It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of beloved Magnum photographer Constantine Manos, aged 90.

Constantine “Costa” Manos began his photographic career when he was just 13, joining the school camera club in 1947 — incidentally, the same year Magnum Photos was founded. Within a few years, he was a professional photographer working at his local newspaper, and well on his way to becoming one of the most influential documentary photographers of his generation.

Born in 1934, in Columbia, South Carolina, USA, to Greek immigrant parents, Manos developed his love for photography in his early teens, but it wasn’t until he was 18 that he garnered a more substantial understanding and appreciation for the greater world of photography.

In 1952, he enrolled at the University of South Carolina. While there, he read an article in a magazine about the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who, unbeknown to him, would become Manos’s mentor from afar. The young photographer went so far as to acquire the same equipment — a Leica rangefinder and Ilford film. That same year, Cartier-Bresson published Images à la Sauvette, or The Decisive Moment. Around the same time, Manos made his first serious photographs and “began a lifelong search for beautiful and poetic images.” 

Read the entire remembrance here: