It looks like, as per the piece below that, this is just the beginning of this campaign.
Magnum Photographers are the current targets as, they're high profile. This thing will likely spread given the recent CJR's success with Magnum.
The article is long. I'll post some "snips" as Other Magnum Photographers are now being called out.
This article is a week old. It's possible, I think, the author had knowledge of the Magnum BOD's decision on Harvey (or a weather report) before the piece was published.
Olivia Arthur - now can we talk about Magnum Photos and child abuse? — duckrabbit
Warning: This post contains distressing details of images centered on child sexual abuse, as well as sexual violence against women. Images that are potentially indecent were reported to the relevant authorities in 2020. Images have been altered by me to protect the identity of any children featured in them. The post that follows is addressed to Olivia Arthur. As President of Magnum Photos (since 2020) she is responsible for enforcing the agency’s code of conduct.
To put the post in context:
In 2017 Magnum photos ran a photo competition marketed on Facebook with a Souvid Datta photo of an Indian child allegedly being raped. The fall out was intense when the industry woke up to find that outside of photojournalism only sex offenders think men with cameras setting up photos of children being raped is anything to celebrate.
Two men decided to take action. Robert Godden (Rights Exposure, formerly Amnesty) and Jason Tanner (Human Rights For Journalism) started a campaign to introduce some very basic child protection standards in the industry.
Snip
That’s the spin.
Here’s the truth.
…
Hello Olivia,
It’s over five months since I first raised the fact that Magnum Photos was seeking to profit from outing children as survivors of sexual abuse. I did that because I’d sat in a room at Interpol’s head office in Lyon interviewing one of the world’s leading experts in online child abuse.
He told me that what worried him most is the normalization of child abuse. I came home, opened your archive and there it was.
The normalization of child abuse.
Anything goes. For-profit. Just package it as ‘photojournalism’. And sell.
I took screengrabs. Sat at my computer. Tweeted.
(tweet August 3rd 2020)
Structural racism. @MagnumPhotos archive has a huge number of identifiable children forced into sexual abuse. Some with hands up trying to hide their identity. All in the developing world. No US. No UK pics.
In the Uk if you did this you would be arrested. pic.twitter.com/jUlfs6t25b
— duck (@duckrabbitblog) August 3, 2020
The journalist Andy Day saw my tweet and started to investigate your agency the next day. He pulled up the Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey’s Thai ‘child prostitute’ photos and started to write:
‘The archive of Magnum Photos features numerous photographs of child sex workers, many of whom were photographed without their knowledge. Several of these photographs are sexually explicit, featuring nudity and encounters with clients. These images may constitute acts of child sexual abuse.’ Andy Day/ Fstoppers
Snip
Child abuse’
I want to talk about that because as you know it goes a lot further than David Alan Harvey, the only photographer Magnum has made any public comment about. In this post, I write about Chris Steele Perkins, Antoine d’Agata, Martin Parr, Cristina de Middel, Stuart Franklin, Larry Towell, Paolo Pellegrin and Patrick Zachmann. But Harvey first.
Snip
1: David Alan Harvey
Shortly after I first wrote to you last year the Guardian reported that Harvey was suspended for allegedly harassing a colleague. According to the article, Magnum would not be representing him during his suspension. Except Magnum continued to defend Harvey against the earlier allegation that he shot numerous naked or semi-naked Thai children, in hotel rooms, for sale on a Magnum gallery title ‘Bangkok Prostitutes’.
Snip
2: Chris Steele-Perkins
In your statement, you wrote, ‘we have begun a process of in-depth internal review – with outside guidance – to make sure that we fully understand the implications of the work in the archive, both in terms of imagery and context‘.
Well let’s set the context to a Chris Steele-Perkins photo that Martin Parr and Cristina de Middel included in the La Fabrica published book ‘Players: Magnum Photogs Come Out To Play‘.
At eleven I was offered a place at the (fee paying) independent school Trent College under Thatcher’s Assisted Place Scheme.
One of the first lessons we learned was the junior maths teacher’s nickname: Paedo.
