Photography is more than image. It is vital to our collective recordkeeping. But how do we combat a record that is incomplete and often heavily biased? The Magnum Foundation’s 2025 Counter Histories Fellowship supports twenty documentary photographers whose work challenges dominant historical narratives through visual storytelling.
Counter Histories Fellow Mackenzie Calle’s The Gay Space Agency at Photoville. Photo by Irynka Hromotska. Image courtesy of Magnum Foundation.
It’s not just about who tells the story, but how. By embracing hybrid strategies (merging photography with audio and archival materials) and moving away from the traditional single-author approach to documentary photography, The Magnum Foundation’s Counter Histories Fellows are stretching the form to meet the needs of the disparate histories they’re telling.
2025 COUNTER HSITORIES FELLOWS
GLORIANNA XIMENDAZ | COSTA RICA
Inherited Injustices
A commentary on the intertwined legacies of modern slavery, colonialism, and environmental degradation in Sixaola, Limón, Costa Rica, where the banana trade established by U.S. colonialist Minor Keith has left behind contaminated environments and social injustices that continue to plague the local community today.
2025 COUNTER HSITORIES FELLOWS
HARLAN BOZEMAN | UNITED STATES
In The E
A co-curated archive that empowers the Black community in Elaine, Arkansas to contribute to a collective representation of the town’s identity. Over a hundred years after one of the deadliest racial massacres in U.S history, the project illustrates how history has shaped residents’ lived experiences.
2025 COUNTER HSITORIES FELLOWS
JORGE PANCHOAGA | COLOMBIA
Erythroxylum. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961
Tracing the role of media representation and government campaigns in creating the stigmatization of the coca leaf plant and its traditional uses in Colombia during the period surrounding the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs in 1961.
2025 COUNTER HSITORIES FELLOWS
KATERYNA RADCHENKO | UKRAINE
Invisible Archive
Visualizing the systematic destruction of visual archives in Ukraine—a pattern of intentional erasure going back to the Soviet era that has been renewed by the Russian military since their 2014 invasion of Ukraine.
2025 COUNTER HSITORIES FELLOWS
LINA GEOUSHY | EGYPT AND UNITED KINGDOM
Trailblazers: An Inquiry Into Egypt’s Feminist History
Reclaiming and inscribing Egypt’s feminist history through self-portraiture and performance inspired by Egypt’s Golden Age cinema, integrated with public and collected archives.
2025 COUNTER HSITORIES FELLOWS
MAEN HAMMAD | PALESTINE AND UNITED STATES
Amira’s Castle
Tracing the intersecting lives of the artist’s grandparents, Amira and Mohammad Rabah, as they navigate exile and return in Palestine.
2025 COUNTER HSITORIES FELLOWS
MAHEDER HAILESELASSIE | ETHIOPIA
Barefoot, I remember you.
Investigating the brutal occupation period of Ethiopia by the Fascist Italian army (1936–1941) through a combination of archival materials and sites of memory in both countries, prompting us not only to remember but to reflect on where we stand today.
2025 COUNTER HSITORIES FELLOWS
MUSUK NOLTE | PERU AND MEXICO
The Language of the Bones
Exploring mourning and memory tied to Peru’s armed conflict (1980–2000), juxtaposing archives from Peru’s Place of Memory Documentation Center with documentary photographs from restitution ceremonies and survivors’ funeral rites to deepen and contextualize spaces for post-conflict discussion during a time of renewed conflict, denial, political crisis, and persecution.
2025 COUNTER HSITORIES FELLOWS
SHOWKAT NANDA | KASHMIR, INDIA
Fragments Beneath the Earth: Reclaiming Kashmir’s Erased Family Albums
Tracing memory, loss, and identity in Kashmir through family photo albums that were hidden, damaged, or displaced during the upheavals of the 1990s. What everyday stories do these images hold? And what happens to collective memory when personal histories disappear?
2025 COUNTER HSITORIES FELLOWS
VI NGUYEN | VIETNAM AND UNITED STATES
Heart Size is Normal, Lung Fields are Clear
On the 50th anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam, Heart Size is Normal, Lung Fields are Clear attempts to reimagine the dominant and violent visual narrative of war, the artist’s family’s refugee experience, and the poetry of healing.
Because photographs are so ubiquitous and have been used for so many purposes— evidence, commemoration, identification— they offer an alternative account of people, places, and systems that might not be included in official histories.
While thematic resonance is welcome, it is not a factor during the process of selecting fellows. Themes do, however, often emerge organically throughout the two-year-long fellowship. Two key themes emerged among the previous cohort. One: addressing official archives, state violence, surveillance, and photographic evidence. Two: exploring family archives, snapshots, and personal histories.
A visitor stands in front of Chris Gregory-Rivera’s work at Magnum Foundation’s exhibit on state archives. Photo by Yolanda Hoskey. Image courtesy of Magnum Foundation.
Crucially, fellows are often working within their own communities. This proximity allows for more access to and a more nuanced understanding of the subjects they depict. Such embedded work also resists the extractive tropes common in traditional documentary photography. “There’s an awareness of what stories matter locally, and how to tell them with care,” Kristen explains, “Within that, there are always layers of complexity about the relationship between photographer and subject, one of the central dynamics of documentary photography.”
Counter Histories Fellow Naomieh Jovin with one of her images exhibited alongside other family archive projects in Magnum Foundation’s space. Photo by Irynka Hromotska. Image courtesy of Magnum Foundation.
History is a fractured record. The Magnum Foundation champions artists who are not just correcting that record’s omissions but confronting the violent legacies those gaps have left behind. To stride blindly into the future without reckoning with the full breadth of our shared past would be a profound error. If we want to envision a more just world, we must begin by revisiting the archive and widening its lens.
