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History of Magnum

Two years after the apocalypse that was called the Second World War ended, Magnum Photos was founded. The

world's most prestigious photographic agency was formed by four photographers - Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-

Bresson, George Rodger and David "Chim" Seymour - who had been very much scarred by the conflict and were

motivated both by a sense of relief that the world had somehow survived and the curiosity to see what was still

there. They created Magnum in 1947 to reflect their independent natures as both people and photographers - the

idiosyncratic mix of reporter and artist that continues to define Magnum, emphasizing not only what is seen but

also the way one sees it.

"Back in France, I was completely lost,"legendary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson explained in an interviewwith Herv Guibert in Le Monde. "At the time of the liberation, the world having been disconnected, people had a

new curiosity. I had a little bit of money from my family, which allowed me to avoid working in a bank. I had been

engaged in looking for the photo for itself, a little like one does with a poem. With Magnum was born the necessi

for telling a story. Capa said to me: 'Don't keep the label of a surrealist photographer. Be a photojournalist. If not

you will fall into mannerism. Keep surrealism in your little heart, my dear. Don't fidget. Get moving!' This advice

enlarged my field of vision."

Englishman George Rodger, another of Magnum's founding photographers, recalled how his colleague Robert

Capa, the agency's dynamic leader, envisioned the photographers' role after World War II, which had itself been

preceded by the invention of smaller, portable cameras and more l ight-sensitive film: "He recognized the unique

quality of miniature cameras, so quick and so quiet to use, and also the unique qualities that we ourselves had

acquired during several years of contact with all the emotional excesses that go hand in hand with war. He saw afuture for us in this combination of mini cameras and maxi-minds."

There had been both emotional and physical excesses. Rodger, noted for his pictures of the Blitz and the

liberation of Bergen-Belsen, had had to walk "three hundred miles through the bamboo forest and what seemed

like a thousand mountain ranges" to escape the Japanese in Burma. He would give up war photography forever

after finding himself "getting the dead into nice photographic compositions" upon entering the concentration camp

Cartier-Bresson spent much of the war as a German prisoner and, after escaping on his third try, in the French

Resistance. Polish-born David Seymour (known as "Chim"), who received a medal for his work in American

intelligence, had lost his parents to the Nazis (his father was a publisher of Hebrew and Yiddish books). And

Hungarian Capa, whose name was synonymous with war photography since the Spanish Civil War, made the

blurred, visceral photographs of the D-Day invasion that became its symbols. Tragically, two of the four founders -

Capa and Chim - would die within a decade covering other wars.

These four formed Magnum to allow them and the fine photographers who would follow the ability to work outside

the formulas of magazine journalism. The agency, initially based in Paris and New York and more recently adding

offices in London and Tokyo, departed from conventional practice in two fairly radical ways. It was founded as a

co-operative in which the staff, including co-founders Maria Eisner and Rita Vandivert, would support rather than

direct the photographers. Copyright would be held by the authors of the imagery, not by the magazines that

published the work. This meant that a photographer could decide to cover a famine somewhere, publish the

pictures in "Life" magazine, and the agency could then sell the photographs to magazines in other countries, such

as Paris Match and Picture Post, giving the photographers the means to work on projects that particularly inspired

them even without an assignment.

In those days a photographer had a significant advantage: large areas of the world had hardly ever seen aphotographer. They could choose to go almost anywhere they wanted, as Rodger pointed out, because in the

early days one could "take pictures of just about anything and magazines were clamoring for it; the mistake was in

thinking that it would continue." Still, four decades later, at the age of 75, Rodger was averaging one sale a month

of the photographs he had taken in Africa in the late 1940s during a self-initiated post-war trip that he had

undertaken "to get away where the world was clean."

Magnum's first move was to divide the world, rather loosely, into flexible areas of coverage, with Chim in Europe,

Cartier-Bresson in India and the Far East, Rodger in Africa, and Capa at large and replacing Bill Vandivert (an

American who had helped found Magnum but soon dropped out) in the USA. They had some early scoops, such

as Robert Capa's first uncensored look behind the Iron Curtain at the Soviet Union with the writer John Steinbeck,

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[originally published in "Ladies Home Journal" (for which Capa, according to John Morris, the Journal's picture

editor and later Magnum's executive editor, was paid $20,000 to Steinbeck's $3,000)], and Cartier-Bresson's

landmark coverage of India at the time of Gandhi's assassination.

