Magnum 75 #35 by Jonas Bendiksen. KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. 2014
Moses, overlooking Eshowe. Moses Hlongwane is known to his thirty or so disciples in South Africa as The King of Kings, The Lord of Lords, or simply: Jesus. God first told Moses he was the Messiah in a dream in 1992, at which time he was working as a small-time jewelry salesman. Since then he has preached to the multitudes in the KwaZulu-Natal province; he later expanded his mission to Johannesburg and other large cities. Now Moses lives with his closest disciples in his native village of Eshowe outside Durban. According to Moses’ teachings, Judgment Day is approaching fast. The buildup to this moment has been long and dramatic, with Moses singlehandedly fighting the Devil for many years. The resulting End of Days is in part triggered by the conclusion of Moses’s successful search for a wife.
The Magnum 75 collection is the inaugural NFT collection by Magnum Photos. Created in 2022, the collection brings together works by 76 photographers taken across seven decades.
Each drop will be curated in dialogue with three leading picture editors from across the globe and selected to embody the agency’s past, present, and future. This collection release coincides with the agency’s 75th celebrations and its Annual General Meeting in New York.
The first collection has been curated by Alejandro Cartagena, co-founder of Obscura.
Alejandro Cartagena said: "To look into Magnum’s vast archive is to look into the evolving history of photography as a language. For this selection, which marks the first steps of the agency into yet another horizon for photography with the emergence of blockchain technology, I decided to focus on the ingredients that make certain images stand out from the rest – the elements that all photographers should be aiming for. These 76 images celebrate not only the endurance of Magnum Photos but the quality that has made this longevity possible."
Edition: 1 of 1
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