Announcing the 2023-2024 Heat Fellows
River Claure
Magnum Foundation is pleased to announce the participants in the 2023-2024 Photography Expanded Fellowship focused on the topic of heat and climate crisis. The cohort features nine photographers whose projects reimagine what a critical and ecological photographic practice might look like. The selected participants will each receive a $10,000 grant, take part in two workshops, and connect with collaborative partners and networks. They are:
Farhana Satu | Bangladesh
Gayatri Ganju | India
Hashem Shakeri | Iran
José Luis Arroyo-Robles | Mexico
Luján Agusti | Argentina
Mahmoud Khattab | Egypt
María Valqui | Peru
Miora Rajaonary | Madagascar
River Claure | Bolivia
With projects on topics including climate-based migration, pollution-driven health disparities, and indigenous origin stories and collective memory, this international and interdisciplinary cohort is expanding the discourse around visuality, heat, and the climate crisis. Over the course of the initiative, they will develop and deepen their projects while coming together as a creative community in interdisciplinary exploration and collaboration under the guidance of mentors Eric Gottesman, Nandita Raman, and Newsha Tavakolian.
Operating on a two-year thematic cycle with bi-annual open calls, the Photography Expanded program provides fellowships and mentorship for photographers who seek to expand the parameters of documentary photography and develop experimental strategies for engaging audiences. The program fosters experimentation with new approaches to image making and distribution, and fellows explore creative models for narrative change in the context of various global practices of photography. The 2023-2024 cycle’s theme is heat and climate; the 2022-2023 cycle focused on Counter Histories.
The program partners with alumni from past Magnum Foundation programs to locally produce workshops in rotating locations that are relevant to that cycle’s theme. The 2023 cohort’s workshops will take place in Amman, Jordan and are produced in partnership with Darkroom Amman and MMAG Foundation.
On participating in the initiative, selected fellow Farhana Satu shared: “I feel like one of the luckiest in the world because my hard work is showing results. I am super happy that I will be able to keep continuing my ongoing project with this grant. There are thousands of stories based on climate change and global warming, but there is no story of how my hometown and my people are dealing with this, how women are becoming sick and infertile in my home land. So, I know my story is special for me, but I am looking for a unique way to tell this story to the world. I am hoping that I will be able to find that unique and special language of mine with the help of the mentors of the workshop of this program.”
The selected artists were chosen from over 620 applications from 70 countries, via a hybrid open call and nomination process that helped reach applicants who might otherwise have been outside the range of Magnum Foundation’s immediate network. Following a multi-round review process that included alumni of our past programs, artists and researchers engaged with climate narratives, and photographers with particular geographic or community knowledge, the final cohort was chosen by a selection committee that included members of the Magnum Foundation team and jury members Raquel De Anda, Makeda Best, Paola Farran, and Tanvi Mishra.
The cohort was selected with a priority to support photographers living and working in their own communities, centering projects that are based on equitable relationships and interdependence among individuals, communities, and non-humans. In the context of rising global temperatures, this cycle's theme explores the effects of the climate crisis and the frictions between existing systems and assumptions of economic growth on one hand, and possibilities of ecological regeneration and repair on the other. Heat, like a fever, can be a symptom of a more systemic problem; the program will delve into root causes of threats to our planet, as well as potential pathways toward a paradigm of recovery.
This initiative is made possible thanks to the generosity of the Rosenthal Family Foundation, the William Talbott Hillman Foundation, and the Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Foundation.
Magnum Foundation is grateful to our advisory committee, whose diverse and multidisciplinary perspectives have been invaluable in shaping the framework of this initiative: Raquel De Anda, Makeda Best, Heather Davis, Judith Helfand, Eugenia Kisin, Chelsea Michael Frazier, Emily Scott, Gregory Sholette, Nicole Starosielsk, and Maria Thereza Alves.
Please join us in congratulating the 2023-2024 Photography Expanded Fellows, and read more about this outstanding group of photographers and artists below!
Farhana Satu | Bangladesh
Water/Life
Climate experts predict that by 2050, rising sea levels will submerge some 17 percent of Bangladesh’s land. Here, global warming is increasing the severity and frequency of cyclones, storms, droughts and floods. Rising sea levels mean that low-lying coastal areas may disappear altogether. Salinity is having a huge impact on people’s health, especially women’s health. Yet people are persistently fighting this crisis and trying to exist.
Gayatri Ganju | India
The Pregnant Tree
This work looks at the relationship that the Kurumba and Irula indigenous communities from South India have to the forests they belong to, using their origin stories as a starting point. Stories of reverence, fear, death, the beginning and belonging, that act as prophecies and talismans, that to this day, keep things in place.
Hashem Shakeri | Iran
An Elegy for the Death of Hamun
As one of the largest provinces of Iran, Sistan and Baluchestan is located in the southeast and it shares borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan. The province, which was once a great producer of crops in the country, is now facing rapid climate change and ineffective management of water resources, which has turned the region into an infertile desert.
José Luis Arroyo-Robles | Mexico
A stain hides the table
This project is based in the territory where the monarch butterfly lands in Michoacan, Mexico. It aims to contrast a personal archive of slide film photographs developed by my father in the 90’s with the current views – and extracts of materials – of said panorama, through a narrative based on fast climate change in the region.
Luján Agusti | Argentina
Less a land
Historically, peatlands have been associated with useless, cursed territories. Claiming something to be nothing in order to exploit it, is not a new technique. I aim to make reflections linked to ecofeminism and decolonial perspectives where the subjugation of minorities and nature are connected. By examining these narratives, we can better understand how they have shaped the understanding of our territories and how we interact with them today.
Mahmoud Khattab | Egypt
There Was a Valley Here Once
Searching for disappearing landscapes, tracing a valley that is becoming a memory and looking for history of the mediterranean in Cairo, this is a story of reminiscence of how our cities once looked like in a distant past. Hidden in layers, sometimes history will reveal itself to you as a reminder, and a witness.
María Valqui | Peru
Water Rope
This is the story of my family, our roots in the Peruvian Amazon, and how collective memory and territory are threatened by the progressive destruction of the Amazon jungle.
Miora Rajaonary | Madagascar
The Common Ground
This project will document the effects of climate change on the food security of the most vulnerable communities in Madagascar, and highlight how they strengthen the resilience of their food production systems and livelihoods despite the challenging and unprecedented climate conditions.
River Claure | Bolivia
Mita
Through staged photography in ex-mining communities of the Bolivian Andes, this project investigates the cycles of territorial depletion and their repercussions on the local imaginary.
The Photography Expanded Fellowship is an initiative developed by the Magnum Foundation, a non-profit organization that expands creativity and diversity in visual storytelling.
Press Contact: Sarah Perlmutter, Manager of Communications and Development: sarah@magnumfoundation.org