Bruce Gilden, born in 1946, lives in New York City and observes urban behaviors and customs, with a particular focus on strong characters and their individual peculiarities. He has said “I'm known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get. ” Gilden’s subjects have included the intimacy of bodies sprawled across the legendary New York beach of Coney Island (1986), people in New Orleans during its famous Mardi Gras festival and the people of Haiti. Gilden joined Magnum in 1998. He tackled a new approach to the streets of New York City, where he had been working since 1981, and his work culminated in the publication of ‘Facing New York’ (1992), and ‘A Beautiful Catastrophe’ (2005). Gilden has received numerous awards, including the European Award for Photography, three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Japan Foundation fellowship.

Bruno Barbey is a Frenchman born in Morocco in 1941, and is known for his free and harmonious use of color. He has said “Photography is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world”. Barbey became a member of Magnum in 1968, the year he documented the political unrest and student riots in Paris, and he served as Magnum vice president for Europe in 1978 and 1979 and as President of Magnum International from 1992 - 1995 Over four decades Barbey has journeyed across five continents and into numerous military conflicts. Although he rejects the label of 'war photographer', he has covered civil wars in Nigeria, Vietnam, the Middle East, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Kuwait. His work has appeared in most of the world's major magazines. He has received many awards for his work, including the French National Order of Merit. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, most recently in France, Oman, Turkey and Brazil.

Burt Glinn became an associate member of Magnum in 1951, along with Eve Arnold and Dennis Stock - the first Americans to join the young photo agency - and a full member in 1954. He made his mark with spectacular color series on the South Seas, Japan, Russia, Mexico and California. In 1959 he received the Mathew Brady Award for Magazine Photographer of the Year from the University of Missouri. In collaboration with the writer Laurens van der Post, Glinn published A Portrait of All the Russias and A Portrait of Japan. His reportages have appeared in Esquire, Geo, Travel and Leisure, Fortune, Life and Paris-Match. He has covered the Sinai War, the US Marine invasion of Lebanon, and Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba. Versatile and technically brilliant, Glinn is one of Magnum's great corporate and advertising photographers. He has received numerous awards for his editorial and commercial photography, including the Best Book of Photographic Reporting from Abroad from the Overseas Press Club and the Best Print Ad of the Year from the Art Directors Club of New York. Glinn has served as president of the American Society of Media Photographers. He was president of Magnum between 1972 and 1975, and was re-elected to the post in 1987.

David Hurn famously photographs ‘things as-they-are’. His most celebrated pictures of the Beatles from the 1960s shows his spontaneous style that shows the ‘complexity, wonder and surprise’ of life. Born in 1934 in the UK of Welsh descent, David Hurn began his career in 1955 as an assistant at the Reflex Agency. While a freelance photographer, he gained his reputation with his reportage of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. He became an associate member of Magnum in 1965 and a full member in 1967. Hurn eventually turned away from coverage of current affairs, preferring to take a more personal approach to photography. In 1973 he set up the famous School of Documentary Photography in Newport, Wales, and has produced carefully observed photographs that reveal both the traditional and the modern sides of the country. David Hurn has a longstanding international reputation as one of Britain's leading reportage photographers. He continues to live and work in Wales.

David Szymin was born in 1911 in Warsaw . After studying printing in Leipzig and chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, Szymin stayed on in Paris. Szymin - or 'Chim' - began working as a freelance photographer. From 1934, his picture stories appeared regularly in Paris-Soir and Regards. Through Maria Eisner and the new Alliance agency, Chim met Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa. From 1936 to 1938 Chim photographed the Spanish Civil War, and after it was over he went to Mexico on an assignment with a group of Spanish Republican émigrés. At the outbreak of the Second World War he moved to New York, where he adopted the name David Seymour. Both his parents were killed by the Nazis. Seymour served in the US Army (1942-45), winning a medal for his work in intelligence. In 1947, along with Cartier-Bresson, Capa, George Rodger, and William Vandivert, he founded Magnum Photos. The following year he was commissioned by UNICEF to photograph Europe's children in need. He went on to photograph major stories across Europe, Hollywood stars on European locations, and the emergence of the State of Israel. After Robert Capa's death he became the new president of Magnum. He held this post until 10 November 1956, when, traveling near the Suez Canal to cover a prisoner exchange, he was killed by Egyptian machine-gun fire.

