This month Magnum Photos releases Georgian Spring: A Magnum Journal, a group project for which ten photographers—Thomas Dworzak, Martine Franck, Mark Power, Alex Majoli, Martin Parr, Alec Soth, Jonas Bendiksen, Antoine D’Agata, Gueorgui Pinkhassov and Paolo Pellegrin—traveled to the Eastern European country to document the contemporary culture and national identity. The book is curated and published by Chris Boot, a former Magnum director in London.

Georgia’s recent history includes a war with Russia over the breakaway republic South Ossetia, and an ongoing effort to strengthen its ties to Western Europe and the United States, all of which add a timeliness to the Magnum project and give it the potential to introduce Georgia to a large number of people worldwide who, until recently, may not have been able to locate it on a map.

Most intriguing about the project, however, is the manner in which it was made. Magnum was commissioned by the Georgian Ministry of Culture, at the suggestion of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.

A commission from a national government sounds like a PR campaign, especially given the nation’s quarrels with Russia, a component of which has been an international battle for hearts and minds. However, the unique agreement between Chris Boot, Magnum and the Georgian government makes it difficult to cry foul. The Georgian government agreed that they would not interfere with the project, and gave Magnum and Boot the freedom to create the book as they saw fit.

At a time when NGOs, advocacy groups and other organizations have replaced traditional media as the major sources of funding for documentary photography, the Georgian Spring project may provide a model that other photojournalists can use if they want to seek funding from non-traditional sources while maintaining the appearance of integrity.


Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak was the driving force behind the project. German by birth, Dworzak became enamored with Georgia when he traveled there in 1993 to witness the civil war, long before he became an internationally recognized photojournalist. He later lived in the country for several years and says he plans to retire there eventually.

In 2008, Dworzak photographed the aftermath of Georgia’s five-day war with Russia and also traveled with and photographed the Georgian president during a trip to the United States, where he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Dworzak made Saakashvili a small book of photographs from the trip. When next they saw each other in December of last year, Saakashvili asked if Dworzak could do a contemporary book on Georgia that he could give to people as a gift. Dworzak suggested they make it a Magnum project, and Saakashvili arranged the sponsorship.

According to Dworzak, the project set off some debate within Magnum. “It’s nothing extraordinary, Magnum has done it and other agencies have done it for many other countries, it’s just usually done in a very shitty way,” Dworzak says. That the Georgian government agreed to a completely hands-off approach “made it really easy to accept,” Dworzak relates.

Dworzak knew they needed a strong curator to organize everything and select the photographers who would participate, and Magnum decided to approach Boot. The promise of zero interference from Georgian officials was also key to Boot’s involvement.

“I was offered the project on the basis that neither Magnum nor the Georgian Ministry of Culture would decide anything, that all the decisions would be mine,” Boot says. “Of course, life is generally a bit more complicated.”



Boot accepted the project and traveled to Georgia to gather information and meet the team Dworzak had assembled to serve as guides for the photographers. Boot selected the group of photographers and elected a travel journal theme, where each photographer was given a “loosely conceived journey, which they were free to shape in their own way.”

None of the photographers who were asked to participate declined, but the state sponsorship did cause some of the photographers to go out of their way to make sure their work was not propagandistic, Boot says. “One of the things the photographers in Magnum tend to do, if they think it’s their job to promote something, they’re really going to compensate in the opposite direction,” Boot relates. All of the photographers who were involved loved the country, he says, “yet look at their essays and you wouldn’t think that they necessarily did love it.”

For his essay, Alec Soth embarked on a tongue-in-cheek search for “The Most Beautiful Woman in Georgia.” Martine Franck’s piece focuses on a group of interconnected Georgian families. Antoine D’Agata created a dark series of images, many of them sexual, which he paired with a stream-of-consciousness-like personal text interspersed with quotes from people he encountered along the way. And Martin Parr did what he does, photographing culture and consumerism in markets, restaurants, nightclubs and Sulphur baths, and finally concluding, “I think a bit of Georgia has rubbed off on me.”

Alex Majoli’s bleak piece about the legacy of the war over South Ossetia, and Dworzak’s chapter, which among other things illustrates the “ten things about modern Georgia that [Saakashvili] was proudest of,” with the president’s quotes as captions, are the most political of the essays. Referring to Saakashvili by the familiar name “Misha” and admitting he was granted uncommon access to the president, Dworzak veers the furthest into propagandistic territory.

When the Georgian Ministry of Culture saw an early version of the book, “they did observe that the Georgian landscape wasn’t particularly well represented, nor were some of the icons of contemporary Georgia,” Boot relates. They asked for a sequence of pictures to be added at the front and back of the book, which appear as postcards. “I always wanted this to be informative to the reader about Georgia and not just a personalization by idiosyncratic photographers,” Boot says. “I think the balance of the individual essays with these rather prosaic postcards actually give you a rounded picture, and visually they work very well.”

“For a project that you could claim is propaganda—it has a promotional purpose in the sense that the Georgians want the world to engage with the country—it is very unusual and rather remarkable they didn’t seek to interfere at all,” says Boot, adding that he’s never worked on a project where the client was less demanding.

The anniversary of the war passed in August, and both the Georgian and Russian governments claim that a recent EU report vindicates their position that the other nation was at fault. Thus Magnum and Boot are introducing the book into a largely unresolved and pressurized political climate.

“I think all editorial work has a line of rhetoric built into it, and the idea of a nation inviting photographers to have a look and produce their own take is very benign and entirely comfortable,” Boot suggests. “It would be different if it was a place like North Korea.”

“I don’t feel I have done something for the Georgian government,” says Dworzak, “I feel I have done something for Georgia, bringing Georgia to the world.” In his foreword to the book, Dworzak admits that some will likely “scream propaganda.” But he calls sharing Georgia with his fellow photographers “one of the big stories of my life.”

He also does not believe his or his colleagues’ participation in the project will compromise future work for any of them in Russia. “I guess the Russians aren’t going to like it particularly,” Dworzak says, adding, “I don’t care, I made my choice a long time ago.”