Early Magnum

It took an act of faith to create a cooperative that would enable its photographers to independently pursue expensive world-wide stories which would further the understanding of this new post-war world.

Sudan. George Rodgers Christmas card from Magnum Photos' Equatorial Office. 1948. © George Rodger/Magnum Photos

Legend has it that these photographers decided to divide the world between them. Rodger took Africa; he and his wife traveled from South to North. He photographed tribal life in Africa, work that inspired Leni Riefenstahl to ask him how she could get to the Nuba.

Bob Capa was the first to report on what the Soviet Union looked like before the Iron Curtain came down. It had been the West’s “Glorious Ally” in the fight against Hitler, and no one had seen what conditions there looked like. Later he photographed the arrival of concentration camp survivors in Israel.

Chim meanwhile concentrated on the face of a destroyed Germany and its rebuilding. In much admired work he recorded the plight of the orphaned, starving, and displaced children of Europe.

In the decades after the two great world wars, there was terrible suffering, and much of the awareness of it came from photojournalism. Today digital photography may make such images suspect, but back then they showed an unretouched reality.
Cartier-Bresson was already photographing in the United States when Magnum was founded. Next he and his Indonesian wife decided to explore Asia, where they felt new nations would be arising from the British Raj and the Dutch colonies.

Magnum was based on sound financial thinking. Especially in the major market, the United States, the magazines claimed ownership of negatives of work done on assignment, thus also keeping all reproduction rights. They alone were in control of what pictures were to be published and how. Magnum photographers insisted on keeping their negatives and reproduction rights. Whenever possible, the photographers submitted selected enlargements, rather than contact sheets of all their photographs, thereby reducing the magazines’ efforts to edit their work. Where stories were politically controversial, the prints bore a stamp stating that if the photographer’s captions were changed, the new captions could not vary in meaning from those supplied with the photographs.

To make the financing of these ambitions possible, Magnum operated like a bank for its members. Money earned was deposited in Magnum bank accounts. Withdrawals were based not on earnings but on need for projects. This made advances possible for stories in progress, though it also made major earners nervous at the time. Later, this arrangement allowed younger photographers to produce and sell independent work, rather than wait for assignments hard to obtain for untried photographers.

At that time, most countries’ currency restrictions made it impossible to convert from one to another or to take currency out of European countries. The US dollar, however, was accepted everywhere, and unlike many other countries, the United States allowed its currency to be sent abroad. This made operation of the Magnum New York office invaluable for financing worldwide Magnum projects.

The post-war years were tough in Europe. There were shortages of all kinds, not only of food, and heat, but also of film, chemicals and paper for prints. Magnum photographers helped each other. For example, when visiting New York from Paris, Bob Capa would take back a suitcase of film, not just for his own use but also for that of all the Magnum members there.

It was this ability of the Magnum photographers to operate independently and to sell rights to their stories not just once, but in each country’s market, that made its members the envy of the photographic world.

From the beginning it was clear that in order to maintain itself, Magnum would need more photographers to keep its infrastructure intact. Various tries were made with less experienced photographers, but it was soon found that to obtain work for them took up an inordinate amount of the offices’ time, and these efforts were not always successful.

USA. California. San Francisco. Ernst Haas. 1955. © Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos

In 1949 and 1950, Ernst Haas and Werner Bischof became the first full new members of the cooperative.

Haas had spent the war years in Austria. Only 28 years old, he had only been operating in photography for a year or so, when his moving picture story on Austrian prisoners of war returning home from Russia drew international acclaim, as well as invitations for a staff job at LIFE and to join Magnum. Fiercely independent and full of ideas, Haas excused himself from LIFE and joined Magnum. A few years later, he astonished the photographic world with a new concept of color in a poetic New York story which LIFE magazine published in two consecutive issues on twenty-four pages. It was only the first of his successes at color innovation.

Werner Bischof had drawn attention with his remarkable coverage of Eastern Europe after the war. Photographed for the Red Cross, this work was published in the much-admired Swiss magazine DU as well as in LIFE and elsewhere.

Werner, who had been cooped up in his neutral Switzerland during the war years, was in tune with Magnum ideals, and proceeded to add to the group’s fame with his stories of Famine in India, his coverage of war in Indochina, and his extensive and beautiful book-length study of Japan.

It was only after his and Bob Capa’s near simultaneous deaths in May 1954, in Indochina and in Peru, that the diminished founders took in a group of younger photographers.

France. Paris. 1957. Magnum Photos Meeting. From left to right. Foreground: Inge Bondi, John Morris, Barbara Miller, Cornell Capa, Rene Burri, Erich Lessing. Middle: Michel Chevalier. Background: Elliott Erwitt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Erich Hartmann, Rosellina Bischof, Inge Morath, Kryn Taconis, Ernst Haas, Brian Brake. © Magnum Photos

Today Magnum has sixty or so photographers and four offices worldwide. Photography has moved away from photojournalism; the magazine market is no longer as lucrative or large as it used to be. Certainly war photography has become much more dangerous and frequently more restricted in movement, though coverage is no longer by a few, as in the days of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Vietnam and the Middle East.

I stayed at Magnum New York for 20 years. My first job was to file photographs that had been returned by the magazines. This was an invaluable way of learning to recognize the authors of the photographs, by looking at the pictures before taking note of the name on the back.

Later, in 1951, when Ernst Haas came to New York, he took me in hand and taught me to differentiate great from good photographs. When I left in 1970, I had for some years been Editor for Special Projects, which meant initiating exhibitions, finding book publishers as well as looking after advertising and annual report work.

It was a great opportunity to learn from the masters when magazine photography was at its peak.

Courtesy of De Montford University, UK.