It was important for Magnum's photographers to have this flexibility to choose many of their own stories and to

work for long periods of time on them. None of them wanted to suffer the dictates of a single publication and its

editorial staff. They believed that photographers had to have a point of view in their imagery that transcended any

formulaic recording of contemporary events.

We often photograph events that are called 'news' , "Cartier-Bresson told Byron Dobell of "Popular Photography"

magazine in 1957, "but some tell the news step by step in detail as if making an accountant's statement. Suchnews and magazine photographers, unfortunately, approach an event in a most pedestrian way. It's like reading

the details of the Battle of Waterloo by some historian: so many guns were there, so many men were wounded -

you read the account as if it were an itemization. But on the other hand, if you read Stendhal's Charterhouse of

Parma, you're inside the battle and you live the small, significant details... Life isn't made of stories that you cut

into slices like an apple pie. There's no standard way of approaching a story. We have to evoke a situation, a

truth. This is the poetry of life's reality."

******

1947 Founders

David "Chim" Seymour and George Rodger

Chim, with whom Cartier-Bresson felt the most empathy as an artist, had yet another style, one that was gentler.

Chim had largely given up photography during the war but soon after began working for UNESCO on a two-year

project depicting the impact of the war on children in Europe, particularly those who had been injured or

orphaned. One of his most distressing photographs shows a young girl who, having been asked to draw her

home, stands mutely in front of an inchoate scribble. Cultured and modest, a lover of fine wines and good food

("Chim avoided ostentation as if it were the Automat," wrote Horace Sutton in the Saturday Review), Chim made

pictures that radiate a quiet sensitivity, an awareness of the pain of suffering and an understated appreciation of

others' humanity, almost as if he were attempting to restore a more distinguished order to a senseless world.

"Chim picked up his camera the way a doctor takes his stethoscope out of his bag," wrote Cartier-Bresson,

"applying his diagnosis to the condition of the heart; his own was vulnerable." George Rodger would go on to

distinguish himself in those early years with photographs and text that depicted Africans living in the dignity andisolation of their own tribes, practicing communal rituals and relating to the camera with the lack of pretense that

is now difficult to find in today's highly mediated world. His two-year, 29,000 mile trip by car and jeep was taken in

large part as a reaction to the horrors that he had witnessed during World War II and served as an attempt to find

those who attach a greater value to life. His photographs, direct and modest, distinguish themselves as both

sensitively seen and respectfully rendered.

The deaths within Magnum's first decade of two of the agency's founders, Capa and Chim, and their gifted

colleague Werner Bischof, threw the agency into turmoil. Some feel that Magnum's survival at that point was due

in large part to a desire by its remaining members not to let the deaths of their colleagues be in vain.

Werner Bischof and Ernst Haas

Swiss-born Werner Bischof and the Austrian photographer Ernst Haas were the first new Magnum members after

the founders. Each had growing problems with the role of the reporter. Bischof complained of his frustration with

the magazines, contrasting the tragedies around him, such as the famine in India that he covered, with the short

attention span of the media. "I am powerless against the great magazines - I am an artist, and I will always be

that," Bischof wrote. Haas, after working for a short time reporting the devastation of post-war Europe, turned to

color and motion. His specialty was luminous, abstract, semi-liquid color imagery of otherwise banal details - shop

windows, sidewalks, litter, reflections. "I am not interested in shooting new things," Haas wrote in 1960. "I am

interested to see things new. In this way I am a photographer with the problems of a painter, the desire is to find

the limitations of a camera so I can overcome them."

*****

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1950s and Now

Within five years of its founding, Magnum had also added to i ts roster talented young photographers such as Eve

Arnold, Burt Glinn, Erich Hartmann, Erich Lessing, Marc Riboud, Dennis Stock and Kryn Taconis. Riboud soon

followed Cartier-Bresson with his own pioneering work in China, the first of many trips in what has become a

lifelong interest. Arnold took a memorable series of pictures of the Black Muslims and of Marilyn Monroe. Taconis

covered the Algerian war for independence. Soon others such as Rene Burri, Cornell Capa (Robert's younger

brother), Elliott Erwitt and Inge Morath would join. The agency was growing. But there was a feeling that it was

heading in some wrong directions. In a memorable 1962 memo addressed to "All Photographers" Cartier-

Bresson, attempted to remind the photographers of their place in the world:

I wish to remind everyone that Magnum was created to allow us, and in fact to oblige us, to bring testimony on

our world and contemporaries according to our own abilities and interpretations. I won't go into details here of

who, what, when, why and where, but I feel a hard touch of sclerosis descending upon us. It might be from the

conditioning of the milieu in which we live but this is no excuse. When events of significance are taking place,

when it doesn't involve a great deal of money and when one is nearby, one must stay photographically in contac

with the realities taking place in front of our lenses and not hesitate to sacrifice material comfort and security. Thi

return to our sources would keep our heads and our lenses above the artificial life, which so often surrounds us.

am shocked to see to what extent so many of us are conditioned - almost exclusively by the desires of the

clients..."

