Early Magnum

Inge Bondi

As the festivities around Magnum's 60th birthday and the famously passionate AGM in New York City are over, Inge Bondi, who worked for Magnum for 20 years, looks back at the early years of the agency.

When I was hired by Magnum Photos in New York at the beginning of 1950 as a researcher/secretary, Magnum was just two and half years old, having been established in New York and Paris in May 1947.

The name conjured up pictures of glamour, but in fact its creation had been an act of desperation: working conditions had changed.

Robert Capa, a Hungarian, had already been acclaimed as the most daring and brilliant of war photographers for his coverage of the Spanish Civil War in the thirties. He and George Rodger, an Englishman, had covered World War II for LIFE and other magazines. George had chased the enemy across Africa from East to West and had walked ahead of it out of Burma into India.

Henri Cartier-Bresson had been a French prisoner of war in German hands, had worked with the French Underground after escaping, and had been given a post-war retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946. David Seymour, a Pole known as Chim, had been a much-published photographer before the war, and a great friend of Capa’s and Cartier-Bresson’s in Paris. He had spent the war years in the U.S. Army interpreting aerial reconnaissance photographs.

France. Paris. The photographers David Seymour "Chim" (left) and Robert Capa in 1952. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

William Vandivert, the American, had worked for LIFE before and during the war. He stayed only a year with Magnum.

The original Magnum photographers were all in their mid thirties and experienced in working independently in the field. With peace the magazines, especially in the US, began expanding their activities, hiring younger photographers on staff . Quite naturally, editorial emphasis shifted to the interests of the troops coming home and the daily routine of newly united families.

Stories from far-off lands had to be beyond the scope of the magazine staff photographers. The small international group that created Magnum felt that tectonic changes would soon be creating a changed world, and they wanted to report on them.

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