A Brief Visual History of ISIS by Magnum Photos | Time

These Photos Show the History of ISIS

A special photography project traces the group visually, from colonialism to the group’s modern atrocities

via Time: http://time.com/longform/isis-visual-history-magnum-photos/

ISIS, that much feared, reviled, celebrated, media-savvy and somewhat phantasmagoric entity, “promotes itself much less through a coherent ideology than via the equivalent of an aggregated, gigantic snuff-selfie,” writes Peter Harling in A Brief Visual History in the Time of ISIS, the first issue of the photo-based publication Magnum Chronicles. According to photographer Peter van Agtmael’s introductory statement, Magnum Chronicles will be published on occasion to provide timely reflections on issues of critical importance, utilizing imagery by the agency’s photographers to create a kind of first draft of history.