The mission of Magnum Foundation, created in 2007, is to foster diversity and creativity in documentary photography. This is Susan Meiselas’s grand design.
For Susan Meiselas, bearing witness to history and protecting memory against forgetting doesn’t end with a photo story published in the press. Very early on, she started combining her images with text, videos, archives, and other material resulting from close collaboration with journalists, researchers, or directly with the community she was documenting. As the curator Pia Viewing points out in the catalogue to the Jeu de Paume exhibition: “She works directly with a given situation and its various layers of meaning. Present on site, she ‘digs down’ in search of visible elements that signify past experiences in certain places where she photographs the people and the traces of actions, she records the testimonies of those who remain, gathers archival material, jots down the facts. . .”
Since the late 1990s, when the Internet was still in its infancy as a narrative platform, she launched www.akakurdistan.com, a participatory archive aiming to revive Kurdistan in the aftermath of genocides that claimed many of its nationals as victims in Iraq, Iran, and Turkey. And this came after she had worked on participatory projects addressing domestic violence, rural America, and the heritage of the Nicaraguan Revolution.
Working through the Magnum Foundation, of which she has been president since its inception, she pioneered photography freed from the narrow demands of the media. For the past ten years she has advocated the development of different modes of representation, and by extension, storytelling. While the media industry has faced budget cuts, dealing a blow to the photographic production, Magnum Foundation had been “conceived as an initiative to support independent, long-term visual storytelling on social issues,” .
The Foundation launched its activity by offering grants for the production of photo stories, and quickly diversified to become a laboratory supporting experimental modes of storytelling through mentorship and outreach, bringing out an increasingly wide range of voices. Further responding to a current lack of diversity in the media landscape, the Foundation set up specific programs aiming to train and support the growing generations of photographers in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. These goals are supplemented by a vast photographic archive dating back to the late 1940s and a series of co-edited or commissioned publications. Their aim is to promote the image as a social catalyst, an idea dear to Meiselas. “From the humble beginnings in her basement studio to a full-time staff and hundreds of photographers supported in one way or another around the world, its really special to see what’s blossomed from her vision over the last 10 years,” concludes Simone Salvo, the manager of operations and communications at Magnum Foundation.
Laurence Cornet
Laurencen Cornet is a journalist specializing in photography. She is also an independent curator. She splits her time between New York and Paris.
