Magnum Commission Tier

"Some call it a human zoo or a horror show, others a zombie tourist attraction or Brazil's shame. But the most common name for the district south-west of São Paulo's Luz station is Cracolândia. Drug users, many wrapped in dirty blankets, lie on the pavement or are slumped on stained sofas. Others shuffle along the road, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings." (from The Guardian)

Percentage of the photo goes to NGO : “Teto Trampo Tratamento”

Throughout my career as a documentary photographer, I have experimented with multidisciplinary approaches to add novel layers of analysis to traditional documentary photography. My artistic practice has primarily been driven by the theories of innovative intellectuals representing the fields of psychology, neuroscience, literature, and, increasingly with time, by the art of theater, with a focus on Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. In particular, this is what triggered me to undertake further research on the theater of everyday life. I realized that we all play a part. We wear masks that accommodate fixed societal roles, and in that way, we exist trapped in our own play—here we are, relentlessly acting ourselves. A key to understanding our complex reality, then, could be to acknowledge and question the meaning of the theatrical elements that have constructed its play, our core societal narrative.

Contributing a continuation to the Brazilian body of work included in TUDO BOM, the photographs will retain the DNA of photojournalism—in the strict sense of providing content regarding the current events, but will bring into play an aesthetic that highlights what roles the various characters in this crucial chapter of contemporary history have been assigned, and how they are building particular narratives that shape different groups’ understanding of the issue.

I wanted to create a project on the costs of being poor. About how the U.S. system and utility bills keep the poor behind the economic curve and dig a deeper hole in their lives. In my research, I found a single mother of 32 years being neglected by affordable housing: Lisa McKine.

I first found Lisa on a Philadelphia Instagram page called nogunzone; it reposts police news and shares crime reports from people in the community. I find it more informative than the local news, however I know several people who choose not to tune in for mental health reasons; it shows all the bad crime, and we are currently on track to outdo last year’s homicide rate.

Days after a tragic fire in another Philadelphia affordable housing apartment (PHA) that killed 12 people, a social media trend began with videos of people sharing themselves holding burning cigarettes near a silent smoke alarm. One in particular caught my eye, Lisa’s video of her son, telling him to wake up as a bunch of flies flew off his face.

Lisa did not grow up poor, she was raised by her dad and stepmother. Her dad worked for the City of Philadelphia, managing janitorial duties in the courthouse. Her parents separated when she was young and it wasn’t until her 20s when she learned bad habits from her biological mother of working the system. Lisa found herself a single mother of two children and living in her first apartment of PHA affordable housing for ten years.

Lisa’s brother, Raul “Bobby” Gore is currently on probation and has dealt with his own unfortunate circumstances. He told me about the decisions he made in his early twenties that put him in and out of jail. He knows he can’t change how irresponsible he was, but is now enjoying life with his family and providing for them. He works during the week while his wife works on the weekends, and they take turns watching their children. The environment Bobby grew up in at a younger age was surrounded by cops who watched him and his friends go to and from school. He remembers having fun with the cops by making them chase him and his friends.

My first visit to Lisa’s place was at the beginning of March of this year. There was an exterminator outside her building with hoses hooked up to an apartment on the second floor. Inside her apartment I noticed a particular odor and counted at least two roaches and one dead in the kitchen cabinet. Lisa had been complaining about the roach infestation to PHA since 2020, sharing records of failed exterminations, and the summer of 2021 is when the flies began appearing. The infestation has forced her to live out of bins and plastic bags. PHA exterminates the apartment every month and denies Lisa the permission to move to a new place.

While photographing Lisa, I learned she has an associates degree in Applied Science in Construction Management from the college I work at. We crossed paths in 2018 but never met each other. Sharing personal frustrations, we spent a lot of time together as we both needed someone to just hear us and provide emotional support. Her boys Zaahir (11) and Quamir (5) are well behaved, social and sweet. Lisa provides for them all by driving for Uber, bartering within her community, making and selling her own hair and skin products, as well as providing different hair services and body contouring.

Luckily, Lisa found help to make a few months' deposit on rent for a new house outside of affordable housing. Through her four businesses, she plans to cover her rent of $2500. The ample light from Lisa’s new house windows will help with her mood, and knowing her dad is 13 minutes away in a nursing home should relieve some stress. Lisa’s dad had a stroke, which required doctors to remove the left side of his brain due to bleeding. Her step-mother also had brain surgery due to a horrible fall, and now both her parents are bedridden while they recover from surgery.

Witnessing Lisa’s life, I imagined myself in her situation. A single mother unhappy in an infested home, barely getting by while the only way out is taking a huge risk renting a house without knowing if she can afford it. The purpose of this NFT collection is to give back to the community, specifically to Lisa, and so I have shared Lisa’s wallet address with you below.

