Interview with Spring 2023 Magnum Foundation Fellow Johan Orellana
Leon Leaving Package at Messenger, New York, US, 2023 © Johan Orellana
As Johan Orellana’s Spring Magnum Foundation Fellowship wrapped up, intern Sebastian Barreto caught up with Johan to discuss the latest developments in his photo project and learnings from his time working on Magnum Foundation’s programs. Read more below!
Can you share with us what brought you to this fellowship? What were your personal, artistic, professional goals when applying?
While I was applying to the fellowship my main motives were very clear: I wanted to enter a photography driven space to fully kick start my work on Ecuadorians in New York City. The Magnum Foundation felt like a fitting space to nurture and bring up this project, since there had been a good number of past fellows and grantees that had worked in similar modes. Artistically and creatively, I was looking for similar forward thinking folk to engage with the work that I had been making, which became reality through this fellowship. Professionally, I was seeking to experience the arts non-profit work space without fully breaking away from the commercial photography post-production environment that I have been in for the past two years. Since the beginning, the MF team was so warm and welcoming, which I think made a big difference for me when comparing these two spaces, especially when it came to community activation.
How has this overlapped experience, of working on your personal project and working alongside the Programs department, been for you?
Working alongside the Magnum Foundation team in the office allowed me to understand the power of collective planning in order to bring projects/ideas/exhibitions to fruition. I valued the ways in which we communicated before and after we tackled public facing events like the Morgan Gwenwald and Ariel Goldberg conversation, the opening reception for Counter Histories, and the zine workshop at the Abrons Art Center. This gave me a good grasp on arts organizing and programming, which I will be using in the near future. Working as well on the Counter Histories fellowship, I came to embrace a more experimental approach to art making. I found new ways to contextualize what I wanted to say visually without losing potency in the work.
Nicole and Marcellus, New York, US, 2023 © Johan Orellana
Could you walk us through your project, how it evolved, and some questions that still remain unanswered?
Prior to entering the fellowship, I had been conducting a social documentary project called Nothing but The Truth. I felt very comfortable with the landscape and portraiture images that I was making for that project around the Cypress Hills and East New York neighborhoods. This approach carried out into the early stages of my fellowship. After four weeks of conducting field work, I burned out. I took the time to step back and reconsider what my fellowship project was really about. Through brain maps and studio visits with Tif Ng, Lexi Parra, and Irynka Hromatska, I came to understand that I first needed to tackle the body of work that I had been making about my family archive, Ecuador’s national archive, and current photographs of close relatives. That work was really the precursor to my larger project about Ecuadorians in NYC. For the rest of the fellowship, bringing that body of work back and playing around with visual ideations became my main focus. However, I did not discard the “documentary” photographs that I made early on. They are still part of the project, and maybe they are saying something different in the same stream of thought.
What’s next for your project? What’s next for you?
In regards to my project, keep developing and expanding it. There’s a lot of ideas that I want to implement and bring to fruition. Professionally, I am back at my post-production job full-time.
The Magnum Foundation Fellowship (also known as our NYC Work-Study Fellowship) offers a project production grant, mentorship, and arts administration experience to early-career photographers. This fellowship is designed for New York City-based photographers to work in the Magnum Foundation office while also developing their own photographic project in the city that addresses social issues and engages with New York City communities.
Applications to the Spring 2024 Magnum Foundation Fellowship are due January 31, 2024 - find out more here.