Magnum’s reputation is not just based on extraordinary photography. What distinguishes the members of the photoagency, which was founded in 1947, is character. The legendary Magnum photographers Elliott Erwitt and Burt Glinn talk about moments of opportunity, courage, independence – and humor. This interview was conducted by Pia Frankenberg in December 2006 and was first published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in January 2007.
Pia Frankenberg: Since when do you two know each other?
Burt Glinn: We first met in 1952 or ´53 I guess.
Elliott Erwitt: In the morning, I think.
BG: We got introduced and I said to somebody "what's so good about Erwitt?" (grins) I am actually still asking myself that.
PF: When did you join Magnum?
BG: Roughly around the same time, I guess.
EE: ´53
BG: Magnum wasn't a very large organization then. It was... - (turns to Elliott) Oh, by the way, Marc Riboud called the other day and said he'd come across a treasure trove of letters from Henri (Cartier-Bresson, Magnum founding member) to him that he is going to edit and maybe make a book of it.
EE: Really?
BG: He said he didn't know if certain photogaphers would like to have Henri's opinion on record and I said it's okay with me (grins).
Anyway ... I came to New York in ´53 because the Queen was going on a world tour. I don't know whether Elliott did anything on that but I know Eve Arnold did Bermuda or Jamaica and I did one of the Caribbean Islands, too, and that's when I got to know some of the older Magnum people. And then, when Bob and Werner were killed (Robert Capa, Magnum founding member, was killed by a landmine in Indochina and Werner Bischof, a member since 1949, died nine days earlier in a car accident in Peru) we all sort of got together a lot in New York. For one of the most painful funeral services that I ever attended. Do you remember that? For Bob?
EE: Yeah. 1954. May 25th. I remember that because it was my fathers's birthday.
BG: That's when I met Chim (David Seymour, Magnum founding member) for the first time.
Elena Glinn: I think Burt was talking about ´52 before. The queen was covered in ´52.
BG: That's right.
PF: Do you mean the boat "The Queen" or the Queen?
EG: The Queen.
EE: There's only one queen.
BG: Oh, I don't know!
EE: There's only one queen and, huh, what's his name... it's ...
BG: Elton John.
EE:.... he did "My fair Lady". He did the costumes for that.
BG: Oh... Cecil Beaton.
EE: Cecil Beaton! That's the queen.
PF: Do you remember any assignments that you worked on together?
BG: In the early days we both worked a lot for Holiday Magazine. We worked together on an issue on Rome. We were a very strange group of photographers there. Henri and Elliott and Slim Arons and Arnold Newman...
EE: Actually the ususal suspects.
BG: ... and I remember, the government of Italy was so pleased to have a special issue on Rome that they gave what was the Italian equivalent of the Legion of Honor to the editors of Holiday Magazine. I guess we also worked together on the Krushchev tour of America.
Beloved Magnum photographer, Burt Glinn, passed away early on the morning of April 9th.
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Burt Glinn served in the United States Army between 1943 and 1946, before studying literature at Harvard University, where he edited and photographed for the Harvard Crimson college newspaper. From 1949 to 1950, Glinn worked for Life magazine before becoming a freelancer.
Glinn became an associate member of Magnum in 1951, along with Eve Arnold and Dennis Stock - the first Americans to join the young photo agency - and a full member in 1954. He made his mark with spectacular color series on the South Seas, Japan, Russia, Mexico and California. In 1959 he received the Mathew Brady Award for Magazine Photographer of the Year from the University of Missouri.
In collaboration with the writer Laurens van der Post, Glinn published A Portrait of All the Russias and A Portrait of Japan. His reportages have appeared in Esquire, Geo, Travel and Leisure, Fortune, Life and Paris-Match. He has covered the Sinai War, the US Marine invasion of Lebanon, and Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba. In the 1990s he completed an extensive photo essay on the topic of medical science.
