InSight America, a documentary project of Magnum Photos, launched on the eve of the U.S. presidential election to chronicle what the photojournalism cooperative sees a critical moment in the country’s history.
Similar to how Magnum had documented the first 100 days of of John F. Kennedy in office, InSight America will offer 60 days of Web-based coverage through photographs, audio, video, diaries, blogs, podcasts and statistics. The project aims to explore the pressing economic and political issues of the day by asking questions such as: Who are the people of America? Are some of us really all blue and some all red, or are we mostly shades of purple? How are African-American communities reacting to the Obama candidacy? How do families on military bases hear the debates over the futures of Iraq and Afghanistan?
With Magnum New York bureau chief Mark Lubell as publisher, InSight unites the coop’s photographers and the multimedia team behind Magnum in Motion with veteran editors Fred Ritchin, Anne Cronin and Melissa Harris. Ritchin, InSight America editor, is a photography and communications professor at New York University, the director of online magazine PixelPress and author of several books. InSight managing editor Cronin has spent 25 years in varying image and graphic-editing positions at The New York Times and currently works as a digital film editor. InSight contributing editor Harris is the editor-in-chief of Aperture; she also curates photography projects and teaches at Columbia University and NYU.
Founded after World War II by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour, 61-year-old Magnum currently encompasses over 70 members. It maintains offices in New York,London, Paris and Tokyo and has digitized 450,000 of its photographers’ images.