Many Magnum photographers have succeeded brilliantly at transcending "the artificial life" and exploring life's

realities subsequent to Cartier-Bresson's memo, as well as before. Bruce Davidson's "East 100th Street" is anextraordinary formal meditation on the lives of people living on an impoverished New York City block, and Philip

Jones Griffiths's 1971 book, "Vietnam Inc.", is a brilliantly sardonic, even ferocious, look at the policy of the United

States in Vietnam.

In the 1970s, magazines increased their use of photojournalism and many Magnum members excelled, finding

that they had pages and pages of photographs published. But the paradox was that as magazine editors grew

both more attached to photographs and more visually sophisticated they also began to use photography in a more

decorative, illustrative way. Photographers would be told specifically how to set up a cover shot, lighting and color

became the focus, and many of the more serious images did not fit the upscale ambitions of publishers acting to

attract a more affluent readership.

So while photographers were having success publishing photographs in magazines, such as Susan Meiselas'sphotographs of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, or Gilles Peress's photographs of Northern Ireland and the

upheaval in Iran, many Magnum photographers were increasingly turning to books and exhibitions to express

themselves. Meiselas's "Nicaragua", Peress's "Telex: Iran", Salgado's "L'Homme en Detresse" were attempts to

give a more sophisticated and visionary explication of world events. As Magnum's photographers began to

experiment with text and with book and exhibition design, their photographic language began to evolve as well.

For many the direct testimony that Magnum's founders believed in no longer was sufficient in a media-saturated

world where photography was increasingly used to illustrate the points of view of editors and art directors, of

politicians and movie stars, at the expense of the photographers.

Raymond Depardon worked on a pioneering effort with the French daily newspaper Liberation to report on New

York City by providing a single picture every day for the newspaper's foreign-affairs page with a diary-like text that

described the people he met, what he was reading, his very personal feelings; Peress's book, "Telex: Iran",included the telexes he received from Magnum's staff as a way of highlighting his quasi-mercenary, foreign role

along with photographs that raised questions more than providing authoritative responses as to what was

happening.

Eugene Richards's books combined the intimate and the public in raw exposes of the suffering of the

impoverished, the sick, the addicted; Harry Gruyaert and Alex Webb's work in Morocco and the Caribbean,

respectively, reveled more in the self-conscious exoticism of the observer rather than trying to reveal the societies

underpinnings.

For today's younger generation of photographers there is much less of a sense that simply reporting on an

injustice is sufficient, and there is a much more complex awareness as to what is or is not possible to explain.

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Right now, "If your pictures aren't good enough you may be too close rather than not close enough, as Capa put

it long ago. In today's "information age", if the reader can be enjoined to enter the quest for meaning, then one

has succeeded. With all of Magnum's prickly personalities, with all the difficulties inherent in attempting to see

differently, it is a wonder for many that the agency has managed to survive almost sixty years. Very few

cooperatives are noted for their longevity. Magnum, in its idiosyncrasy, its inability to stand still, has been a

remarkable exception. As Cartier-Bresson put it in one of his blistering memos to the other photographers, "Vive

la revolution permanente."

******

Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle significant andhistorical events. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or

academic pursuit. The photographer attempts to produce truthful, objective, and usually candid photography of a

particular subject, most often pictures of people.

History

The term documentaryapplied to photography antedates the mode or genre itself. Photographs meant to

accurately describe otherwise unknown, hidden, forbidden, or difficult-to-access places or circumstances date to

the earliest daguerreotype and calotype "surveys" of the ruins of the Near East, Egypt, and the American

wilderness areas. Nineteenth century archaeologist John Beasly Greene, for example, traveled to Nubia in the

early 1850s to photograph the major ruins of the region;[1]

One early documentation project was the

French Missions Heliographiquesorganized by the official Commission des Monuments historiquesto develop anarchive of France's rapidly-disappearing architectural and human heritage; the project included such photographic

luminaries as Henri Le Secq, Edouard Denis Baldus, and Gustave Le Gray.

