SHIFTING FOCUS
What does it mean to photograph the world today?
This online exhibition highlights the work of eleven contemporary voices who have joined Magnum over the past decade. Through more than forty images, we invite you to discover the worlds of these photographers: Salih Basheer, Zied Ben Romdhane, Myriam Boulos, Gregory Halpern, Nanna Heitmann, Sakir Khader, Lorenzo Meloni, Cristina de Middel, Emin Ă–zmen, Lua Ribeira and Newsha Tavakolian.
Navigating the thin line between documentary commitment and the power of suggestion, their images occupy a subtle frontier. Here, reality is not merely recorded; it is felt, staged, and at times elevated by a powerful and poetic aesthetic. Whether exploring intimate narratives, conceptual fictions, or the urgency of socio-political upheavals, these photographers share the same visual rigor and a gaze deeply rooted in our modern times.
Welcome to the next chapter of Magnum.
Discover eleven perspectives, forty-four windows open onto the world of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
SALIH BASHEER
Salih Basheer, born in 1995 in Omdurman, is a Sudanese photographer. After finishing high school in Sudan, he moved to Cairo in 2013 and received his Bachelor’s degree in Geography from Cairo University in 2017. During his studies in Egypt, he started as a self-taught photographer, and subsequently studied photojournalism in Denmark.
In 2021, Basheer received the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund student grant for his personal project “22 Days in Between.” For the same project, Basheer was awarded the Everyday Projects Grant, In January 2023, Basheer published 22 Days in Between, the first ever photobook by a Sudanese photographer, and the book was awarded the 2023, Les Rencontres d’Arles Photo-Text Book Award.
A roadblock was made by the protesters in Al Qasir street that leads to the presidential palace in Khartoum in a million-march protest day against the military coup. Khartoum, Sudan, 2021
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Nairobi, Kenya, 2024
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Self portrait. Cairo, Egypt, 2019
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Mirror reflection. Khartoum, Sudan, 2017
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ZIED BEN ROMDHANE
Zied Ben Romdhane, born in 1981 in Tunisia, shifted his focus to documentary photography in 2011. He published his first book, West of Life, in 2018 with Red Hook Editions. Ben Romdhane’s work is centered around his native Tunisia. He delves into the socio-political contrasts between inland regions and coastal areas, shedding light on how geography shapes these dynamics.
He won the World Press Photo Prize in 2024, was selected for the 6X6 Global Talent Program in 2018 by the World Press Photo Foundation, participated in the Joop Swart Masterclass with World Press Photo, and received the POPCAP award (Africa Image, Basel, 2015). Zied also contributed as the Director of Photography for Fallega (2011), a documentary film documenting the Arab Spring in Tunisia. Furthermore, he actively participated in World Press Photo’s 2013 Reporting Change initiative and was a member of the collectives “Rawiya” and “Native.” Zied Ben Romdhane joined Magnum as a Nominee in 2019 and became a Member in 2025.
MYRIAM BOULOS
Myriam Boulos was born in 1992 in Lebanon. At the age of 16, she started to use her camera to get closer to reality. She graduated with a master’s degree in photography from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. She has taken part in both national and international collective exhibitions, including Close Enough at ICP, New York; Infinite Identities at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; and Troisième Biennale des Photographes du Monde Arabe, at l’Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris.
Her work has been published in Aperture, FOAM, Time, GQ Middle East, Vogue Arabia, and Vanity Fair France, among other publications. In 2020, Myriam co-founded and became the photo editor of Al Hayya, a bilingual magazine that publishes literary and visual content on the works, interests and strife of women in her region. In 2021, she joined Magnum as a nominee. In 2023, her book What’s Ours was published by Aperture and she was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Fellowship.
GREGORY HALPERN
Gregory Halpern was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1977. He is known for a distinctive style of documentary photography that is rooted in both the real and the sublime. This approach has led him to photograph, among other things, life in post-industrial towns of the American Rust Belt, the people and places of Los Angeles, and the uniquely unifying experience of a total solar eclipse. Of his practice, he says, “What’s interesting to me about the world is its chaos and contradictions, the way opposites can be so beautiful in relation to each other.”
Though Halpern says he is primarily motivated by the desire to “create” rather than “document,” his work is powerfully affecting in its reflection of the world around us. A study of working conditions for service employees at Harvard, created while he was a student there, resulted in a successful bid for a living wage and was published as a book, Harvard Works Because We Do (2003). ZZYZX, his fantastical book of photographs of Los Angeles published by MACK in 2016, is now in its fourth edition. King, Queen, Knave, published by MACK in 2024, brings together two decades of work from his hometown of Buffalo.
NANNA HEITMANN
Nanna Heitmann was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1994. She is based in Moscow and covers current events such as the invasion of Ukraine, while pursuing long-term projects that often focus on the way people respond to, and interact, with their environment.
