April 11, 2012

MoJo and the Magnum Foundation Join Forces to Showcase Documentary Photography

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It’s with exceptional excitement that I can finally squawk about the Mother Jones/Magnum Foundation partnership. This is a big step towards building out the awesome photojournalism and documentary photography for which Mother Jones has become known, to our website.

In partnering with the Magnum Foundation’s Emergency Fund, Mother Jones will be showcasing 10 photo essays through the year, giving a platform to projects documenting underreported stories from around the world. It’s a partnership that makes sense: the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund helps photographers complete documentary work that may otherwise not see completion. And upon completion, Mother Jones helps give an audience to the work.

Karen Mirzoyan shot our first project, The Unrecognized Islands of Caucasus, an appropriately complex project that examines the tangle of unrecognized lands in the Caucasus region. Mirzoyan’s work goes beyond straight, expected documentary photography, which he smartly realized wouldn’t do justice to such a complicated region, to a story with so many contours. The photography varies in tone and style to match the chapter of the story being told. Mirzoyan incorporates pieces of his notebooks he kept while working on the project. It’s a very intimate look at the people of the Caucasus, their relationship to their homeland — and to each other. Really, it’s an amazing body of work. It’s exciting to get to run it on MotherJones.com.

We will be bringing a new photo essay from the Magnum Foundation partnership to MotherJones.com each month. And we will be running at least one Emergency Fund project in print. My heart still lies with the printed page, so for me, that’s an important component of this partnership. Thanks for taking a look. This is just one step to help expand our commitment to documentary photography. We hope you enjoy it.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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