In the United States, photographs tracing the progress of the American Civil War by photographers for at least

three consortia of photographic publisher-distributors, most notably Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner,

resulted in a major archive of photographs ranging from dry records of battle sites to harrowing images of the

dead by Timothy O'Sullivan and evocative images by George N. Barnard. A huge body of photography of the vast

regions of the Great West was produced by official government photographers for the United States Geological

and Geographical Survey, the USGS, during the period 1868-1878, including most notably the

photographers Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson.[2]

Both the Civil War and USGS photographic works point up an important feature of documentary photography: theproduction of an archive of historical significance, and the distribution to a wide audience through publication. The

US Government published Survey photographs in the annual Reports, as well as portfolios designed to

encourage continued funding of scientific surveys.

The development of new reproduction methods for photography provided impetus for the next era of documentary

photography, in the late 1880s and 1890s, and reaching into the early decades of the 20th century. This period

decisively shifted documentary from antiquarian and landscape subjects to that of the city and its crises.[3] The

refining of photogravure methods, and then the introduction of halftonereproduction around 1890 made low cost

mass-reproduction in newspapers, magazines and books possible. The figure most directly associated with the

birth of this new form of documentary is the journalist and urban social reformer Jacob Riis. Riis was a New York

police-beat reporter who had been converted to urban social reform ideas by his contact with medical and public-

health officials, some of whom were amateur photographers. Riis used these acquaintances at first to gatherphotographs, but eventually took up the camera himself. His books, most notably How the Other Half Lives of

1890 and The Children of the Slums of 1892, used those photographs, but increasingly he also employed visual

materials from a wide variety of sources, including police "mug shots" and photojournalistic images.

Riis's documentary photography was passionately devoted to changing the inhumane conditions under which the

poor lived in the rapidly-expanding urban-industrial centers. His work succeeded in embedding photography in

urban reform movements, notably the Social Gospeland Progressive movements. His most famous successor

was the photographer Lewis Wickes Hine, whose systematic surveys of conditions of child-labor in particular,

made for the National Child Labor Commission and published in sociological journals like The Survey, are

generally credited with strongly influencing the development of child-labor laws in New York and the United States

more generally.

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In the 1930s, the Great Depression brought a new wave of documentary, both of rural and urban conditions.

The Farm Security Administration, a common term for the Historical Division, supervised by Roy Stryker, funded

legendary photographic documentarians, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, John Vachon,

and Marion Post Wolcott among others. This generation of documentary photographers is generally credited for

codifying the documentary code of accuracy mixed with impassioned advocacy, with the goal of arousing public

commitment to social change.[4]

During the wartime and postwar eras, documentary photography increasingly became subsumed under the rubric

of photojournalism. Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank is generally credited with developing a

counterstrain of more personal, evocative, and complex documentary, exemplified by his work in the 1950s,

published in the United States in his 1959 book, The Americans. In the early 1960s, his influence onphotographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander resulted in an important exhibition at the Museum of

Modern Art[MoMA], which brought those two photographers together with their colleague Diane Arbus under the

title, New Documents. MoMA curatorJohn Szarkowski proposed in that exhibition that a new generation,

committed not to social change but to formal and iconographical investigation of the social experience of

modernity, had replaced the older forms of social documentary photography.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a spirited attack on traditional documentary was mounted by historians, critics, and

photographers. One of the most notable was the photographer-critic Allan Sekula, whose ideas and the

accompanying bodies of pictures he produced, influenced a generation of "new new documentary"

photographers, whose work was philosophically more rigorous, often more stridently leftist in its politics. Sekula

emerged as a champion of these photographers, in critical writing and editorial work. Notable among this

generation are the photographers Fred Lonidier, whose 'Health and Safety Game" of 1976 became a model ofpost-documentary, and Martha Rosler, whose "The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems" of 1974-75

served as a milestone in the critique of classical humanistic documentary as the work of privileged elites imposing

their visions and values on the dis-empowered.

A contemporary documentary photographer is Manuel Rivera-Ortiz, who documents the lives of people in

developing countries.[5]

Affected by his own experience of growing up poor in rural Puerto Rico, Rivera-Ortiz has

photographed Cuba[6]

India,[7][8]

showing the dignity of the Dalit ("Untouchable") caste, or the Aymara living in the

arid altiplano of Bolivia.

Acceptance by the art world

Since the late 1970s, documentary photography has increasingly been accorded a place in art galleriesalongside fine art photography. Luc Delahaye, Manuel Rivera-Ortiz and the members of VII Photo Agency are

among many who regularly exhibit in galleries and museums.[9]