thought; subtly unpacking and redefining masculinity. Her images of men in water dive into human experiences beyond labels, showing the more tender and vulnerable side of black men, while eliciting a new sense of power and freedom.

Pérez’s depth of observation is remarkable. The photographer has an astounding ability to display her subjects with a seductive energy, balancing their powerful presence with the beauty of the natural landscape. Her recent work includes multiple series with a number of portraits, in which young black men are captured interacting with water landscapes. “Water can disarm even the most armed of facades,” she shares. Taken in different corners of Africa, from East to West, the images are a celebration of culture and beauty, but most of all, of resilience and liberation.

In her work, Pérez challenges detrimental theories and notions of black masculinity that stem from Westernized patriarchal systems, and have been filtered through the lens of racism. Her photographs do not indulge in the masculinity often imposed upon black men—rigid, aggressive, inherently violent, and hyper-sexual. They highlight aspects of comfort, tenderness, lightness, and freedom, through bodily expression and staged compositions in waterscapes. The images showcase men feeling beautiful, expressing emotions, showing attachment, and embracing each other. In a society that expects men to dominate in every aspect of their lives, Pérez’s work unearths new conceptions of male identity, by building new visual foundations. By documenting a softer side of men, her series shows vulnerability, sentimentality, and the intimate relationship between body and space, declaring that there is no need to conform to societal expectations of what black masculinity is—black men are not monolithic and black masculinity is simply not one thing; it has many facets and complex layers.

In her work, Pérez challenges detrimental theories and notions of black masculinity that stem from Westernized patriarchal systems, and have been filtered through the lens of racism.

DENISSE ARIANA PÉREZ'S DEPTH OF OBSERVATION

Penrose has been taking self-portraits on a ten-second timer for over a decade.

They are unpremeditated and spontaneous and record her responding to her environment. She explores identity and the opposed notions of vulnerability and empowerment, comedy and tragedy. Her pictures focus less on sexuality and female allure, but retain the awkward, often beguiling force of the body as an object, pushed into a space, forced into a position whilst feigning a sense of normality and control.

Polly Penrose studied Graphic Design at Camberwell College of Arts in London. She went on to work in Fashion Styling and after that worked for the photographer Tim Walker. She has always taken photographs, but started to take the practice seriously when she entered and won a competition held by the London Photographic Association in 2008.

She held her first solo show, ‘A Body of Work’, at the Downstairs at Mother Gallery, London, in May 2014. She held her second solo show at the Hoxton Gallery in London in May 2016 and also exhibited in group shows ‘Self Reflection’ at The Untitled Space, New York and ‘All Inclusive’ at the HVW8 Gallery, Berlin. In 2018 she showed work in ‘Spring Break Art show in New York.

She explores identity and the opposed notions of vulnerability and empowerment, comedy and tragedy. Her pictures focus less on sexuality and female allure, but retain the awkward, often beguiling force of the body as an object, pushed into a space, forced into a position whilst feigning a sense of normality and control.

POLLY PENROSE: THE BEAUTY OF THE FEMALE FORM THROUGH CAREFULLY PLANNED SELF PORTRAITS

This is photographer and journalist Larry Towell’s documentary account of the Palestinians. It reveals the landscape of a scarred and battered “no man’s land” – the area that calls itself Palestine and Israel, but which is neither fully – and the daily lives of the people who live there. Photographed over a period of ten years and completed with the support of the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson Award (with Towell as its first recipient, in 2003), this is Towell’s most important body of work to date and a landmark of photographic art and journalism. Towell describes the physical and psychological walls that divide Palestinians from Israelis and a land divided against itself.

As Towell relates in an excerpt from the book, “Today, the little that remains of Palestinian land has been cut to ribbons by a military infrastructure of settlement roads, checkpoints, watch-towers, security gates, walls and weapons, guaranteeing Israel’s ultimate control and extending it to satellite settlements, the purpose of which is clearly expansionist. By granting Israel enough political immunity to flout international law, the U.S. has helped turn it into a pariah, condemned by the world community.”

Towell illustrates this through his black and white photographs, many of them epic panoramas, which are simultaneously sad, haunting, breathtaking and beautiful. With a foreword by Robert Delpire.