Versatile and technically brilliant, Glinn was one of Magnum's great corporate and advertising photographers. He had received numerous awards for his editorial and commercial photography, including the Best Book of Photographic Reporting from Abroad from the Overseas Press Club and the Best Print Ad of the Year from the Art Directors Club of New York. Glinn has served as president of the American Society of Media Photographers. He was president of Magnum between 1972 and 1975, and was re-elected to the post in 1987.
The world that I grew up in will be, from today, a poorer place. It is with great sadness I have to write that Philip - a monumental, irrepressible force in photography and in life - and a courageous fighter against the cancer that finally defeated him - passed away early this morning.
Philip's passing is an enormous loss to us all at Magnum, and I am sure to everyone who knew him. It was a privilege to have brushed, even lightly, against his charm, his brilliance and his passion for photojournalism. Those who only know him through his work will have missed his skills as an orator, raconteur, wit and polemicist. He remained the lovely man that he was - graceful and welcoming - especially to young people trying to make a start in photography. He had much to pass on, not just about the importance of "real" photography, but about the art and craft of picture-making.
Philip was born in Rhuddlan, near Rhyl in Wales on 18th February 1936 and it was there, at the age of 16, that he learnt an early lesson about photography - from Henri Cartier-Bresson: "The first picture of his I ever saw was during a lecture at the Rhyl camera club. I was 16 and the speaker was Emrys Jones. He projected the picture upside down. Deliberately, to disregard the subject matter to reveal the composition. It's a lesson I've never forgotten."
It was Philip's consummate skill as a picture maker, carefully able to draw the viewer closer and closer to his subjects through his emotionally-charged compositions that lent such power to his work. Philip was always concerned with individuals - their personal and intimate suffering more than any particular class or ideological struggle. And the strength of his vision, that inspired so many of us, led Henri Cartier-Bresson to write of Philip: "not since Goya has anyone portrayed war like Philip Jones Griffiths."
Philip's iconic work on the Vietnam War, an unprecedented work, published in 1971 under the title 'Vietnam Inc.' is arguably the most articulate and compelling anti-war statement made by any photojournalist ever. Indeed it led Noam Chomsky to comment that: "If anybody in Washington had read that book, we wouldn't have had these wars in Iraq or Afghanistan".
Indeed, it was Philip's passion for peace that led to greatness in his later work. In 2005 he published "Viet Nam at Peace" a 25 year study exploring the long term consequences of the war. The first Westerner to travel by road from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City after the war, and later the Ho Chi Minh trail, he amassed an unparalleled photographic record of the post-war transformation of this country.
Thoroughly industrious and tenacious to the end, Philip had just completed a new book of his less known studies of British life in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, entitled 'Recollections', and in the last few weeks before his death, Philip became thoroughly engaged in compiling his life's work documenting Cambodia.
Philip enriched all our lives with his courage, his empathy, his passion, his wit and his wisdom; and for many he gave to photojournalism its moral soul. He died as he wanted so passionately that we should live - in peace. In his last days he was together with his loving family and friends at his side.
He leaves behind his loving family, Fanny Ferrato, Katherine Holden, Donna Ferrato and Heather Holden.
My first direct experience of Magnum was on June 24 1982, when I turned up in Paris for my first photographer's meeting, (once a year all the members get together, alternating between New York, Paris and London to decide policy for the year ahead, and look at new portfolios presented to the group). I had been voted as a Nominee, the summer before, on the first rung of the Magnum membership ladder.
Round the table were some most well known photojournalists of the twentieth century, but on the table was basically a carpet of Leicas and other assorted cameras, and as the meeting went on people began photographing each other.
I felt more than uneasy when I finally had the nerve to join in, but it is something that I have done ever since at subsequent meetings over the years. Rene Burri has traditionally been the one to shoot a group portrait each year, an event that is always full of fun as Rene tries to dash into the shot as the delayed action setting ticks away.