Heitmann has documented the effects of climate change, including catastrophic forest fires and melting permafrost in Siberia (As Frozen Lands Burn), as well as the peatlands complex of the Congo Basin, which serves as the world’s largest carbon reservoir (Beneath The Trees). She has been published by National Geographic, Time, and M Le Magazine du Monde, among others, and contributes to the New York Times and New Yorker. Her visual journalism has been recognized with numerous prizes, including the Olivier Rebbot Award for her work on Russia’s Covid experience and a World Press Photo Award for her story on forest fires.
SAKIR KHADER
Sakir Khader, born in 1990, is a Palestinian documentary photographer and film director based in the Netherlands. His main focus is the relation between life and death in conflict zones, especially across the Middle East. Known for his raw yet intimate cinematic signature style, Khader always seeks to illuminate the poetic sorrows of everyday life.
LORENZO MELONI
Revelation explore des carrières, des laboratoires, des sites industriels, des architectures techniques et des paysages transformés.
Les images montrent les lieux où le monde est extrait, mesuré, produit, testé et contenu, des espaces souvent invisibles, mais au cœur de nos modes de vie. Elles ne racontent pas une catastrophe à venir. Elles montrent un état déjà là , des matières épuisées, des environnements altérés, des territoires soumis à des logiques de contrôle et de transformation.
Au centre, il n’y a pas l’homme, mais les conséquences de ses choix.
CRISTINA DE MIDDEL
After 10 years as a photojournalist, Cristina De Middel shifted her practice 
to a more conceptual approach in order to question the documentary value 
of photography. In 2012 she produced the acclaimed series The Afronauts, triggering a decade of work around the role of photography in creating stereotypes. Besides her prolific career as an author, and as an active member of the photography community, Cristina has been invited to curate festivals like Lagos Photo, PhotoEspaña, and San José Photo in Uruguay. She has published more than 14 photobooks and her work is constantly on show in different institutions and venues. Cristina is also on the board of Vist Projects, a platform to support Latin American visual story-telling.
EMIN Ă–ZMEN
Born in 1985, Emin Ă–zmen is concerned with documenting human rights violations in his home country of Turkey and around the world. He aims to bring attention to the suffering of those who are victims of civil unrest and social injustice.
In 2011, he worked on famine in East Africa, the disaster of the earthquake-tsunami in Japan, and economic protests in Greece. The following year, he started covering the Syrian civil war and IS crisis in Iraq, which he continues to document. Since then, he has worked in South Sudan, Niger, Nigeria, Venezuela, Azerbaijan, Iraq and Turkey, among other countries.
Özmen’s work has been published by Time magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Le Monde magazine, Paris-Match and Newsweek, among others. He has won several honors, including two World Press Photo Awards and the Public Jury Photo Prize of the Bayeux-Calvados Awards for war correspondents. He was a member of the jury for the 2016 and 2018 World Press Photo Multimedia Contests.
Ă–zmen became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2017 and a full member in 2022. He currently lives in Istanbul.
LUA RIBEIRA
Through three bodies of work that trace the evolution of a photographic practice grounded in encounter, collaboration and the search for new ways of making images.
Across these projects, photography becomes less a tool for recording reality than a means of creating relationships, where gesture, performance and the human body open spaces between lived experience and imagination. Working between documentary, the performative and the symbolic, Ribeira develops her images through prolonged engagement with people and places, understanding the encounter itself as the fragile ground from which the work emerges. For Ribeira, the image is not simply something that represents the world, but a device capable of activating relationships between the real and the lived. Echoing filmmaker Robert Bresson's observation that "The crude real will not by itself yield truth," her practice embraces theatricality and collaboration as ways of moving beyond documentary certainty towards a deeper emotional and symbolic reality.
Beginning with Noises, continuing through the interconnected series brought together in Subida al cielo, and culminating in Agony in the Garden, these projects reveal an expanding visual language in which the human body becomes both subject and metaphor. Across different communities and landscapes, Ribeira constructs images that oscillate between the intimate and the mythological, the contemporary and the timeless. What unites these works is a sustained commitment to creating encounters that question structural separations and invite new ways of seeing the present.
NEWSHA TAVAKOLIAN
Newsha Tavakolian, a Magnum Photos member born in 1981 in Tehran, is an Iranian photographer, visual artist, and educator known for her work that captures the human condition. Tavakolian began her career in photography at a young age, eventually becoming a prominent figure in the field. Her photography is characterized by its evocative storytelling and her keen eye for capturing the delicate emotions that shape us as humans. She has covered a wide range of topics, from the challenges faced by women in Iran and worldwide to the aftermath of tensions in conflict zones. Her work often combines artistry with documentary, blurring the lines between reality and the imagined. Throughout her career, Newsha Tavakolian has received numerous awards, such as the Carmignac Gestion Award, the Prince Claus Award (principal laureate), and several international photo prizes. Her photographs have been featured in prestigious exhibitions worldwide.
Amongst others, Tavakolian’s work has found its place in the private collections of international institutions, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the British Museum, Sackler Gallery and the Boston Museum of Fine Art. In 2019 Tavakolian made her first short film “For the Sake of Calmness.” She is now preparing for the production of her first feature film in Iran and Romania.