Larry Towell’s business card reads ‘Human Being’. Experience as a poet and a folk musician have done much to shape his personal style. The son of a car repairman, Towell grew up in a large family in rural Ontario, Canada. During studies in visual arts at Toronto’s York University, he was given a camera and taught how to process black and white film.

A stint of volunteer work in Calcutta in 1976 provoked Towell to photograph and write. Back in Canada, he taught folk music to support himself and his family. In 1984, he became a freelance photographer and writer focusing on the dispossessed, exile and peasant rebellion. He completed projects on the Nicaraguan Contra war, on the relatives of the disappeared in Guatemala, and on American Vietnam War veterans who had returned to Vietnam to rebuild the country. His first published magazine essay, Paradise Lost, exposed the ecological consequences of the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. He became a Magnum nominee in 1988 and a full member in 1993.

In 1996, Towell completed a project based on ten years of reportage in El Salvador, followed the next year by a major book, Then Palestine. His fascination with landlessness also led him to the Mennonite migrant workers of Mexico, an eleven-year project completed in 2000.

With the help of the inaugural Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, he finished a second highly acclaimed book on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 2005, and in 2008 released the award-winning The World From My Front Porch, a project on his own family in rural Ontario where he sharecrops a 75-acre farm.

Larry Towell's testimony of unrest and daily life of those caught in the on-going Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Sexiness is an all-day affair for Agent Provocateur. Featuring photography by Charlotte Wales, a new Spring 2021 campaign from the iconic lingerie house uses their singularly sensual brand of irony to send a glorious message of everyday empowerment.

The imagery humorously plays with our expectations of the everyday and the intimate. Wales photographs her models as they go about normal, everyday activities, such as putting gas in the car, making work phone calls, or walking the dog. But these everyday women are bedecked in all the glamorous sexiness of the new Agent Provocateur lingerie collection. Thus the campaign subverts a paradigm of our culture’s expectations of women: the sexiness and sexuality that lingerie represents exists in opposition to everyday life; sexuality is supposed to be something private and unseen. Agent Provocateur presents us with a woman who boldly unites these separate aspects, which feels absurd, and yet empowering.

This sense of tension is amplified by Wales’ smart use of props and minimalist set. She uses versions of these objects which seem to date back to the 80’s, taking us back to a time when the idea of an independent working woman was often seen as stylishly provocative, rather than the norm. The short film, directed by Alyn Horton, also echoes this sense of retro gonzo glamor through slow-motion shots, high-powered fans, and a bodacious soundtrack.

Both humorous and thoughtful, the campaign is another strong example of Agent Provocateur’s singularly witty approach. At once uniting and emphasizing the distinction between the ostensibly disparate realms of everyday activity and idealized sexuality, the imagery sends a strong note of empowerment and self-love in all things. Whether we are walking the dogs, making work calls, or looking as hot as possible, we are always the same person, and we deserve to feel beautiful.

Review of Agent Provocateur ‘All Hours’ Ad Campaign by Photographer Charlotte Wales and Filmmaker Alyn Horton with models Alva Claire, Nohemi Hermosillo, Chinchin Hsu, Effy Kaethner, and Leila Nda.

AGENT PROVOCATEUR SPRING 2021 AD CAMPAIGN

Ferdinando Scianna started taking photographs in the 1960s while studying literature, philosophy and art history at the University of Palermo. It was then that he began to photograph the Sicilian people systematically. Feste Religiose in Sicilia (1965) included an essay by the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia, and it was the first of many collaborations with famous writers.

Scianna moved to Milan in 1966. The following year he started working for the weekly magazine L’Europeo, first as a photographer, then  as a journalist from 1973. He also wrote on politics for Le Monde Diplomatique and on literature and photography for La Quinzaine Littéraire.

In 1977 he published Les Siciliens in France and La Villa Dei Mostri in Italy. During this period, Scianna met Henri Cartier-Bresson, and in 1982 he joined Magnum Photos. He entered the field of fashion photography in the late 1980s and at the end of the decade he published a retrospective, Le Forme del Caos (1989).