I was always rather frustrated by the lighting conditions, which are normally difficult, and in my first meeting as President in London 1991, I set up two large film lights across the large table determined that this was going to be the best-lit Magnum meeting ever. It all went well until on the third day Philip Jones Griffiths started fiddling with one of the lighting stands and it came crashing down fusing the whole system.
The pictures here were all taken this year in June 2007, at Milk Studios in New York, and were my way of passing some of the time during four days of intensive and sometimes difficult discussions. They are all shot on real film, using a 6x6 Mamiya camera, and with the occasional help of a chair for the camera to rest on for long exposures.
This is the third and final part of a multi-part article series on the work of Magnum's multimedia department. The first part of this series was entitled "The philosophy behind the story", the second part "The importance of sound". Bjarke Myrthu, the executive editor of Magnum In Motion, grants us a view behind the scenes and shows us how the Magnum In Motion team brings life to static photographs on the web.
After a month and a half of hard work we are at last screening the final edit of "Libera Me", the latest Magnum In Motion essay. Everything is received well by Alex Majoli and the rest of the people that watch it. However having a movie that plays merrily on the computer is not the same as having a finalized online piece. Some hard work still lies ahead. We need to make the movie run smoothly online, making it viewable on a reasonable fast internet connection without loosing too much quality, and we need to add the extra features and chapters that make this story different from an offline video.
Naturally the most important thing is the content and the story. But the online platform holds certain technical limitations that inadvertently influence the stories. However having certain technical boundaries is nothing new to storytellers. The old day moviemakers had to stay within twenty-minute sections, because this was all a camera reel could hold, which, newspaper and broadcast journalists have time and space limitations and so on. The important thing is how you play with the creativity and use these limits to form your storytelling.
The challenge online is that the better and bigger the visuals look, and the better the audio sounds, the more data has to be pushed through the internet pipeline, which often means that the viewer in the other end will experience a jagged and slow playback. To be sure that the story plays well it has to be compressed, but then the images risk becoming small and pixilated and the audio will sound canny and chopped. One of the ways to avoid this has been to chop the story into smaller elements, giving the end user less to load through the internet.
Screenshot from the Magnum In Motion essay "Revolution" by Burt Glinn
This fragmented way of telling stories can, however, work nicely if you either use it to give the viewer control of the navigation, or you trick the viewer into thinking it is one long story, because certain parts are loaded while the others are being watched. A story like "Revolution" is actually build from small pieces of photos, graphics and audio, but they load in a sequence that makes it look like one long movie. In "Libera Me" we choose to chop the story into several different chapters. This gives the viewer a better overview and leaves a choice to watch certain parts of the story separately, which I think makes sense in this story (other stories are more suited to be kept as one entire piece), but technically it also ensures a better playback.
This is the second part of a multi-part article series about the work of Magnum's multimedia department. The first part of this series is entitled "The philosophy behind the story". Bjarke Myrthu, the executive editor of Magnum In Motion, grants us a view behind the scenes and shows us how the Magnum In Motion team brings life to static photographs on the web.
The first question when we decide to make a Magnum In Motion essay is what kind of images we have, and how they could be edited. But right after this we ask ourselves about the sound. While Magnum is all about the images, sound is actually a very important part of what we do at Magnum In Motion. If you are asking yourself why, just try and turn off the volume the next time you are watching a good movie. Even if there is no dialogue, audio plays a huge role in setting the mood and driving the story, even in driving the visuals. Two stories that are identical visually can be completely different if the sound tracks are different. And when I talk about sound I also mean the exclusion of sound. Silence can be just as important as noise can be.
Tools like Soundslides, iView and iPhoto have made it very easy to put together a slideshow of images and add a piece of music or other audio behind the images. While this kind of slideshow does change the experience of the photographic story, it does not really make use of sound as a powerful driver of the story. If you want to create an experience that is a powerful alternative to books, exhibitions and good magazine photography, you have to work on creating an entire soundscape that blends in with the visuals and creates a rhythm between images and sound.
