Magnum Squares Collection

A unique collection of square format photographs inspired by Magnum Photos' visual storytelling tradition. Each image captures decisive moments and compelling narratives within the classic square frame. We started a special program for 53 weeks in 2025, introducing the square collection of Magnum Photos in 53 weeks.

Patrick Zachmann

In 1984, I was 29 years old, and I was asked to make work with young kids in Marseille who had dropped out of school, and were suffering domestic or social difficulties. They were almost all teenagers of immigrant origins, and many of them were involved with drugs and gangs. I was supposed to give them small compact cameras, and introduce them to photography, not necessarily so that they may become photographers, but so that they could use photography as a medium to express themselves. I chose to make them focus on their identities, on their neighbourhoods, their families and friends. This fascinating experience lasted six months. While they took pictures, I decided to follow each of them in their daily lives and make a photographic work of my own. Thanks to this cultural assignment, I understood that I could penetrate very closed and sometimes dangerous communities if it was understood that I wasn't a reporter who would just pass through, take pictures and leave, but that I was a 'teacher'. It changed everything! I was not only 'taking' something, but giving something.

Jérôme Sessini

It was my first assignment abroad. I was a young freelancer for Gamma photo agency, and when I arrived at the Gamma offices, the bureau chief needed a photographer to travel to Albania immediately with some French Kosovar volunteers who planned to join fighters of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army). So, he asked me bluntly, 'You want to be a reporter? Are you ready to go now?' I replied that I needed time to organize the travel and my life. He walked away and came back with 30 rolls of film and 800 dollars, 'Now you're ready. Good luck. Call me when you are in Albania.' An hour later I was on my way, lost and scared. This photograph is one of the first I made the day I arrived in Tirana. I think it's an image that reflects my state of mind at that moment: chaotic, filled with doubt and fear. As a young photographer, I was very influenced by black-and-white photographers — especially Bruce Gilden and Mark Cohen — so I think that part of me was trying to copy them by introducing the maximum number of elements into the frame. Looking back, I realize how much my approach has changed, as I look to make photos better by subtraction rather than addition.

Bruno Barbey

This is an early digital photograph for me. I started shooting digital some 10 years ago. I had been using Kodachrome for decades, but digital techniques offered me many new possibilities and incredible flexibility. It stimulated creation.

Alec Soth

In March of 1992, I made a road trip down the Mississippi River with my future wife Rachel and our dog Tasha. We traveled from our home in Minneapolis to Memphis. Each night we'd hunt for a discreet place to park so that we could sleep in our van. We'd unload all of our bags and make a small bedroom. A decade later I would travel the Mississippi again for my first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi. This picture is like looking at the seed from which all of that work sprang.

Susan Meiselas

This image has always sparked a memory of reflection for me. It was the first time I felt a subject was using me to make the photograph they wanted so that their message could get out. It was taken in Masaya, Nicaragua just before the popular insurrection against the Somoza dictatorship took hold. The indigenous community used these traditional dance masks to protect their identity. They were practicing future attacks with homemade contact bombs. They simply wanted the world to know. The surprise for me was that it was used on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, my first ever in the media. I remain ambivalent about the performative in photography. I have never thought of myself as a portraitist, and still prefer to make connections through a process of immersion.

Nudity warning. Hover to reveal

Bieke Depoorter

I never felt comfortable with street photography. If I take snapshots of total strangers, it feels a bit like I am stealing something from them. This picture comes from my first book, Ou Menya, which was my graduation project when studying photography. My initial idea was taking pictures in small villages alongside the Trans-Siberian Railway. Because I could not afford hotels, someone wrote me a letter in Russian that allowed me to ask people on the street if I could spend a night in their homes. This is how, one night at a time, I became part of a stranger's family. Surprising-ly, this opened a whole new world for me. I finally started to feel comfortable taking pictures. Without knowing one word of the language, I was able to achieve intimacy with families that I had only just met. These short, but very intense encounters, like the one represented in this photograph, became very important to me, and I continued this practice in many countries.

Jonas Bendiksen

This picture of a burning hut was taken in 2012 while I was working at a small local newspaper in Vesterälen, northern Norway. I can't say this exact photographic moment was a game changer, but it was captured during a time in my life that definitely changed everything. I had found the woman I knew I wanted to spend my life with, and she was working as a doctor in a small community called Myre. I halfway moved to this small town in order to be close to her, and continue to woo her to move back south with me. I worked at the newspaper so that I had another reason or maybe an excuse to be there, photographing the community's big and small events. This was one of my favorite images I took during this time, a period when I felt my life coming together, when I had found love. (We are now married and expecting our first baby.)

Elliot Erwitt

The picture made me a vegetarian. But only for a while.