Scianna returned to exploring the meaning of religious rituals with Viaggio a Lourdes (1995), then two years later he published a collection of images of sleepers – Dormire Forse Sognare (To Sleep, Perchance to Dream). His portraits of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges were published in 1999, and in the same year the exhibition Niños del Mundo displayed Scianna’s images of children from around the world.

In 2002 Scianna completed Quelli di Bagheria, a book on his home town in Sicily, in which he tries to reconstruct the atmosphere of his youth through writings and photographs of Bagheria and the people who live there.

"A photograph is not created by a photographer. What they do is just to open a little window and capture it. The world then writes itself on the film. The act of the photographer is closer to reading than it is to writing. They are the readers of the world"

Ferdinando Scianna records the significance of Sicilian religious rituals and practices in the 1960s.

FERDINANDO SCIANNA: RELIGIOUS FESTIVALS IN SICILY

It’s been a year and a few days since Italy’s first COVID case was detected. Milan Fashion Week was in full swing when the outbreak in the Lombardy region began. Looking back, knowing now what we didn’t know then, is to see plenty of hand-wringing but probably not enough hand-washing. Fashion has done much hand-wringing for the last 12 months. Beyond the disastrous economics of the pandemic, there have been pressing, existential questions: How will a year at home affect what we want? Does fashion matter in a world bereft of social interactions?

There are two brilliant fashion minds at Prada now, with Raf Simons having joined Miuccia Prada as co-creative director that fateful week a year ago. So there are few better places to look for answers now. As the director Lee Daniels put it in an online Q&A post-show, “Miuccia takes this shit very, very seriously.” (Daniels hired Prada to design the costumes worn by Andra Day in his new film The United States vs. Billie Holiday.)

Adjusting to the idea that “normal” isn’t coming back took all of us longer than it probably should have. But whatever shape the world takes when we re-emerge, there’s a collective feeling of hope that’s new. At a small press conference after the Q&A Prada said, “optimism is mounting.” That’s a different take than she and Simons had a month ago in a similar situation following their fall 2021 men’s show. “We don’t feel it’s right, now, to be too exuberant,” Simons said then.

You can credit this shift of mind to the vaccines, the inevitable brightening of moods as winter ends and spring begins, or the pleasures that Prada and Simons are finding in collaboration. “It feels natural,” Simons said of their partnership today. “At the same time, of course, it’s challenging, but I expected that. And I wanted it to be, otherwise I wouldn’t have come.” Together, these factors produced a collection with a tantalizing sense of glamour. It glimmered most clearly in the rectangular double-sided wraps—paillettes on one side, faux fur on the other—that models clutched to their breasts in a gesture “of protection, but also of elegance.” One such wrap was worn over a matching black paillette dress which itself was layered over the second-skin jacquard knits that appeared in many of the looks.

In its endorsement of these foundational knits, the collection was a showcase for the key way the pandemic is changing fashion. Ease is the flip side of elegance: In 2021, in contrast to the past, both are integral; and women seem unlikely to sacrifice the former for the latter. “Ease and movement were very important to us,” Simons confirmed. This is a positive development, especially because Prada and Simons were able to manage it while also reigniting a fashion spark that a year of online living has otherwise made dormant. A few of the compelling ways to celebrate our reemergence here included a drop-shoulder, puff-sleeve coat in electric yellow (a color the duo is staking a claim to), a chesterfield in midnight sequins, and a clutch coat in fake fur and the company’s regenerated Re-Nylon.

At a small press conference after the Q&A Prada said, “optimism is mounting.” That’s a different take than she and Simons had a month ago in a similar situation following their fall 2021 men’s show. “We don’t feel it’s right, now, to be too exuberant,” Simons said then.

The 2014 revolution in Ukraine saw the country move toward greater integration with Europe, and away from the influence of Russia, largely as a result of the ‘Euromaidan’ demonstrations. Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, was the scene of months of mass protest throughout the bitter winter of late 2013, through to February 2014. These protests focused upon the city’s Independence Square, popularly referred to as just the Square or ‘Maidan’, which was occupied from November 2014 onward. The popular uprising led eventually to the ousting of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, and sparked Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing hostilities in the country’s east. The last three days of the Maidan protests, from February 18 onward, saw a peak in violence and the deaths of at least 70 people, many killed by snipers whose motives are contested even now. Magnum photographer Jérôme Sessini was in the square when the shooting started. During his time in Kiev he captured the protesters’ dogged occupation, the building tensions at Maidan and the standoff’s bloody climax. Here, five years on, he reflects upon his days in the square.

