The destroyed cities, damaged infrastructure, mass graves and kidnapped children are not “collateral damage,” i.e. “unintended harm or casualties in civilian areas caused by military operations.” They are fully intentional damage: victims of executions, shelling, bombardments, and planned mass kidnappings. There ought to be no doubt which party is the war’s victim and which is the aggressor.
Can photographs change the world? They can certainly thoroughly document it and provide clear testimony. When identified with the photographer’s name and the endorsement of a respected photographic agency, they provide us with certainty that they show us the truth. Today, a single world leader’s statement can transform a hero into a war criminal, and a war criminal into a hero. We live in a time when history can easily be rewritten and illustrated with AI-generated images to make the point. This is why the work of photojournalists, the collecting of testimonies and publishing of verified information and facts, are now more important than ever. They are a counterweight to political propaganda and “fake news.”
The Magnum Photos agency was established in 1947 by five photographers—Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymour, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and William Vandivert—who, in part, achieved their renown by reporting on military conflicts. Over its decades of existence, Magnum Photos has become a highly respected agency whose archives serve as a chronicle of the world’s political and social history. While military technology has evolved over the years, the tragic consequences of wars have not, and Magnum photographers continue to document them. This exhibition features photographs by Antoine d’Agata, Sabiha Çimen, Rafał Milach, Paolo Pellegrin, Moises Saman and Jérôme Sessini.
Our task was a difficult one: selecting fewer than twenty photographs from the Magnum archive to depict the realities of life in war-torn Ukraine. While we wanted to include as few typical war-time images as possible, we also wanted our exhibition to make an impact. To force everyone who has grown accustomed to the images of the war, or become willing to rationalize it, to truly reflect on it. Initially, we wanted to depict life among the ruins, evoking the images of post-World War II Warsaw returning to life. However, it seems unwise to focus on this aspect while the conflict is still ongoing. Many have died, many have fled, and many continue to fight, while the majority are attempting to live as normally as possible in a highly abnormal time.
This brief photographic report from Ukraine is augmented with several of Abbas’s photos of the war in the former Yugoslavia. That war came to an end, the cities destroyed during it—much like Warsaw 80 years ago—are being rebuilt, and life has once again returned to them. This is also our wish for our Ukrainian neighbors.
Katarzyna Puchalska and Beata Łyżwa-Sokół
ABBAS
An Iranian born in 1944 and transplanted to Paris, Abbas dedicated himself to documenting the political and social life of societies in conflict. In his major work from 1970 onward, he covered wars and revolutions in Biafra, Bangladesh, Northern Ireland, Vietnam, the Middle East, Chile, Cuba, and South Africa during apartheid.
Abbas photographed the revolution in Iran from 1978 to 1980 and returned in 1997 after 17 years of voluntary exile. Iran Diary 1971–2002 (2002), his book photographed and written as a private journal, is a critical interpretation of Iranian history. During his years of exile, Abbas traveled constantly. Between 1983 and 1986, he journeyed through Mexico and attempted to photograph the country as a novelist might write about it. The resulting exhibition and book, Return to Mexico: Journeys Beyond the Mask (1992), helped define his photographic aesthetic.
From 1987 to 1994, he focused on the resurgence of Islam throughout the world. Allah O Akbar: A Journey Through Militant Islam (1994), the subsequent book and exhibition spanning 29 countries and four continents, attracted special attention after the 9/11 attacks by Islamic jihadists. A later book, Faces of Christianity: A Photographic Journey (2000), and touring show, explored Christianity as a political, ritual and spiritual phenomenon.
Abbas’s concern with religion led him to begin a project on animism in 2000. In the resulting book, Sur la route des esprits (2005), he sought to discover why non-rational ritual had re-emerged in a world increasingly defined by science and technology.
On the first anniversary of 9/11, he started a seven-year, 16-country project on jihadism. The work was published in the book In Whose Name? (2009). From 2008 to 2010, he traveled and photographed the world of Buddhism for his book Les Enfants du lotus: Voyage chez les bouddhistes (2013). In 2011, he began a similar long-term project on Hinduism, which concluded in the book Gods I’ve Seen (2016). Before his death, Abbas was working on documenting Judaism around the world.
A member of Sipa from 1971 to 1973, then of Gamma from 1974 to 1980, Abbas joined Magnum Photos in 1981 and became a full member in 1985. He died in Paris on April 25, 2018, at the age of 74.