The more time I spent with Lisa, the closer we became. We talked about our experiences of dating in Philadelphia and of life in general. I don’t become friends with all my subjects, but for those who don’t have a problem sharing their feelings, I tend to share back. During one visit I couldn’t help but break down crying; and on another, Lisa needed to as well. It happened as we had planned to take the photograph that became Lisa Praying to God and Ancestors, when she was telling me about how her dad was transferred to a different hospital. Wondering why, she demanded to see him and discovered he had a large infected bed sore that went up his back. From the photo, the scab looked as long as my arm with a faint fist-sized sore. Why did they wait so long to tell Lisa? More neglect. Lisa would love to take care of him herself if she was able to. In the end, Lisa still wanted to make the photograph, she wanted to keep her promise and help me with my project. I said no, but ultimately gave in even though it was completely dark out. My plan was to catch the sun setting. However, life isn’t what we plan it to be. During the photo, I could hear Lisa praying to God and her ancestors, full of sadness, hope and joy.

To keep up with Lisa, follow her on Instagram @lovelylisa215, @hollywoodglamour.co, @mckine_building_group

Donate ether to Lisa’s address: 0x0cE11858dc7f01E6c2bEB9d1f2F6cb273484076e

ALL SEASON 1 COMMISSIONS ARE SOLD OUT. Thank you to our collectors.

Claim is ongoing to all Magnum Season Pass Holders.

Many photographers and journalists of my generation, interested in war and conflict, would at one point read Richard Kapusciznsky's all-time classic "The Soccer War" and watch Oliver Stone's "Salvador”. » The latter now feels insanely cheesy. With the country's troubled history in mind and never having been to Central America, I found "Bitcoin Nation - El Salvador" a challenging theme to explore for this NFT project.

I set out to straightforwardly document this alien and invisible world of bitcoin, and being 'in the realm of crypto,' I hoped it would give me access to President Nayib Bukele's surprise project. Last year he had suddenly declared Bitcoin the official currency of El Salvador - which until now was only the US dollar. The 40-year-old president of Palestinian origin started out as an anti-establishment candidate, describing himself as "the world's coolest dictator," but soon took an authoritarian turn. Yet he continues drumming the bitcoin beat, and bitcoin celebrities from all around the world keep flocking to El Salvador. The Pacific beach town of El Zonte became "Bitcoin Beach," and "Volcano Bonds" and "Bitcoin City" are meant to be the future.

When official doors remained closed for me, I started digging for clues in the county's troubled past and present or anything, even remotely related to the bitcoin world. Vignettes of the bloody civil war regularly popped up, and I came across a few "bitcoin events." The sudden spike of almost a hundred homicides in the course of one weekend in late March, due to what seemed a breakdown of a secret deal between the government and the two main gangs, had President Bukele declare a state of emergency, martial law and intensify the war on the gangs. I could see fringes of it. But nothing compared to the brutality of the spectacularly filmed daily government propaganda videos of mass arrests and more-than-rough prisoner handlings I watched on TV, Twitter, and Instagram.

It was at a small bitcoin event that I found a hint why I may have been shunned and didn't get any access to show the "shiny world of Bitcoin Nation," as I had hoped. My NFT ticket was definitely the "wrong church" in the Bitcoin world. To paraphrase one of the speakers: "If I want to gamble, I go to Vegas and party with beautiful hookers, instead of being a loser, sitting around in my basement, frustrated, minting NFTs. Shitcoins.

"El Salvador and the President were meant to be guests of honor at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami. But due to the internal tension, he canceled the visit, and the 30+ thousand delegates had to discuss the future of bitcoin without him."

ALL SEASON 1 COMMISSIONS ARE SOLD OUT. Thank you to our collectors.

Claim is ongoing to all Magnum Season Pass Holders.

This series was made in various cities across the Spanish territory in collaboration with young people involved in the emerging Trap and Drill music scene.

Both genres originated in the United States as an evolution of rap music and have transcended their initial context to become globally influential movements with local scenes emerging across the world (Spain, France, Italy, Australia, Ghana, Sweden, (.))

The music is often recognized for the nihilistic lyrical content and portraying a duality between a precarious life and one of luxury and fame that becomes tangible within the global-digital-online arena. It is the hedonism versus nihilism, the darkness versus joy, the glorification of wealth and banalization of violence that resonate as a response to the values, markets and structures within contemporary society in late capitalism.