One way to do this is to very literally make the photographs appear and change to the beat of the sound. Thomas Dworzak's story about the medical teams in Iraq is an example of a project where we worked this way. The blend of TV-shots and photographs from the field somehow seemed to work well with an abrupt and very rhythmic edit of sound and visuals.
Another way is to use the sound as a more subtle driver, that sets the mood under the visuals. This can be a very powerful way to increase and decrease the tension in the storyline and drive the viewer through the narrative. This is common knowledge in the world of filmmaking, but somehow we tend to forget it in the world of photography. An example for this would be Larry Towell's "Land and Identity" which was one of the first Magnum In Motion productions.
Screenshot from the Magnum In Motion essay "Libera Me" by Alex Majoli
Using sound as a mood-setter and tension-maker, was how we approached Alex Majoli's "Libera Me" essay, that we recently published. But before we found the final method we went through a lot of experimentation. We started out by interviewing Majoli, which is something we do with a lot of photographers when we help them create an essay. It often make sense, because the Magnum photographers usually create very personal projects, with a personal voice - so what we do is simply to extend this voice and give it an actual form that reaches beyond the photographs. However this also proves a serious challenge, because adding interview or voice over easily ends up taking away from the experience of the images instead of adding something extra to the story. A photograph can be a magic catalyst for feelings and emotions, but if it is explained too much the magic disappears.
This is the first part of a multi-part article series about the work of Magnum's multimedia department. Bjarke Myrthu, the executive editor of Magnum In Motion, grants us a view behind the scenes and shows us how the Magnum In Motion team brings life to static photographs on the web.
"This is not a slideshow, we want to do something more," says photographer Alex Majoli. He is sitting next to me and Adrian who is a producer at Magnum In Motion. We are discussing how to do an online version of "Libera Me", which is a personal story about identity, loss, heaven, and hell that started out as an exhibition in Rome. Alex is expressing exactly the same ambition I have for Magnum In Motion. We want to create a new language for photography. Something that can only be done online and not just a new way of distributing old-fashioned slideshows. Are we reaching our goals? Not to the extent that I would like to, but I think we are moving in the right direction. However, we need to take the storytelling and the use of interactivity to another level, if we really want to live up to our mission and the ambitions I have for Magnum In Motion.
Screenshot from the Magnum In Motion essay "Chernobyl Legacy" by Paul Fusco
When I started doing online storytelling eight years ago, my mission was to create something that could give the same kind of experience as watching a good documentary or reading a nice narrative story - an experience that could speak to the heart and stir emotions, and not only be a factual news story. In my opinion one of the stories where we succeed with is Paul Fusco's "Chernobyl Legacy". This is a solid, factual documentation of an issue, but at the same time a larger story of what happens when humans play too much with nature - all driven by Paul's incredible passion and sensitivity.
Secondly, I wanted to create a new kind of storytelling using interactivity and multimedia - instead of just transferring existing broadcast and print journalism to the online world. It became clear to me that the way to do this was to make the stories very visual and auditory. This seems a bit banal now, but in 1999 a lot of online content was either text, single images, or sound clips.
It's been a little over two months now that Magnum welcomed three new nominees into the circle of Magnum Photographers. Once a year, the photographers from Magnum travel to Paris, London or New York for their Annual General Meeting (AGM). The 2007 AGM took place at the end of June in New York City. One day of the AGM is reserved to look at submitted portfolios and to decide upon new nominees, associates and members.
I briefly e-mailed with them to find out about their motivation to join Magnum and how it felt to be notified of their acceptance. A more in depth look at our new nominees will follow in the future. Make sure to post your comments or questions, we will try to find responses and answers to them by our nominees.
"I love photography. it is not only a means to an end to me. I love the whole process: from the first idea, all the way to the final print. And sharing it.
I still see making a photograph as an extraordinary and magical act and those qualities make it very powerful.
I wanted to be part of a group of people that I believe still love photography, respect it, don't underestimate it, and think about why, and how they use it.
And who - needless to say - are also photographers I've long admired, many having inspired me since I was a child.
