Diane Arbus was an American photographer. She photographed a wide range of subjects including strippers, carnival performers, nudists, people with dwarfism, children, mothers, couples, elderly people, and middle-class families. She photographed her subjects in familiar settings: their homes, on the street, in the workplace, in the park. "She is noted for expanding notions of acceptable subject matter and violates canons of the appropriate distance between photographer and subject. By befriending, not objectifying her subjects, she was able to capture in her work a rare psychological intensity." In his 2003 New York Times Magazine article, "Arbus Reconsidered", Arthur Lubow states, "She was fascinated by people who were visibly creating their own identities—cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort." Michael Kimmelman writes in his review of the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations, that her work "transformed the art of photography ". Arbus's imagery helped to normalize marginalized groups and highlight the importance of proper representation of all people.
Gilles Peress is a French photographer and a member of Magnum Photos.
Joy Amina Garnett is an artist and writer from New York, United States. Trained as a painter, her artwork explores contemporary practices around cultural preservation, alternative histories and archives. Her interdisciplinary work combines creative writing, research and visual media. In her early paintings (1997–2009), Garnett engaged issues around contemporary consumption of media and the distinctions between documentary, technical, and artistic image making. Her mature work draws on archival images, alternative histories and the legacy of her maternal grandfather, the Egyptian Romantic poet, bee scientist and polymath Ahmed Zaki Abu Shadi. Garnett is married to conceptual photographer and video artist Bill Jones.
Alec Soth is an American photographer, based in Minneapolis. Soth makes "large-scale American projects" featuring the midwestern United States. New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a "photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers" and photographs "loners and dreamers". His work tends to focus on the "off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America" according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. He is a member of Magnum Photos.
Zoe Strauss is an American photographer and a nominee member of Magnum Photos. She uses Philadelphia as a primary setting and subject for her work. Curator Peter Barberie identifies her as a street photographer, like Walker Evans or Robert Frank, and has said "the woman and man on the street, yearning to be heard, are the basis of her art."
Larry Towell is a Canadian photographer, poet, and oral historian. Towell is known for his photographs of sites of political conflict in Ukraine, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Standing Rock and Afghanistan, among others. In 1988, Towell became the first Canadian member of Magnum Photos.
Bruce Gilden is an American street photographer. He is best known for his candid close-up photographs of people on the streets of New York City, using a flashgun. He has had various books of his work published, has received the European Publishers Award for Photography and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Gilden has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1998. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Harry Mattison is an American photographer born Henry E. Mattison in New York City. In 1978, he photographed the bombing of Estelí, Nicaragua and began working as a photographer for Time magazine. Between 1977 and 1996, Mattison photographed in Central America, Lebanon, and South Africa. His photographs have also appeared in The New York Times, Le Figaro, Paris Match, Der Spiegel, and many other publications. In 1982, he was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for photography. That same year, he published El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers, which he co-edited with Susan Meiselas.
Ellis (Eli) Reed is an American photographer and photojournalist. Reed was the first full-time black photographer employed by Magnum Agency and the author of several books, including Black In America. Several of the photographs from that project have been recognized in juried shows and exhibitions.
Alex Webb is a photographer who makes vibrant and complex color photographs. He has been a member of Magnum Photos since 1979.
Abigail Heyman (1942–2013) was an American photographer, photojournalist, and educator. She was the a department director and a teacher at the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, in the mid-1980s until the 1990s.
Alessandra Sanguinetti is an American photographer. A number of her works have been published and she is a member of Magnum Photos. She has received multiple awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Molotov Man is the title by which a photograph taken by Susan Meiselas during the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution has come to be known. Famous in its Nicaraguan context as a symbol of the Sandinista revolution, it has been widely reproduced and remixed.
Yolanda Cuomo is an American artist, educator, and art director known for her collaborations and intuitive design work with visual and performing artists, including Richard Avedon, the estate of Diane Arbus, Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Twyla Tharp, Laurie Simmons, Donna Ferrato, Larry Fink, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Sylvia Plachy, Gilles Peress, John Cohen, Paolo Pellegrin, Peter van Agtmael, Andrew Moore, and the estate of Al Taylor. Since the mid-1980s Cuomo has often collaborated on books and exhibitions with the Magnum Photos agency and Aperture.
Carolyn Drake is an American photographer based in Vallejo, California. She works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and imagine alternatives to them. Her work explores community and the interactions within it, as well as the barriers and connections between people, between places and between ways of perceiving. her practice has embraced collaboration, and through this, collage, drawing, sewing, text, and found images have been integrated into her work. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries.
Bieke Depoorter is a Belgian photographer. The relationships she establishes with her subjects lie at the foundation of her practice. Depoorter is a member of Magnum Photos and has published the books Ou Menya (2011), I am About to Call it a Day (2014), As it May Be (2017), Mumkin. Est-ce possible? (2018), Sète#15 (2015), and Agata (2021). She has won the Magnum Expression Award, The Larry Sultan Award, and the Prix Levallois. She was one of four photographers shortlisted for the 2022 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
Paz Errázuriz is a Chilean photographer. Errázuriz documented marginalized communities such as sex workers, psychiatric patients, and circus performers during the military dictatorship of Chile. Errázuriz's has said about her work: "They are topics that society doesn't look at, and my intention is to encourage people to dare to look." She was a teacher at a primary school when Augusto Pinochet overtook Chile's Presidential Palace in 1973, inspiring her to begin her photography career. She is the co-founder of the Association of Independent Photographers (AFI). Originally titled the "Asociación de Fotógrafos Independientes," she helped create the AFI in 1981 to make it easier for artists in Chile to find legal support and organize group art shows.
Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice includes photography, moving image, archival interventions, book-making and text-based performance, and focuses on history, conflict, memory and extraction. She has exhibited in solo shows in Europe and Asia, and her work has been shown in biennales and triennials.
Lua Ribeira is a Galician photographer, based in Bristol in the UK. She is interested in "using the photographic medium as a means to create encounters that establish relationships and question structural separations between people." She is a Nominee member of Magnum Photos and was joint winner of the Jerwood/Photoworks Award in 2017. Her series Noises is about femininity and British dancehall culture.
Sunil Gupta is an Indian-born Canadian photographer, based in London. His career has been spent "making work responding to the injustices suffered by gay men across the globe, himself included", including themes of sexual identity, migration, race and family. Gupta has produced a number of books and his work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Tate. In 2020, he was awarded Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society.