ANTOINE D’AGATA
Born in Marseille, Antoine d’Agata left France in 1983 and remained overseas for the next ten years. Finding himself in New York in 1990, he pursued an interest in photography by taking courses at the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.
During his time in New York, in 1991–1992 d’Agata worked as an intern in the editorial department of Magnum, but despite his experiences and training in the US, after his return to France in 1993 he took a four-year break from photography. His first books of photographs, De Mala Muerte and Mala Noche, were published in 1998, and the following year Galerie Vu began distributing his work. In 2001, he published Hometown and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers.
He continued to publish regularly: Vortex and Insomnia appeared in 2003, accompanying his exhibition 1001 Nuits, which opened in Paris in September; Stigma was published in 2004 and Manifeste in 2005.
In 2004 d’Agata joined Magnum Photos, and in the same year shot his first short film, Le Ventre du Monde (The World’s Belly); this experiment led to his long feature film Aka Ana, shot in 2006 in Tokyo.
He presented a solo show at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo in 2024 in the context of the 80th anniversary in 2025 of the two American nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Divided into three parts, his series explores the then, now, and next—providing an indelible record of both the catastrophic impact of the bombings in 1945 and the testimonies of survivors for the future.
In 2024–2025, his work was the subject of a major five-month solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2025, his large-scale touring project Beyond the Silence was exhibited internationally to illuminate common experiences and challenges around the concepts of ongoing occupation and annexation, the impact of colonialism and censorship, and individual and collective choices to resist or adapt in times of war, including presentations at APF in Cambodia, Jam Factory in Ukraine, TPMM in Georgia, and a return to the Nobel Peace Center in Norway, among other venues.
Since 2005 Antoine d’Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world.
RAFAŁ MILACH
Rafał Milach is a visual artist, photographer, and educator. His work focuses on the tension between society and power structures. He is the author of protest books and critical publications on state control and protest strategies. Milach is a professor at the Krzysztof Kieślowski Film School at the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. He has received scholarships from the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage, the US State Department, and the European Cultural Foundation, and was a finalist for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the Polityka Passports Awards. He has been awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Award and the World Press Photo Prize. He is a cofounder of the Archive of Public Protests and Sputnik Photos collectives. His works have been widely exhibited and can be found in public institutional collections worldwide. Milach joined Magnum Photos in 2018.
SABIHA ÇIMEN
Sabiha Çimen was born in Istanbul in 1986. She is a self-taught photographer, focusing on self-reflective projects focusing on women, Islamic culture, portraiture, and still life. Çimen graduated from Istanbul Bilgi University with an undergraduate degree in international trade and finance, and a master’s degree in cultural studies.
In 2021, Çimen was honored with the Light Work Artist Residency. In 2020, she was named a W. Eugene Smith Fund recipient, was awarded the Canon Female Photojournalist Grant, and won second prize in the Long-Term Projects category at the World Press Photo Awards. In 2018, she won third prize in the PHmuseum Women Photographers Grant. For her debut book, Hafiz (2021), she received the Paris Photo/Aperture First PhotoBook Award. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025.
Çimen is a member photographer at Magnum Photos. She lives between Istanbul and New York.
MOISES SAMAN
Moises Saman is a documentary photographer and a member of Magnum Photos, currently based in Amman, Jordan. The attacks of 9/11, just a year into his career, dramatically altered his path, thrusting him into the global coverage of the conflicts that followed. Initially following a traditional journalistic approach, Saman gradually shifted toward a more nuanced exploration of the lasting impact of war. Over the past two decades, his work has been deeply rooted in the Middle East, capturing some of the region’s most transformative and turbulent moments. From the 9/11 aftermath and the US invasion of Iraq to the Arab Spring uprisings, the rise of ISIS, and the fall of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, Saman has documented not just the frontlines of conflict but also the profound human stories that emerge in the shadows of war and revolution.
Saman was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography for his work documenting the aftermath of the Assad regime’s collapse in Syria. His photographs from that project bear witness to mass graves, abandoned detention centers, and the lingering trauma of survivors—images that form part of a powerful historical record of state violence and its consequences.