Snip
3: Antoine d’Agata
Magnum photographer Antoine d’Agata is celebrated for his dehumanization of women. The more dehumanized the better. Apparently, it sells. Workshops. Prints. Books.
I found the following photos after searching the word ‘rape’ on the Magnum archive.
What is this? Male rape fantasies for the art buyer that can afford more than pornhub? What is it that the men in Magnum who voted d’Agata into the agency like about photos that dehumanize women and are tagged rape?
Antione d’Agata photos all tagged ‘rape’ ‘le viol’ on the Magnum archive. pic.twitter.com/vHaBc7wnW0
— MakeMagnumPhotosSafeForKidsAgain (@MagnumMake) January 24, 2021
‘There is a strong undercurrent in Magnum culture that worships the male photographer who is into sex/drugs/sex-workers/bragging about conquests’. Dr. Alice Driver
In a 2012 filmed interview d’Agata says:
‘there is something in Cambodia that is very, very far from any morality. Let’s say it is in those extremes I’d like to continue my work. To see if there are still limits for me’.
Sleeping with sex workers is not far from morality. It’s the norm for more than a few foreigners who head to Cambodia. And drugged up artists are a ten a penny cliche.
Snip
4. Stuart Franklin
In 2016 Magnum Photos ran a photo competition with the website Lensculture. The jury was made up of Martin Parr, David Alan Harvey, Newsha Tavakolian and David Kogan from Magnum, plus Stacey Baker (New York Times), Amy Pereira (then MSNBC) and Jim Casper (Editor Lensculture).
For the winner of the Photojournalism prize, they picked Sandra Hoyn’s series The Longing of the Others which focused on the lives of sex workers in Bangladesh. One of the photos shows a man lying on top of a child who looks visibly distressed. The man’s identity is conveniently hidden.
According to Hoyn the girl is fifteen. She described the scene of the photo in an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine:
Sometimes I felt very bad to be taking pictures. But I always had to remind myself that I am a photojournalist … Taking portraits of Pakhi, a 15-year-old girl, together with a customer she didn’t like at all was a bad experience. She is like a friend to me. It felt like I was abusing her when I took those pictures. But I forced myself to do it, it wouldn’t be real if I didn’t show it. Her customer came in a group of five men who all wanted to have sex with her one after another. This was horrible.
In Bangladeshi law a child cannot consent to paid sex with an adult. Hoyn is describing a gang rape. And furthermore arranging to be in the room she is party to that rape.
An Interpol investigator told me that ‘journalism’ is no defense, ‘the moment you take a photo of a child being raped you have committed a crime’.
In the UK it a crime to identify any child who is a survivor of sexual assault.
Snip
5: Larry Towell and Paolo Pellegrin
In a former life I set up and helped run a health project for young people in Ethiopia, focused on sexual and reproductive health. Young women and men would tell their stories on the radio of love and loss. Some of the most painful imaginable. Early marriage, FGM, HIV, not being able to be with the boy or girl you love. Dreams spoken and dreams crushed.
On average we’d get a 100 letters a day from young people with questions for Hanna, our agony aunt. We told the stories of many HIV positive children. But one thing we never did, for their own safety, was identify them, even if they’d wanted us to. The consequences can be fatal.
How many fully identifiable children has Magnum Photos outed as HIV positive on your website and others? Too many for me to count.
Young children who cannot consent, packaged by Magnum as victims and sold like you are doing the world some kind of heroic favor. Some kids so young that they probably neither knew nor could have understood their status. Objects.
In my very first tweet about your archive last year I included a Larry Towell photo taken in a Lima slum in 2006 (the same year I was working in Ethiopia).
The photo shows a young and extremely vulnerable child sat in the corner of a room and was keyworded ‘prostitution’ and ‘HIV’ on the Magnum archive. On other sites it was keyworded ‘caucasian beauty’ ‘sick’ ‘premium product’.
The caption outs the child as HIV postive.
Even after your statement, you continued to sell this image across at least three different sites until my November 11 tweet when I shamed you into taking it down.
A whole lot more
https://www.duckrabbit.info/blog/20...-we-talk-about-magnum-photos-and-child-abuse/