You have said previously that you were unsure about going to Ukraine to cover the protests at first. What was it that led you to go, in the end, in spite of that doubt?

Firstly it was curiosity, I hadn’t travelled to Ukraine before. On top of that there was the encouragement of my colleague Gueorgui Pinkhassov, who was just coming back from Kiev at the time. He played a big part, he gave me energy and motivation to make the trip.

You often speak emphatically about authorship, and about the photographer’s need to admit – and commit – to conveying a story with their work. When you were working in the square how did you feel about Ukraine’s status and the protests themselves? 

During the violent events of late February, when snipers opened fire on protesters, everything was totally unpredictable. I woke up the day after my arrival in Kiev, and I was plunged into extreme violence, into one of those rare moments where you find yourself facing death. In such moments you are totally immersed in the present, there is no before, there is no after, just the instant. Only life and death. I trusted my instinct, I became very calm and sharp. I call such times ‘moments of grace’. Maybe I’ve been unconsciously looking for these moments all my life as a photographer.

But in these situations there is no space or time to think. Reflection comes eventually after…

With that in mind, and looking back over the work you made, has time changed how you feel about it? 

Yes and no. I had felt, from the very beginning, that the division of Eastern Ukraine would be a bad thing for all Ukrainians. I regret that most of the mass or mainstream media had such a simplistic and binary vision of the issues. Sometimes [coverage] was totally militant (Pro-Kiev of course, or rather, anti-Russian) without putting into perspective the events. War is about propaganda, truth is the first victim of war, to quote the famous saying. Our work, as journalists or even just witnesses of history, is to stay out of government propaganda.

One other problem in Ukraine, was that the conflict was largely being covered by young journalists, many based in Kiev and with strong bonds to Kiev’s educated pro-European youth. They also had a romantic vision of revolutions in general.

Because of this self-identification of many involved, I think there was also a sort of bias toward a view of Kiev representing progressivism and open-mindedness, while people from East-Donbass who are mainly Russian-speaking and often working class (miners for example) had a totally different view of the events in Maidan. Europeans just saw it as young people protesting for freedom, and against corruption. People from Donbass were scared about the takeover of long-time anti-Russian fascist activists like the Right-Sector.

Is there one image in particular from your work in Maidan Square which stands out to you as best conveying the realities of that complex situation on the ground?

Not really. I look at the work from a general point of view. I don’t believe in iconic pictures. I don’t believe in the idea of ‘true’ photography…

Was the disinformation or propaganda war already in full effect when you were there working? You have touched on the biases in play, but did any of that effect your approach? 

Propaganda was very strong from both sides, but I think photography is quiet limited with regards to showing what’s going on behind the scenes. Photography can only ever show the surface.

The pictures I took during the shootings in the square are a good example of that. My photos show unarmed protesters being killed by bullets, everybody – including myself and the press – thought it was the government’s riot police who open fire on the protesters. Later some journalists carried out investigations and it appears that the snipers were shooting both protesters and police, in order to create chaos and confrontation. I met with former police officers, one year later, who had been on Instytutska Street when shooting happened and they lost a lot of police officers that day.

In terms of what came next – the war in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 which you covered – does the weight of events that followed make the clashes around Maidan take on a greater historical and personal weight for you? 

Absolutely, Maidan was the first act in a great historical movement, it was just the beginning of a coming confrontation on a much larger scale.

It seems to me that you have often worked in ‘liminal’ areas. From your early work in Kosovo, to Libya, the drug war in Mexico, to Ukraine – these conflicts seem unified by their not-quite-defined nature. Does the grey area surrounding these confrontations add to the role played by photography in creating a document or record? 

Yes, paradoxically I am attracted by big events, but once I am in the middle of them I try to move away from it all, to step back and from a distance try to understand what it is playing out, beyond the obviously visual.