His work has also received numerous other honors, including a Guggenheim Grant for Photography (2015), the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund (2014), the Henri Nannen Preis (2014), multiple World Press Photo awards (2004, 2007, 2014), and Pictures of the Year International (2012, 2014, 2015). He is a regular contributor to National Geographic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Time, among other international publications.
His first monograph, Discordia, was published in 2016, and his latest book, Glad Tidings of Benevolence, was released in March 2023.
JÉRÔME SESSINI
Jérôme Sessini was born in Vosges, France, in 1968. He is one of the world’s most prolific and respected names working in the sensitive field of conflict zones and has been dispatched to war-torn countries, including Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Libya, for international publications. As well as reporting on the front lines, he has covered social issues such as drug-related violence on the streets of Mexico and anti-government protests in Ukraine.
In 2016, he documented the Kurdish Peshmerga offensive against the Islamic State in the city of Bashiq before crossing the region to cover Iraqi forces pushing towards Mosul. In 2017, he traveled to remote villages in Cambodia with Samrith Vaing, documenting the lives of indigenous minorities facing forced eviction. Since 2018, Sessini has been documenting the opioid crisis in the United States, where he has traveled to Ohio and Philadelphia to create intimate portraits of the people and places ravaged by drug misuse.
Sessini’s work has been published by prestigious newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, Time and Stern. His images have also been shown in multiple solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Rencontres d’Arles, the Bibliothèque Nationale François-Mitterrand, the French Ministry of Culture, the International Center of Photography, and the Barbican.
Sessini joined Magnum Photos in 2012 and became a full member in 2016.
He has been awarded several prizes, including in 2015 from the American Society of Magazine Editors for his series Crime Without Punishment, in which he examined the devastating wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down in rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board. In 2018 he won the Pierre & Alexandre Boulat prize for his series The Inner Threat.
Among his most recent exhibitions, he participated in 2022 in the national photographic mission Les Vies qu’on mène, on the Yellow Vest movement. The year after, he got involved in the photojournalism mission launched by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France An X-Ray of France: A Look at a Country Going Through a Health Crisis, for which he focused on the impact of social phenomena on the people and landscape of the Grand Est, a rural and industrial territory. Jérôme Sessini questions the mechanisms of social and geographical determinism, which are often at the root of inequalities.
PAOLO PELLEGRIN
Paolo Pellegrin was born in 1964 in Rome. He studied architecture at Università La Sapienza, before studying photography at Instituto Italiano di Fotografia.
Between 1991 and 2001 Pellegrin was represented by Agence VU in Paris. In 2001 he became a Magnum Photos nominee, and a full member in 2005. He was a contract photographer for Newsweek for ten years.
Pellegrin is a winner of many awards, including eleven World Press Photo awards, a Hasselblad
Foundation Grant for Photography, a Leica Medal of Excellence, an Olivier Rebbot Award, the
Hansel-Meith Preis, the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award, the Lucie Awards and the Leica European Publishers Award. In 2006, he was assigned the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. In 2025 he was named the Honoree of the Achievement in Photojournalism Award by the Lucie Foundation.
His photographs have been shown in numerous museums and galleries, including Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Rencontres d’Arles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, MAXXI in Rome, the Aperture Foundation Gallery, Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, Reggia di Venaria Reale and Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, the Wolfsburg Museum, Stanze della Fotografia in Venice, and Galerija Jakopič in Ljubljana.
His books include Event Horizont (Marsilio Arte, Italy, 2023), La Fragile Meraviglia (Skira, Italy, 2022), Des Oiseaux (Éditions Xavier Barral, France, 2021), Alps—Aosta Valley (Forte di Bard editore, Italy, 2019), Paolo Pellegrin curated by Germano Celant (Silvana Editoriale, Italy, 2018), Terre Spezzate (Contrasto, Italy, 2016), 100 Photos of Paolo Pellegrin for Press Freedom (Reporters Sans Frontières, France, 2013), Paolo Pellegrin (Kunstfoyer der Versicherungskammer Bayern, Germany, 2012), Dies Irae (Contrasto, Italy, 2011), Photo Poche (Actes Sud, France, 2010), As I Was Dying (Actes Sud, France, 2007), Double Blind (Trolley, UK, 2007), Kosovo 1999–2000: The Flight of Reason (Trolley, UK, 2002), L’au-delà est là (Le Point du Jour, France, 2001), Cambogia (Federico Motta Editore, Italy, 1998), and Bambini (Sinnos, Italy, 1997).