Dennis Stock (1928-2010) evokes the spirit of America through his iconic portraits of Hollywood stars, most notably James Dean and Audrey Hepburn. In 1947 he became an apprentice to Life magazine photographer Gjon Mili and won first prize in ‘Life's Young Photographers’ contest. He joined Magnum in 1951. From 1957 to 1960 Stock photographed some of the world’s most celebrated jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Sidney Bechet, Gene Krupa and Duke Ellington for his book ‘Jazz Street’. Stock generated a book or an exhibition almost every year since the 1950s. He exhibited his work widely in France, Germany, Italy, the United States and Japan. He worked as a writer, director and producer for television and film, and his photographs have been acquired by most major museum collections. He served as president of Magnum's film and new media division in 1969 and 1970.

Renowned for her photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Eve Arnold (1912-2012) is one of the world’s most celebrated female photographers. Born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant parents, she studied photography with Alexei Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in New York. Arnold first became associated with Magnum Photos in 1951, and became a full member in 1957. She was based in the US during the 1950s but went to England in 1962 and, except for a six-year interval when she worked in the US and China, she lived in the UK for the rest of her life. Her time in China led to her first major solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1980. In 1995 she was made fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and elected Master Photographer by New York's International Center of Photography. In 1996 she received the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for ‘In Retrospect’ and in 2003 was granted an Order of the British Empire. She has had twelve books published, including most recently ‘Eve's Arnold's People’, Thames & Hudson, UK (2009) and ‘Marilyn Monroe by Eve Arnold’, Washington Green/Halcyon, UK; Harry A. Abrams, USA (2005).

Jonas Bendiksen focuses on the forgotten stories behind the big headlines of world events. Born in 1977, he spent several years in Russia photographing stories from the fringes of the former Soviet Union, later published as the book ‘Satellites’ (2006). In 2005, with a grant from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, he started working on The Places We Live, a project on the growth of urban slums across the world, which combines still photography, projections and voice recordings to create three-dimensional installations. Bendiksen has received numerous awards, including the 2003 ‘Infinity Award’ from the International Center of Photography, New York, and first prize in the ‘Pictures of the Year’ International Awards. His editorial clients include National Geographic, Geo, Newsweek, the Independent on Sunday Review, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph Magazine, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Marc Riboud is best known for his extensive reports on the East: The Three Banners of China (1966), Face of North Vietnam (1970), Visions of China (1981) and his recent In China (1996). Born in Lyon in 1923, Riboud was invited to join Magnum by Cartier-Bresson and Capa in Paris in 1952. He became a full member of Magnum in 1955 and served as president of Magnum from 1975-76. In 1968, 1972 and 1976, Riboud made several reportages on North Vietnam and later traveled all over the world, but mostly in Asia, Africa, the US and Japan. Riboud's photographs have appeared in numerous magazines, including Life, Géo, National Geographic, Paris-Match, Stern. He twice won the Overseas Press Club Award (1966 and 1970), and has had major retrospective exhibitions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1985) and the International Center of Photography, New York (1988 and 1997).

Martin Parr was born in 1952 in Surrey, England, and became a member of Magnum in 1994, after much heated debate over his provocative photographic style. In 2002 The Barbican Art Gallery and the National Media Museum initiated a mid-career retrospective of his work, accompanied by a monograph published by Phaidon. To date, Martin Parr has been involved in the publication of over 100 books and remains a huge influence on contemporary photography.

Paolo Pellegrin was born in 1964 in Rome. He studied architecture at L'Università la Sapienza, Rome, Italy. After three years, he decided to change career directions and left to study photography. He became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2001 and a full member in 2005. He is a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine. Pellegrin is a winner of many awards, including nine World Press Photo awards and numerous Photographer of the Year awards, a Leica Medal of Excellence, an Olivier Rebbot Award, the Hansel-Meith Preis, and the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award. In 2006, he was assigned the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography. He lives in New York and Rome. His books include Paolo Pellegrin (Kunstfoyer der Versicherungskammer Bayern 2012), Dies Irae (Contrasto, Italy, 2011); Paolo Pellegrin (Actes Sud, 2010); As I Was Dying (Actes Sud, France, 2007); Double Blind (Trolley, 2007); Kosovo 1999-2000: The Flight of Reason (Trolley, USA, 2002); L'au delà est là (Le Point du Jour, France, 2001); Cambogia (Federico Motta Editore, Italy, 1998) and Bambini (Sinnos, Italy, 1997)

Philippe Halsman (1906-1979) was born in Riga, Latvia, and began to take photographs in Paris in the 1930s. He opened a portrait studio in Montparnasse in 1934, where he photographed André Gide, Marc Chagall, André Malraux, Le Corbusier and other writers and artists. Halsman began a thirty-seven-year collaboration with Salvador Dalí in 1941 which resulted in a stream of unusual 'photographs of ideas', including 'Dalí Atomicus' and the 'Dalí's Mustache' series. In the early 1950s, Halsman began to ask his subjects to jump for his camera at the conclusion of each sitting. These uniquely witty and energetic images have become an important part of his photographic legacy. Philippe Halsman died in New York City on June 25th, 1979.