Contradictorily, I am often working at the limits of what photographic media can do or show. But, despite everything, I think – perhaps wrongly – that I can explore this grey area with the camera. In fact my photography is born of this tension and this permanent contradiction.

You often focus on the ‘normal’ people, caught up in conflict, condemned by nothing more than where they live…  Are there universal realities you have seen, having documented so many struggles for independence and change? 

I wish I thought differently, but most of the time, I feel that people’s fate is driven by social determinism.

Jérôme Sessini reflects upon the extreme violence that erupted in Kiev during the protests which culminated in the removal of Ukraine’s president.

In Ciudad Juarez, a Mexican city along the US border of 1,5 million souls, you have more chances of being killed then in Baghdad. For the sole year 2009, there were 2,657 ‘executions’ counted .

There are around 8,000 soldiers stationed in the city to reinforce police forces but fear has spread amongst the population where the crime rate is of 163 murders for 1,000 inhabitants. Rivalry between gangs controlling the drug market, violence within jobless families relying on relatives to send them money from the other side of the frontier, as well as the overwhelming presence of the cartels infiltrating state authorities and ransoming anyone from street vendors to corrupted officials has sent Ciudad Juarez in a seemingly endless spiral of violence.

Jérôme Sessini is one the world’s most prolific and respected names working in the sensitive field of conflict zones and has been dispatched to war-torn countries like Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Libya for international publications. As well as reporting on the frontlines, he has covered social issues such as the drug-related violence on the streets of Mexico, the anti-government protests in Ukraine and indigenous minorities in Cambodia facing forced eviction. Through his work, he is constantly learning, adapting and evolving.

Since 2018, Sessini has been documenting the opioid crisis in the United States, where he has travelled to Ohio and Philadelphia to create intimate portraits of the people and places ravages by drug misuse. In 2017, Sessini travelled to remote villages in Cambodia with Samrith Vaing, documenting the life of indigenous minorities facing forced eviction. In 2016, Sessini documented the Kurdish Peshmerga offensive against Islamic State (IS) in the city of Bashiq before crossing the region to cover Iraqi forces pushing towards Mosul.

His work has been published by prestigious newspapers and magazines, including Newsweek, Stern, Paris-Match as well as Le Monde and the Wall Street Journal. It has been shown in multiple solo exhibitions around the world including the Visa Photo Festival in Perpignan, at the Rencontres d’Arles, the Bibliothèque Nationale François-Mitterrand, as well as with the French Ministry of Culture.

Sessini become Magnum Photos nominee in 2012 and a full member in 2016.

Jérôme Sessini explores the drug-related violence at the U.S. border in Mexico where drug cartels wage war on the streets.

JÉRÔME SESSINI: DRUG-RELATED VIOLENCE IN MEXICO

Julie Poly (real name Yulia Polyashchenko) was born in Stakhanov, Lugansk area, and is now based in Kyiv. Inspired by Boris Mikhailov’s projects and her classes at Kharkiv School of Photography, she took her first pictures at the horse market in Kharkiv. Today, Julie Poly is among the most successful Ukrainian photographers.

Julie Poly’s art practice is merging her previous experience in documentary and staged photography. The artist interprets cultural and visual codes of typical Ukrainian everyday life, predominantly in eroticism, fashion, and novel notions of beauty. The photographer states that she finds herself constantly inspired by “trivial things, everyday events, stories from lives of her friends, and her own experience”.

The photographer states that she finds herself constantly inspired by “trivial things, everyday events, stories from lives of her friends, and her own experience”.

JULIE POLY INTERPRETS CULTURAL AND VISUAL CODES OF TYPICAL UKRAINIAN LIFE

“I think I have never really understood what fashion is,” muses 75-year-old Ferdinando Scianna. Despite a large portion of his back catalogue now comprising both editorial and commercial fashion work, the photographer viewed himself as very much outside of the fashion sphere. Scianna describes experiencing some initial guilt over the fact that he had broken Cartier-Bresson’s commandment that a photographer should not manipulate reality, but then quickly found that doing so in order to orchestrate fashion shoots steeped in drama, Italian cultural mores, and implied narrative, was “a great deal of fun”.

