ZUM emerged in 2011 to promote contemporary photography and debate on its burning issues. Over the last ten years, around 400 collaborators have taken turns to reduce our visual ignorance. Alfredo Jaar, interviewed in this edition, reminds us that photographs bear a way of seeing the world which is not always visual. Deciphering them continues to be the mission of this magazine. To celebrate ZUM’s 10th anniversary, we are offering our readers a poster with another of Jaar’s maxims: “You do not take a photograph. You make a photograph.”

In the 1950s, photographer Gordon Parks exposed Alabama’s deep-rooted racism by the simple expedient of following the daily lives of a Black family. The story of the Causeys, told in bright and pungent colors, was also his. It was also that of George Floyd, whose murder at the hands of the American police force in 2020 was captured on video and sparked the spread of the Black Lives Matter movement through the world. And that of Deborah Willis, who uses photography as a means to weave together her family’s journey to the fight for respect and justice through the generations.

Without leaving the creative force to one side, the artists Poulomi Basu, Laia Abril and Frida Orupabo also use photography as a weapon to make reports. Basu confronts the cruelty of the ethnic and political conflict that fragments society in central India. With forensic detail, April dissects the historical culture of machismo that destroys lives all over the world. By unveiling colonial archives, Orupabo gives form to its traumas and obliges us to face its fruits. Recent attacks on monuments are founded on the certainty that those who control the images, control politics, as researcher Laura Erber points out when analyzing various acts of iconoclasm. But it is Glicéria Tupinambá  who commands the retaliation against colonialism by bringing the extinct cloaks of her people back to life, guided by dreams, visions and photographs. Rafael Pavarotti, whose rise to fame is stunning and meteoric, populates the world of international fashion with his army of martyrs, warriors and orix s willing to face the apocalypse. From the peaceful Icoaraci in Belém, Pará , the photographer redefined beauty and showed that peace is an ongoing struggle. Let us all take up the fight.