See Our 2025 Year in Review
Left to right, by rows: Luis Antonio Rojas, Mariam Giunashvili, Zumrad Mirzalieva, Elliot Ross, Ofoe Amagavie, Nader Bahsoun, Diego Casseres, Showkat Nanda, Cinthya Santos Briones, Mosab Abushama, Musuk Nolte, Florence Goupil, Christopher Gregory-Rivera, Farhana Satu, Nicolo Rosso, Yael Martínez.
In 2025, Magnum Foundation supported 95 photographers from 34 countries whose projects document fights for democracy and equality, uplift joy and resistance in communities at the margins, and shed light on human rights abuses worldwide.
Year after year, we are proud to invest in photographers who illuminate the critical issues of our time. By providing long-term mentorship, critical funding, and a mutually supportive network, we offer socially engaged storytellers an unparalleled space to grow and deepen their impact. See below for highlights of the breadth of activity and achievements of our creative community in 2025. It is an honor to support their work.
We invested in new approaches to storytelling about overlooked narratives
Along the dried-up Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, a former port town lives in the wake of overextraction, still reverberating with the echoes of a lost sea. – Zumrad Mirzalieva, 2025 Heat Fellowship
This year, our Heat Fellowship supported nine photographers bringing attention to the wide-ranging impacts of the climate crisis. Rather than only depicting the immediate impacts of environmental catastrophe, this fellowship emphasized projects that offer alternative ways of seeing—grounded in the histories, perseverance, and connection to land held by communities rooted in these shifting landscapes. See their projects here.
During their fellowships, fellows convened in Oaxaca for two workshops, where they worked with mentors to deepen and expand their approaches and connect with climate-focused projects in the region. We’ll be spending the coming year showcasing projects from both the 2024 and 2025 cycles, starting with the exhibition Enduring Ecologies in our NYC space, with more to come in the new year in Oaxaca and Amman.
Recovering hidden and destroyed photo albums from the 1990s in Kashmir, where cherished photographs of young men became evidence that put families at risk. To protect them, families buried these albums in secret places—graveyards, shrines, parks—or even destroyed them, leaving many without a single photograph to remember loved ones who had disappeared or died in the conflict. – Showkat Nanda, 2025 Counter Histories Fellowship
Our Counter Histories Fellowship also returned for a second cycle, supporting ten projects that creatively engage with archives to uplift overlooked and repressed historical narratives. Fellows will be wrapping up their fellowships at the end of this year, and we look forward to sharing their projects with you in 2026.
We mentored community-based photographers worldwide
Shared rituals and celebrations among Sudanese communities in New York — Walaa Yassien, 2025 New York City Fellowship
We continue to train emerging photographers around the world to develop boundary-pushing work in their communities, bringing nuanced and impactful storytelling to wider audiences.
Since 2014, the Arab Documentary Photography Program (ADPP) has supported over 120 photographers whose projects draw on their lived experiences to explore topics including diaspora, conflict, memory, and belonging. This year, the eleventh cycle of ADPP wrapped up their projects, which can be viewed online here. We welcomed a new cycle of grantees, as well as our second cohort of alumni fellows. ADPP is a joint initiative of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Prince Claus Fund, and the Magnum Foundation.
“In Lebanon, the South carries within it both confinement and possibility. It is a place shaped by survival, by a history of resistance that has defined not only the land but the people who inhabit it. The child appears neither consumed by nor separate from the adult world but moving through it—imitating, absorbing, or reflecting something beyond themselves.” – Nader Bahsoun, 2024-25 Arab Documentary Photography Program
In Latin America, we paired five photographers with grassroots housing organizations to document collectivist approaches to housing across the region. This initiative is a collaboration with the FICA housing rights organization in São Paolo and the DESIS Lab at the New School in New York City, and will be showcased in upcoming exhibitions in Uruguay next year.
We honored Somaya Abdelrahman’s project Tired Souls Seeking Home for the annual Inge Morath Award, awarded each year by Magnum Photos to a woman or nonbinary photographer under the age of 30, and collaborated with Nest and North Six for a series on women refugee artisans.
And from our hub in New York City, we continued to invest in the training and employment of photographers in our local community. Our New York City Fellowship welcomed new fellows Anh Nguyen, Mika Simoncelli, and Walaa Yassien, who join the 35 photographers who’ve participated in this critical launchpad for early-career photographers since 2011. We were also thrilled to receive NYSCA Support for Artists Grants for the second year running, with grants going to Cinthya Santos Briones and Oscar Castillo.
We connected audiences with impactful stories
Los Angeles residents protest ICE raids in their communities. Photo by Rian Dundon.
At this critical juncture in history, we’ve made dozens of responsive grants to ensure that urgent stories are met with in-depth visual reporting. Recent publications include Cheney Orr’s documentation of a Texas town impacted by dementia in The Atlantic; Rian Dundon’s coverage of Los Angeles protests against ICE in The American Prospect; Joseph Rushmore’s photographs of the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death in Arizona for High Country News; and Charity Rachelle’s work on maternal healthcare in the American South for Mother Jones.
We supported a number of publications and exhibitions, including Enduring Ecologies, featuring images from our Heat Fellowship; Heritage in Focus at Photoville, with images from our partnership with Worlds Monuments Fund; and grantee books I Can’t Hear the Birds by Fabiola Ferrero, We Were Just Little Boys by Tace Stevens, Landing by Maen Hammad, among others.
In an increasingly saturated and fractured media landscape, we continue to advance new strategies to connect visual storytelling with new audiences. Starting this fall, we launched a lab for photographers to prototype innovative approaches to sharing work beyond the conventional outlets for documentary photography–increasing the reach and impact of these critical stories.
We gathered in support and celebration of our photographic community
We’ve been honored to share space in support and celebration of our global community of vital storytellers and leaders. This year, we hosted 32 events with over 1,500 attendees in-person and online. We organized fellowship workshops in Cairo and Oaxaca, and convened with photographers and partners at PhotoKTM, Paris Photo, and Recontres d’Arles. We celebrated grantee exhibitions, including Destiny Mata’s Lower East Side Yearbook: A Living Archive at Abrons Arts Center; Christopher Gregory-Rivera’s Sereno no me mandes a dormir at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC); Tace Stevens, Heba Khalifa, Musuk Nolte, and Anh Nguyen at Rencontres d’Arles; and The Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography: Lines of Belonging, featuring works from MF alums Prasiit Sthapit, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, and Nepal Picture Library. We were thrilled to see grantees recognized by various awards including the Paris Photo-Aperture Photobook Awards, The MacArthur Fellowship, World Press Photo Awards, and have their work published in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Washington Post, among others.
Throughout the year, we’ve been honored to be in community with our global network of artists, organizers, partners, and supporters.
This work would not be possible without your support
Exploring the evolving shape of Vietnamese American identity, 50 years after the Vietnam War and the resulting widespread immigration to the U.S. –Anh Nguyen, 2025 New York City Fellowship.
Photography has the power to bear witness, inspire empathy, and hold truth to power. For the many ways you contribute to this work—whether participating in programs, attending events, supporting financially, sharing projects, or staying connected to our network—we thank you.
The work of Magnum Foundation is made possible through the generosity of the Henry Luce Foundation, Acton Family Giving, Three Guineas Fund, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, National Endowment for the Arts, Rosenthal Family Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Select Equity Group Foundation, Henry Nias Foundation, Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Foundation, North Six, Mailman Foundation, Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, William Talbott Hillman Foundation, Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, and Cowles Charitable Trust.
Support is also provided by Magnum Foundation's Board, our Circle of Friends, and the generosity of individual donors.