He discovered that when he applied his craft to fashion, his photography did not really change. “It was a different way to do what I did before and would always do afterwards. I do not see any difference between my fashion photography and my work as a reporter,” he says.

It was a visionary commission for an early Dolce & Gabbana campaign that led Scianna to enter into the world of fashion. “It all happened by chance; Dolce & Gabbana were at the beginning of their career and, for their catalogue, they wanted a photographer that didn’t work in fashion. They had seen some of my photos and asked me to work for them, almost for free. I was intrigued and I accepted. The incredible part is that years after, we discovered the pictures they had seen were by another photographer,” says Sicanna, adding, “The power of randomness!”

Following this initiation, Scianna spent a good deal of time over the 1980s and 90s taking editorial and commercial fashion commissions, as well as documenting fashion shows with much the same approach that he had documented Sicilian daily life.

The characteristic approach Scianna developed to photographing fashion drew heavily on his background as a documentarian of his home country, with Italian social traditions, religious iconography, and the concept of the matriarch as the head of the family coming together to shape his style. In fact, the more Scianna worked as a fashion photographer, the more he identified parallels between fashion and the Italian way of life. “In religious festivals in Sicily the costumes have a very important and theatrical role. It is very similar to fashion, they follow the same principles,” he notes.

“Working as a fashion photographer was surprising and natural for me. I had never done fashion photography and I did it as a reporter, I was amused,” recalls Scianna of his breakthrough commission. “We worked in Sicily, were I was born and took so many pictures. It was something like a psychoanalytical journey into memory. I treated fiction as if it was reality, without calculation and with a certain amount of disquietude.”

The tradition of passeggiata–dressing up and going out of an evening to walk and socialize, is echoed in fashion shows. “Streets are the stage of our life. In Italy, especially in the agricultural Italy I grew up in, women and men dress up to be looked at when walking down the street. Somehow, catwalk shows are the theatrical representation of a street full of women passing by,” he says.

In turn, Scianna’s photography took fashion to this natural setting, with the photographer often staging shoots on the streets of Italy, with casts that included senior citizens and children, alongside professional models. These set-ups spoke to Italy’s traditional esteem for the family and of the traditional pastime of socializing in the streets. “In my fashion photography the scenery, the city and its people are never only a background, they are co-protagonists of the picture and the story I am telling,” explains Scianna. “I always try to tell a story. I believe it is the world that gives meaning to fashion, not the other way around.”

The children, men and older woman are part of these constructed implied narratives within Scianna’s fashion work, but in fashion photography as a genre, and especially the fashion photography of the 80s and 90s, they were an incredibly rare occurrence. In recent years, blogs (and subsequently books and documentaries) like Advanced Style, have sought to address fashion’s youth-centric focus. Working several decades before this, Scianna saw real value in the inclusion of older people in his fashion imagery, employing them to anchor fashion within the culture it a part of: “An old man or woman, an ancient street, they are history, a manifestation of time,” he says. “Fashion pretends to be absolutely in the present but I believe it only has meaning when compared to the past.”

How honing his practice by documenting Sicilian life gave the photographer the perfect grounding to create dramatic fashion images steeped in Italian tradition.

FERDINANDO SCIANNA’S FASHION ICONOGRAPHY

Moises Saman blends traditional conflict photography with a deeply personal point of view. For more than ten years, he has been concerned with the humanitarian impact of war in the Middle East, documenting both the front line of daily suffering and the ‘fleeting moments on the periphery of the more dramatic events’.

Saman was born in Lima, Peru, from a mixed Spanish and Peruvian family. At the age of one, his family relocated to Barcelona, Spain, where Moises spent most of his youth. Saman studied Communications and Sociology in the United States at California State University, graduating in 1998. It was during his last year in university that Saman first became interested in becoming a photographer, influenced by the work of a number of photojournalists that had been covering the wars in the Balkans.

Saman has worked on many editorial commissions including, most recently, the covers for TIME magazine’s Person of the Year 2018, which featured several journalists who have been targeted for their work. For this prestigious assignment, Saman photographed 26 journalists during trips to seven countries — including Myanmar, Bangladesh, Russia, Germany and Mexico.