In Spain -a country with the highest youth unemployment rate in Europe- drill has become the first cultural boom that is not predominantly white. It is in cities like Madrid, Almeria or Granada where younger generations are exploring the music and the aesthetic of trap and drill and making it their own.

Often represented as apolitical, performative, or superficial, my aim with the work is to read between the lines, to reflect on the emancipatory potential of a mainstream expression of our time and how it relates to the present context of a precarious job market, institutional violence, migratory, financial and environmental crisis.

Embracing a performative collaboration that is integral to my work, I focussed on a series of gestures and landscapes to try and capture an atmosphere, hoping to transcend the idea of subculture and consider its value from a more enrooted perspective.

ALL SEASON 1 COMMISSIONS ARE SOLD OUT. Thank you to our collectors.

Claim is ongoing to all Magnum Season Pass Holders.

The impetus of this project grew out of my first book Hafız, about young girls who are memorizing Quran in schools through-out Turkey. Some marry and have children soon after graduation, but some rebel and transform themselves in a radical way; Şeyma is one of those stories of Transfiguration.

This is a world known to me because I too studied in a Quran school with my twin sister in Istanbul when I was younger. When I returned to do my first long term photographic project l sought out familiar scenes and objects from my memory there and it was there that I met Şeyma and her unique and radical ways.

My projects usually deal with the Art of Resistance within my close circle of friends and family. In my last project the young girls' trivialities and playfulness took center stage, and now as these girls enter into adulthood they are faced with living in a world of male dominance. Sometimes, as with Şeyma, there is a need for revenge with their new found power over men and their money and habits; an inner strength coming from raw female intellect, and sexuality.

This time my project not only focuses on the girls stories, but lies within the context of a large city- Istanbul, with its multiple layers and meanings. l am trying to provide the viewer cause and effect by viewing the different strata simultaneously and between. In the story Şeyma l am portraying her world, her fantasies, her fears, hidden love stories, songs and signs, ancient traditions, religious black-outs, and her continued spirituality that was never lost even through her Transfiguration.

ALL SEASON 1 COMMISSIONS ARE SOLD OUT. Thank you to our collectors.

Claim is ongoing to all Magnum Season Pass Holders.

Ficciones is a collaborative project made by Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez along the US Mexico border. We have been partners in life and work since we met in grad school in 2003. Our family histories can be reduced to familiar stories. Andres’ extended family migrated from Mexico to California over a period of decades, settling in the San Francisco Bay. Carolyn also has roots in California – European farmers who migrated West along the Oregon trail in the 19th century. We have both fought, and at times failed, to defy the stereotypes we fit into. And while we are repeatedly confounded by the ways our differing cultural backgrounds shape our behaviors, the next moment we are confounded by the ways we thwart them. The differences draw us together, but they are also a source of struggle, something we are constantly hashing out.

The visual pairings we are making across the border reflect that struggle: to find balance, to relate, and to defy the expectations of our own storyline. We make pictures together yet apart, looking at almost the same things at almost the same time. We are drawn to the ways identity is negotiated in the borderlands – people and towns and waterways that are part one and part the other, perpetually divided and crossing between. The title Ficciones is a reminder that the border itself is not a natural condition; it is an imagined concept – albeit one that occupies physical, political, and psychological space. For the Magnum x Obscura Commission we worked in small towns on both sides of the border between Nogales and Brownsville/Matamoros.

ALL SEASON 1 COMMISSIONS ARE SOLD OUT. Thank you to our collectors.

Claim is ongoing to all Magnum Season Pass Holders.

Afghanistan has been one of the most documented regions in the world for the last two decades, yet it remains a big mystery for the general audience who finds it hard to grasp the complete picture behind the constant reporting of breaking news.

This collection of 55 NFT is the first part of “The Kabuler” project, in which Lorenzo Meloni partners with Cristina de Middel to produce a full panoramic photograph of the current situation of the country, borrowing the treatment that the media provide to other destinations and topics that are not under constant scrutiny.

The project will use the sections of a traditional magazine to propose a complete overview of Afghanistan with an editorial structure, that should prevent the audience from falling again into dramatic expectations.

ALL SEASON 1 COMMISSIONS ARE SOLD OUT. Thank you to our collectors.

Claim is ongoing to all Magnum Season Pass Holders.

This work is an ode, a love letter to the often overlooked rural towns south of Buenos Aires.

“These towns look like aerolites, pieces of inhabited stars that have fallen in the field. Upon arrival it could be said that we re-entered the town that we have just left behind, and that the trip was an illusion.”

Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, “X-Ray of the Pampas”, 1933

ALL SEASON 1 COMMISSIONS ARE SOLD OUT. Thank you to our collectors.

Claim is ongoing to all Magnum Season Pass Holders.