Steve McCurry has been a one of the most iconic figures in contemporary photography for more than thirty years. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, McCurry studied cinematography at Pennsylvania State University, before going on to work for a newspaper. After two years, McCurry made his first of what would become many trips to India. Traveling with little more than a bag of clothes and film, he made his way across the subcontinent, exploring the country with his camera. It was after several months of travel that he crossed the border into Pakistan. In a small village he met a group of refugees from Afghanistan, who smuggled him across the border into their country, just as the Russian invasion was closing the country to Western journalists. Emerging in traditional dress, with full beard and weather-worn features after months embedded with the Mujahideen, McCurry made his way over the Pakistan border with his film sewn into his clothes. McCurry's images were among the first to show the world the brutality of the Russian invasion. Since then, McCurry has gone on to create unforgettable images over six continents and numerous countries.

Stuart Franklin (born London, 16 July 1956) is a photographer, a member of Magnum Photos, and a former President of Magnum Photos (2006–2009). From 1980 until 1985, Franklin worked with Agence Presse Sygma in Paris. During that time he photographed the civil war in Lebanon, unemployed people in Britain, famine in Sudan and the Heysel Stadium disaster. Joining Magnum Photos in 1985, he became a full member in 1989. In the same year, Franklin photographed the uprising in Tiananmen Square and shot one of the "tank man" photographs, earning him a World Press Photo Award. In 1989 Franklin traveled with Greenpeace to Antarctica. He worked on about twenty stories for National Geographic between 1991 and 2009, subjects including Inca conqueror Francisco Pizarro and the hydro-struggle in Quebec and places such as Buenos Aires and Malaysia. In addition, he worked on book and cultural projects. During 2009 Franklin curated an exhibition on Gaza - "Point of No Return" for the Noorderlicht Photo Festival. Currently Franklin is working on two new books.

Thomas Hoepker, born in 1936, specializes in reportage and stylish color features, famously saying, “I am not an artist. I am an image maker”. His photographs of the boxing champion Muhammad Ali are typically iconic. Hoepker worked as a photographer for ‘Münchner Illustrierte’ and ‘Kristall’ between 1960 and 1963, reporting from all over the world. He joined Stern magazine as a photo-reporter in 1964 and worked as their New York correspondent from 1976. From 1978 to 1981 Hoepker was director of photography for the American edition of Geo. Hoepker became a full member of Magnum in 1989 was president of Magnum Photos from 2003 to 2006. He received the prestigious ‘Kulturpreis’ of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie in 1968. Today Hoepker lives in New York. A retrospective exhibition, showing 230 images from fifty years of work, toured Germany and other parts of Europe in 2007.

Born in 1971, Trent Parke is the only Australian photographer to be represented by Magnum. He transforms everyday scenes into poetic landscapes by his use of light. He has said “I am forever chasing light. Light turns the ordinary into the magical”. In 2003, Parke drove almost 90,000 km around Australia and produced a portrait of 21st century Australia entitled ‘Minutes to Midnight’. In 2006, the entire ‘Minutes to Midnight’ exhibition was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia. Parke won World Press Photo Awards in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2005, and in 2006 was granted the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award. He was selected to be part of the World Press Photo Masterclass in 1999. Parke has exhibited widely and published two books, ‘Dream/Life’ (1999), and ‘The Seventh Wave’ (2000).

Werner Bischof (1916 –1954) was the first photographer to join Magnum after the founding members in 1949. He was born in Switzerland and his moving and poetic work received international recognition after the publication of his 1945 reportage on the devastation caused by the Second World War. Bischof traveled in Italy and Greece for Swiss Relief, an organization dedicated to post-war reconstruction. In 1948 he photographed the Winter Olympics in St Moritz for Life magazine. After trips to Eastern Europe, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, he worked for Picture Post, The Observer, Illustrated and Epoca. He was sent to report on famine in India by Life magazine (1951), and he went on to work in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Indochina. The images from these reportages were used in major picture magazines throughout the world.