Photo London will be hosting a night at the Frontline Club, to mark the opening of the festival at Somerset House 17 – 20 May

Join the debate about the state and future of photojournalism, as explored in conversation with award winning photographers and editors. The world of professional 21st century photojournalism is more global than a decade ago, fuelled extensively by technology from the proliferation of digital equipment through to the social media circus via the intergalactic universe. We explore the challenges and opportunities this provides and what to expect in the future.

Chair

Francesca Sears

Francesca is Special Projects Director at Magnum Photos. She works with some of the world’s most respected and accomplished photographers. She has helped them to communicate stories that combine international press coverage, with online platforms, social media and cultural outputs.

Panel

Carol Allen-Storey

Freelance Photojournalist Carol is an award-winning photographer specialising in chronicling complex humanitarian and social issues. Her essays about genocide, post conflict, poverty, orphans, the HIV/AIDS pandemic are widely published and exhibited globally. Carol works intimately with international NGOs, some including The Elton John AIDS Foundation, Save the Children, Comic Relief and International Alert; capturing imagery that platforms their work to raise public awareness and as a potent fund-raising tool. In 2009 she was appointed a UNICEF ambassador for photography.

Alys Tomlinson

Alys combines work as a commercial photographer with long term, fine art documentary projects. Her work is mostly concerned with the relationship between people and place, drawing on themes of memory, belonging and identity. She recently completed an MA in Anthropology at SOAS and her long-term project about Christian pilgrimage sites ‘Ex-Voto’ has received a number of awards. Alys has just been named Sony/WPO Photographer of the Year 2018.

Liz Hingley

Liz Hingley is an independent photographer working on long-term projects that explore sensitive social issues, such as migration, home and contemporary urban ritual, through the depiction of everyday lives. She has received numerous awards including the Getty Editorial Award, Photo-philanthropy Award, Ian Parry Award and Prix Virginia. Liz works with media publications, NGO’s, Universities and Arts Institutions to produce multidisciplinary projects. Her books include ‘Under Gods, Stories from Soho Road’, ‘Shanghai’, ‘Home Made in Smethwick’ and ‘Shanghai Sacred’.

Fiona Shields

Head of Photography for the Guardian News and Media Group For over twenty years,Fiona has been picture editing across a range of newspaper titles and was picture editor of the Guardian for the last nine before taking up her role Throughout her career she has been involved in the coverage of some of the most historic news stories of our time. Fiona has judged the Sony World Photography Awards, the UK Picture Editors Guild Awards, the Renaissance Photography Prize to name a few. Last year she was a a nominator for the Prix Pictet and joined the jury of The Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize.

Timothy Large

Timothy Large is Editor-in-Chief of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence Large is an award-winning journalist, editor and media development specialist with a long record of bringing under-reported issues to life. He has two decades of experience in newspaper, news agency and online media. He was previously Director of Journalism and Media Programmes at the Thomson Reuters Foundation. At the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, Tim overseeing long-form investigative features by journalists across south-eastern Europe in partnership with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and Open Society Foundations.

Photo Credit: Alys Tomlinson – SONY Photographer of the Year 2018

How does a photographer work with a dozen iPhones obscuring her view? This was just one of many questions debated on Thursday 13th December at the Frontline Club’s sold-out event on Magnum’s latest publication: Magnum Revolution: 65 Years of Fighting for Freedom.

Celebrated Magnum photographers Peter Marlow and Ian Berry joined New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson (who wrote the book’s essay, Blood and Hope) and Sunday Times Magazine photo editor Monica Allende for a lively discussion.

Magnum Revolution spans a vast swathe of the twentieth and present century’s seismic conflicts; it begins with the now-familiar images of the Arab Spring and ends on the black and white photos of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Both Peter Marlow and Ian Berry showcased iconic images from their own portfolios, including street photography from apartheid South Africa and the Lenin shipyard strikes in Poland, 1980.

Jon Lee Anderson said the collection was a “moveable feast of revolution”, but questioned the changing nature of the conflicts documented.

“What is a revolution? I still have an old school idea of what revolution is, which is … where you really shake things up, you alter society entirely with an ideology, you replace the old society with a new one, for better or worse.”

But, he added, recent rebellions appear to be more performance than a fundamental shift in social order:

“In some ways we see an extraordinary similarity in what the nuts and bolts of what revolution is: it is people getting out and physically confronting an armed order, that will shoot them down and kill them” he said.

“We now live in a time of … revolutionary performance. It is something a lot of us that covered the rebellion in Libya saw, we now live in a time where everything is so photographed that even youngsters who go out onto the streets have some … sensibility of what a revolution, or a revolutionary should look like.”

Monica Allende agreed that the heightened awareness of civilians to revolutionary performance has forced photojournalists to rethink their role in documenting conflict and war. There are more ways to tell a story than being on the front line of action, “waiting in Aleppo for bullets,” she said.

“You have people photographing in the moment, they are not photographers, they just happen to be there. That is the reality and photographers cannot compete with that. But it opens up new ways of thinking about documentary photography, and new aesthetics to approach. Try to think beyond, find a language that goes beyond the newspaper [traditional home for documentary photography]. There are many platforms these days for conveying conflict.”

Ian Berry agreed that photographers needed to change their approach. He said:

“Wherever you go in the world there is a guy in front of you, or 10 people in front of you holding up their phones. It is tricky. Even as a famous photographer it is not easy.”

The panelists all agreed that the practice of sending a photographer to a war zone with a blank cheque was unlikely to be resurrected.

“Nobody is going to pay me to go to Syria,” said Berry, “or indeed nobody is going to pay anybody to go to Syria. You travel the world at your own expense. Until we find a way of making the web pay, it is going to be tricky. The Sunday Times won’t be here in 10 years, so we have got to find new ways of working.”

Encompassing powerful images from the 1956 Hungarian Uprising to the recent Arab Spring, Magnum Revolution: 65 Years of Fighting for Freedom brings together hundreds of photographs from Magnum members depicting historic events. To mark the recent release, Magnum photographers Ian Berry and Peter Marlow will speak about their careers and experiences photographing war and peace with the book’s co-author, Jon Lee Anderson.

Chaired by Monica Allende, picture editor of the Sunday Times Magazine.

Ian Berry cut his teeth photographing South Africa during apartheid and in 1964 moved to London to become the first contract photographer for the Observer Magazine. He joined Magnum in 1962 and documented Russia’s invasion of Czechoslovakia; conflicts in Israel, Ireland, Vietnam and Congo and famine in Ethiopia for a wide range of publications.

Peter Marlow covered Lebanon and Northern Ireland as a news photographer in the late 1970s for the Paris-based Sygma agency. After joining Magnum in 1980, Marlow developed his photography away from war zones, by focusing first on Liverpool and later on Amiens.

Jon Lee Anderson is foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, and is the author of many books including The Fall of Baghdad.

Copies of Magnum Revolution: 65 Years of Fighting for Freedom will be on sale at a special discounted price of £30 on the night and the speakers will be available for a signing after the talk, with complimentary drinks made available courtesy of Prestel.