In over thirty years of work he has been focused on issues connected to the human condition, from wars to the effects of global climate change, trying to be a witness for our times.
He currently lives in Geneva.
CURATORS
Katarzyna Puchalska is a cultural manager, producer and curator. She graduated from the History Faculty of the University of Warsaw. Since 2025, she has been the Director of the History Meeting House (DSH). She was the curator and co-curator of numerous exhibitions, as well as the lead editor of a number of albums, including: Krzysztof Miller. 1989 (2018), Krzysztof Miller. Przełom i konflikty, (Krzysztof Miller: Breakthroughs and Conflicts,Leica, Prague, 2019), Przełom w kadrze (A Breakthrough in the Frame, 2019), NIEDENTHAL (2022), Chris Niedenthal. Esencjonalnie (Essential Chris Niedenthal, 2023). Puchalska was the executive producer of the plays Ocalone (Survivors), dir. Maja Kleczewska, W maju się nie umiera. Historia Barbary Sadowskiej (No One Dies in May: The Story of Barbara Sadowska), dir. Anna Gryszkówna, Walentyna (Valentina), dir. Wojciech Faruga, and the Internet show Pasta kulturalna (Cultural Pasta), as well as DSH’s Pasta TV project. She was also the artistic director and curator of the Festiwal Bohaterek (Heroines’ Festival), Warszawski Tydzień Kobiet (Warsaw Women’s Week), several editions of the Wyłącz system ((Turn Off the System) festival and the Wybraliśmy wolność. 4 czerwca 1989 (We Chose Freedom – June 4th, 1989 celebrations). She was responsible for creative collaborations on Agnieszka Uścińska and Jarek Wątor’s documentary films Niespodzianka (Surprise, 2019) and Przełom w kadrze (A Breakthrough in the Frame, 2019). Puchalska also compiled the Jacek Kuroń and Western Aid for Poland collection for the KARTA Center’s Opposition Archives. Her work resulted in the following publications: Listy jak dotyk. Korespondencja Grażyny i Jacka Kuroniów (Letters Like Touch: Correspondence of Grażyna and Jacek Kuroń, Karta no. 43/2004); Dziewczyny wolą ułanów od księgowych. Grypsy miłosne (Girls Prefer Uhlans to Accountants: Love Notes, Wysokie Obcasy, no. 24/2005; Droga przez Bałtyk. Szwecja Polsce (The Road Across the Baltic. From Sweden to Poland, Karta no. 47/2005).
Beata Łyżwa-Sokół is a photo editor, educator and author of texts about photography.
For sixteen years, she worked at Poland’s most popular daily newspaper “Gazeta Wyborcza” as the photo editor for its daily edition, the Wyborcza.pl website, and its Duży Format magazine, for six of which she was head of the photo department at Gazeta Wyborcza and the Wyborcza.pl agency.
Łyżwa-Sokół is a graduate of the Faculty of Journalism and Political Science at the University of Warsaw, the European Academy of Photography, and Museum Curatorial Studies at the Institute of Art History at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
She was the initiator of the Krzysztof Miller Competition for the best photographic material of the year. Currently, she serves as the photo editor of Sestry.eu, an online magazine for women from Ukraine and teaches press photography at SWPS University. Since May 2025, she is head of the History Meeting Houses’ exhibition department.
Irene Lombardo is Senior Cultural Manager for EMEA & Asia at Magnum Photos, based in Paris, France.
She holds an Advanced Master’s Degree in the Management of Cultural Goods and Activities from the École Supérieure de Commerce in Paris and Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, as well as a Master’s Degree in Modern Philology from Sapienza University of Rome.
With over a decade of experience in the photography industry, Irene Lombardo is responsible for developing institutional cultural partnerships across exhibitions, commissions, and cultural projects involving Magnum photographers.
Alongside her role at Magnum, she contributes as a journalist for the Italian magazine The Photographer, and shares her expertise as a lecturer at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.
Her commitment to the photography world also includes serving as a jury member for the Fondation Jean-Luc Lagardère Photography Grant and the Belfast Photo Festival.
She regularly reviews portfolios for renowned institutions such as the Rencontres d’Arles International Photography Festival, Photo Days in Paris, and the FORMAT Festival in Derby, UK.
