In Pictures // Family: A Contemporary Portrait by Magnum Photos and Guest Artists
Launched in 1947, the world’s most famous photography collective has now turned its focus to the most intimate of subjects: Family. In an exclusive extract from their new book with AMI, Magnum Photos members Bruce Gilden, Cristina de Middel, Nanna Heitmann, Yael Martínez and Alec Soth all share what bloodlines, dynasties and relationships mean to them…
BIKEFLIFE, BRUCE GILDEN, United States
“June 2020. I was out on the street in Brooklyn, New York, to photograph one of the many George Floyd protests but I was late and had lost track of the march. The streets around me were completely empty when suddenly I heard the very loud roar of motorcycles: hundreds of bikers were parking their machines in front of the Barclays Center, getting ready for a prayer in unison. It was wild and exciting, and I dived into the crowd with no hesitation!
“This was the beginning of what has become an almost two-year-long personal project exploring the little known and seldom seen world of mainly Black Motorcycle Clubs.
“Like most people, I had no idea that New York City alone is home to hundreds of clubs, for both male and female riders. I found out that, along with the members of their chapter clubs and social clubs, the bikers make up a very broad family.
“Even though I’m not a biker, they have always greeted and welcomed me. After all these months with them, I feel that I have my own place in this extended family.”
Endogamia, CRISTINA DE MIDDEL, Spain
“They live under the same roof and spend the day looking at each other, side by side or from opposite walls, perhaps reflecting on why one is a master and the other is a servant, when the light hits their velvety clothes in the same way and the mounting of their frames is made from the most noble of woods and bears a signature in the bottom corner.
“National galleries organize their portraits by family, whether these are royal or gremial, creating labelled communities on the scale of a room that the public visits, understanding and assuming their connection. Sometimes complete dynasties cohabit with their betrayers or with the intellectuals that sealed the end of their era, in a literal interpretation of the Sartrian hell.
“Using multiple exposures and layering the portraits that cohabit in these rooms into a single image, the series Endogamia draws on the notion that some scientists had in the beginning of the nineteenth century that facial traits reflect certain psychological conditions. Phrenology and pseudoscientists such as Cesare Lombroso convinced a large part of the incipient circles of psychology that our faces and the way we look could actually reveal who we really are. Determinism, systemic criminalization, and racism were natural consequences of these ideas and this series aims to invert these premises and look for those traits in the faces of the powerful that make them retain power and use it in perpetuity.”
The Clown: A Short Story, NANNA HEITMANN, Germany
“On a tiny island, in the attic of a small wooden house, lives a lonely man. No one knows his real name, so they call him Mr. Lonely Clown.
“He is a strange person. Nobody loves him and he is very poor. Two days a week he travels to the mainland where he has his own magic travel company to Mars. But nobody wants to undertake a journey to Mars these days, since everyone on the mainland has become very serious and boring. They don’t travel but work all day and night until death. The Clown was sad about it. He fell sick and lay in his bed crying for a hundred days. But finally he fell asleep and had a dream that he was not alone, he was in love, he was happy. He dreamt about her! The girl he wants to be with for his whole life. Beautiful and funny. Funny and playful. Intelligent and in love. How long he’d been waiting for this! He also dreamt they got married and became the happiest couple in the world!
“And then he dreamed of the sky, the real sky, of which the sky that you and I see is only a small part. And in that sky, he embraced his beloved, he kissed his wonderful. How good it was for the two of them! Even too good! Oh, heaven! They made two little friends, two tiny little pranksters. They had taken him from prison to bring them up and make them good people! Those little ones were like children to them.
“This was the Lonely Clown’s dream.”
For this project Nanna Heitmann worked together with her partner, Andrey Soldatkin, a clown and puppeteer.
The Skin of My Land, YAEL MARTÍNEZ, Mexico
“The skin of my land, the skin of my people is sown in my navel and in the palm of my hand, it is found on the horizons that my family has marked in me; I think of the time that is not time, of the red line that extends over us, of the blood that unites us; the aroma of my house surrounds me and a sensation tightens my chest, my breath. The first time I lost someone I loved, a fire burned inside me and I could see the reflection of the flames in my mother’s eyes. A fire that spread like roots on the ground in each one of us, in our bodies, in our voices, in our eyes. We will not always have these bodies, these eyes and one day our image will dance on the eternal fire, on the eternal dream from which we come.
“For now, I can only pursue that image in me, in you, in the eyes of our daughters, grandmothers, the people we love; pursue that image to cross it with light and shadows as a ritual for the earth and the winds, as a ritual for us, who are covered by this stardust. For this blue blanket that, like an immense ocean, covers us until eternity.”
Take Your Daughter to the Road, ALEC SOTH & CARMEN SOTH, United States
“My daughter Carmen has always been surrounded by cameras. As an infant, she saw me photograph the city of her adoption for my book Dog Days Bogotá. When she was seven, she used one of my digital cameras for our collaborative project, Brighton Picture Hunt. More recently, Carmen assisted me on the road for my project, A Pound of Pictures.
“Now nineteen, Carmen is about to venture out on her own road. She has no intention of being a professional photographer, but I nonetheless wanted to give her an old 35 mm just like my father gave me. We took a trip with the premise that I’d teach her about f-stops and shutter speeds. But my real purpose was to travel beside her with my camera one last time.”
Edited by Laura Robertson
The book, Family: A Contemporary Portrait by Magnum Photos and Guest Artists, Magnum Photos and AMI, is out now and available to buy via Flammarion. Foreword by Leila Slimani.
Image credits from top:
Page 104-105 © Bruce Gilden from Family: A Contemporary Portrait by Magnum Photos and Guest Artists, Flammarion/Magnum Photos/Ami, 2022.
Page 113 © Cristina de Middel from Family: A Contemporary Portrait by Magnum Photos and Guest Artists, Flammarion/Magnum Photos/Ami, 2022.
Page 135 © Nanna Heitmann from Family: A Contemporary Portrait by Magnum Photos and Guest Artists, Flammarion/Magnum Photos/Ami, 2022.
Page 160-161 © Yael Martínez from Family: A Contemporary Portrait by Magnum Photos and Guest Artists, Flammarion/Magnum Photos/Ami, 2022.
Page 15 © Alec Soth from Family: A Contemporary Portrait by Magnum Photos and Guest Artists, Flammarion/Magnum Photos/Ami, 2022.
