Announcing the 2024 Inge Morath Award

Magnum Foundation, Magnum Photos, and the Inge Morath Estate are pleased to announce Sara Kontar as the recipient of this year’s Inge Morath Award. Kontar will receive a $7,500 production grant to support the completion of her long-term documentary project, Therefore, I Cut.

Sara Kontar (B. 1996) is a Syrian artist, photographer, and filmmaker based in France since 2016. She holds a Master's degree in animation cinema from L’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD). Her work focuses on her Syrian roots and the experience of exile as a refugee.

Kontar’s project, Therefore, I Cut. offers an intimate and personal exploration of exile, showcasing the mutual support and resilience of her mother and her community of friends in France as they cut each other’s hair, and seek to rebuild a new home.

We’ve been caught between two places, swinging in the middle, trying to build something like a home. During this time, I watch my mother with her scissors, cutting her friends’ hair as they always ask her to. She is not a hairdresser and never has been, but here in exile they only trust each other’s hands.

I listen to their conversations, about love and hate, joy and pain, many stories of the war and what they went through. Together they created this small family, a home with no ground. Here I stay in between and I feel that I could belong again.

“Are you afraid? It’s too late anyway. You will look beautiful, and it will grow back. In life, if you really want to do something, you shouldn't end up wondering what could have been. You should do it, even if you regret it later. At least you tried. But if you never do it, how would you know?” - Joumana 2023

Someone told me that we carry memories of the past in our hair, so I asked my mother to cut it all. 2021

Sara is an alumna of the Arab Documentary Photography Program (ADPP), a joint initiative of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the Prince Claus Fund, and the Magnum Foundation, and she was selected for this year’s inaugural ADPP Alumni Fellowship, in collaboration with For Freedoms. She is a member of VII Academy, where she is currently working on several new projects. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, and ArtExplora Festival. She is also a filmmaker, and her first documentary, 3350 KM, completed in 2023, explores family separation due to exile and is a candidate for the European Film Awards 2024. Sara is the founder of Al-Ayoun, a space for visual storytellers in Syria and the diaspora, aiming to connect Syrian storytellers and curate various exhibitions and screenings.

Kontar’s project was selected from a pool of 190 applications by the membership of Magnum Photos. Given each year to a woman or nonbinary photographer under the age of 30, the award honors the legacy of their colleague, Inge Morath.

On receiving the award, Kontar shared: “I am deeply honored to be the recipient of this year's Inge Morath Award. I am especially looking forward to continuing to tell our stories. Given the current global events and the challenges we face, it is becoming crucial to reclaim our stories and narratives. I am profoundly grateful for this support and trust, which empowers me to continue my work as both a woman and a refugee.”

If you weren’t here I would have really felt exiled. - Joumana 2022

“I don’t know why but I keep thinking about all of this pain, and that even-though it is a constant hurting, on the other hand we are feeling it, that reminds us that we survived, those who don’t feel are those who died” - Joumana 2023

I don't have many photos here, this album is empty. When I left Syria, I had an album for each of my children. I took the photos out and threw away the albums when we left. I looked for my old photos among the pictures, searched and searched but couldn't find them. I had thrown out my album thinking it was empty. I regret that I no longer have memories of myself from before, they were the most important and beautiful photos. - Majeda 2023

Michael Joseph: Lost & Found

By Michael Joseph

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2024 | 144 pages

Lost & Found documents a contemporary American subculture of young Travelers through raw, striking portraiture and intimate storytelling. These Travelers abandon home to move around the country by hitchhiking and freight train hopping in a nomadic, transient existence outside of mainstream society. Along their personal journey driven by wanderlust, escapism, or a search for transient jobs, they find a new family in their traveling friends.

The high of freedom, however, does not come without consequence. The black and white portraits are made in public, on the street, using natural light. Individual stories, as a collection, form a greater narrative. Over ten years in the making, Joseph’s portraits reveal the human condition. They capture courage, tenderness, and determination in his subjects that have been largely ignored and unseen.

An incredible book that we highly recommend! All About Photo

All About Michael Joseph

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now

By Pauline Vermare

Publisher : Aperture

2024 | 440 pages

I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a much-needed counterpoint, complement, and challenge to historical precedents and the established canon of Japanese photography. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences and perspectives of women in Japanese society. Editors Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin, curator and writer Takeuchi Mariko, and photo-historians Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick provide a critical historical and contemporary framework for understanding the work in three richly illustrated essays. Additional context is provided by an in-depth illustrated bibliography by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman, and a selection of key critical writings from leading Japanese curators, critics, and historians such as Kasahara Michiko, Fuku Noriko, and others, many of which will be published in translation for the first time. While this book does not claim to be fully comprehensive or encyclopedic, its goal is to provide a solid foundation for a more thorough conversation about the contributions of Japanese women to photography—and an indispensable resource for anyone interested in a more robust history of Japanese photography.

Lisa McCord: Rotan Switch

By Lisa McCord

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2024 | 204 pages

Rotan Switch is the first monograph by Lisa McCord, documenting life on her grandparents’ cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta community of Rotan. It takes its name from the community’s central landmark—the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Delta. Although it hasn’t been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice. Collected over the last forty-four years, these images and stories are a reflection on the people and places that have taught McCord the meaning of the word home. It is also a self-exploration into her inherently complicated role in this community as both the photographer and the granddaughter of the farm owner.
This publication is a long-term project, constructed from McCord's analog photographs, family snapshots and ephemera. Including, monochrome photographs, color polaroids, and recipes.

All About Lisa McCord

João Pina: Tarrafal

By João Pina

Publisher : GOST Books

2024 | 284 pages

João Pina draws upon his family history to tell the story of the Portuguese concentration camp at Tarrafal, Cape Verde which operated between 1936 and 1974. The visual history of the camp is told through the only known photographs taken inside the Tarrafal camp, combined with correspondence, archives, objects and Pina’s own contemporary photographs. Collectively these materials create a new dialogue about the Portuguese fascist regime of the past—and the resistance to it—on the 50th anniversary of its demise. In 1949, Pina’s grandfather Guilherme da Costa Carvalho—a young communist militant— was sent to the camp. Later that year Guilherme’s parents were granted unprecedented permission to visit their son and using a Rolleiflex camera they photographed all the living prisoners and the graves of the ones who had died in the camp. This extensive visual record—the only one ever made inside the concentration camp—was created with the intent of reporting back to the families of the other prisoners held in the camp or had died there. Seventy years later, in 2019, Pina began investigating a box in his family archive containing the negatives, contact sheets, vintage prints of these pictures made inside the camp, along with related letters and telegrams sent from his grandfather.

Announcing the 2024 Inge Morath Award

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