Over the years Saman’s work has received awards from the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year and the Overseas Press Club and his photographs have been shown in a several exhibitions worldwide. In 2015, he was given the highly regarded Guggenheim Fellowship for his photojournalism project on the Arab Spring.

In 2010, Saman was invited to join Magnum Photos as a Nominee and became a full member in 2014. He is currently based in New York.

Saman's documentation of the country spans Haitian elections, Voodoo ceremonies and the devastating aftermath of the 2010 earthquake.

Raghu Rai was born in the small village of Jhhang, now part of Pakistan. He took up photography in 1965, and the following year joined The Statesman newspaper as its chief photographer. Impressed by an exhibit of his work in Paris in 1971, Henri Cartier-Bresson nominated Rai to join Magnum Photos in 1977.

Rai left The Statesman in 1976 to work as picture editor for Sunday, a weekly news magazine published in Calcutta. He left in 1980 and worked as Picture Editor/Visualizer/Photographer for India Today, India’s leading news magazine, during its formative years. From 1982 to 1991, he worked on special issues and designs, contributing trailblazing picture essays on social, political and cultural themes, many of which became the talking point of the magazine.

In the last 18 years, Rai has specialized in extensive coverage of India. He has produced more than 18 books, including Raghu Rai’s Delhi, The Sikhs, Calcutta, Khajuraho, Taj Mahal, Tibet in Exile, India, and Mother Teresa.

For Greenpeace, he has completed an in-depth documentary project on the chemical disaster at Bhopal in 1984, and on its ongoing effects on the lives of gas victims. This work resulted in a book and three exhibitions that have been touring Europe, America, India and southeast Asia since 2004, the 20th anniversary of the disaster. Rai hopes that the exhibition can support the many survivors through creating greater awareness, both about the tragedy, and about the victims – many who are still uncompensated – who continue to live in the contaminated environment around Bhopal.

Rai was awarded the Padmashree in 1971, one of India’s highest civilian awards ever given to a photographer. In 1992, his National Geographic cover story Human Management of Wildlife in India won him widespread critical acclaim for the piece. Besides winning many national and international awards, Rai has exhibited his works in London, Paris, New York, Hamburg, Prague, Tokyo, Zurich and Sydney. His photo essays have appeared in many of the world’s leading magazines and newspapers including TIME, LIFE, Geo, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, Newsweek, The Independent and The New Yorker.

He has served three times on the jury of the World Press Photo and twice on the jury of UNESCO’s International Photo Contest.

Raghu Rai lives in Delhi with his family and continues to be a correspondent of Magnum Photos.

Magnum photographer Raghu Rai documents the on-going tragedy following the explosion in 1984 of the Union Carbide's pesticide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal.

French prisons, much like many penal systems worldwide, are suffering from overcrowding, structural obsolescence and poor conditions for inmates. The French penal system only has official capacity for 58,681 inmates, yet as of January 1st 2017, 78,796 people are in penal custody in France, of which 68,432 are serving prison terms. These figures are some of the worst in Europe, and are frequently cited by the Council of Europe.

This problem has been amplified since the terrorist attacks of 2015: France has been declared in a State of Emergency ever since, which means an exceptional set of laws are in place, allowing for expanded incarceration policies to protect national security.

In November 2016, Paolo Pellegrin photographed the Meaux Penitentiary Center, a prison constructed in 2001, located in the Parisian suburbs. The prison, originally built for 332 inmates, currently houses 550.

For five “very long, very intense” days, Pellegrin was given unprecedented access to the staff and inmates at Meaux, deploying his humanist perspective on the prison, “connecting with people in an environment he does not know.” He was surprised by the transparency of the prison and the openness of the staff. One of the guards in particular, Philippe, became his guide. Thanks to his help, he found both prisoners and staff very receptive to being photographed in their everyday life at the prison. Most of all he was surprised by the professionalism he encountered everywhere, “as human as possible in a very harsh world.”

This story is part of The France Project: perspectives on the social, political and cultural landscape of contemporary France. In this ongoing project, initiated in 2016, Magnum photographers explore the background to issues influencing debate in the country in the run-up to the election.

Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin spends five days at the Meaux Penitentiary.

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