I got a glimpse of how Magnum works through meeting a few of it's members during the application process, and it seems each person receives from the agency as much as they give. Each one uses Magnum in a different way and all coincided it is a chaos, but a beautiful one.
I have to get to know the workings of it. It is all a bit abstract still. And since I'm used to working alone I have to learn how to be part of a group now.
But I do know I want to do something different from what I've been doing on my own in terms of producing. That is another reason i applied: To be surprised and challenged all over again."
On hearing about being accepted as a nominee:
"On the afternoon the voting took place I came home from a picnic in the park with Martin (my husband), my baby Catalina, and a group of friends. There was a message from Susan Meiselas welcoming me to Magnum. So I went right back out, soaking wet on the E train, and celebrated at the MoMA!"
"After having worked a number of years with personal documentary photography, I was looking for a group of photographers, whose aims and ideas I could identify with. Some of the Magnum members have been a great inspiration to me during the creation of my own personality as a photographer, and now that I feel I have developed my own language within photography, I decided to apply for Magnum.
A strong and passionate interest in people and the subjects and a will not to compromise are some of the qualities which has made Magnum an attractive place for me to become part of. It is a very exciting process for me, because I have always worked alone, and I am just getting to learn how photographers can be individuals and still work as a group to obtain common goals."
On hearing about being accepted as a nominee:
"I did not have some crazy reaction, because I was alone with the news, and it seemed a bit unreal. One of the members called me shortly after the decision was made. I was in NY myself to show my work to galleries and a few members before the voting. I received the phone call at a friend's house in Queens, when I was taking a nap on this couch filled with an enormous amount of cat hair. At first I wasn't sure if I was still a sleep or not....
Becoming a nominee at Magnum was a goal that I had aimed for, and now reaching it, at first I didn't know what to do with the news. Then I called my girlfriend in Tokyo, my twin brother in Bangkok and my mother in Copenhagen. The people who always supported me... And their reactions made me understand it was for real. Afterwards I went on a round trip to visit them and celebrate."
"Since I started working as a photographer, I have always been represented by galleries rather then by agencies. The freedom that this has allowed has, I think been very important to my work. I haven't had to do assignments in order to make a living or fund work. Instead, I have done this through print sales. This has great advantages in some terms as it allows me to spend almost all my time on long-term personal projects rather then 1-week assignments. I also very much like the exhibition as a form of getting work seen as I think it allows for a very particular and very special form of contemplation of images. In an exhibition, one looks at photographs in a very physical way due to the fact that one walks through an exhibition rather then paging through it. I have also organized exhibitions in interesting and varied locations such as Nelson Mandela's old cell in Pollsmoor Prison, the South African Constitutional Court, and the Italian Parliament. This is also very important to me in ensuring that the work can be seen by a wider audience then just those who attend the more elite commercial galleries and museums.
So, while I am very happy to continue working in this way, I also want my work to be seen as widely as possible in different contexts too. I chose to apply to Magnum because I was attracted to the idea of being a part of an organization with such a strong tradition of engaged photographic practice. It made sense to join an agency for editorial photography, and Magnum was the obvious choice, as it seemed to be the best one. I also share a deep affinity and respect for most of the Magnum photographers and feel attracted to the shared quality of social engagement that seems to define Magnum.
I was given the wrong date for the portfolio meeting in New York, so the physical portfolio that I had gone to some lengths to prepare never arrived on time. When I realized this, I thought, ah well, thats it - no chance now. But Magnum already had a disk of my work which I had sent a few months previously for the preliminary selection at the London office, and somehow I got chosen on the basis of that."
On hearing about being accepted as a nominee:
"I received emails from Martin Parr and Jim Goldberg, I smiled to myself, and was really quite surprised after the portfolio problem. I then carried on preparing for the assignment that I was about to start.
While I am obviously delighted and honored to be chosen for Magnum, I really don't see it as changing anything in the way I work, except hopefully to help me to produce better work and get that work seen. But I don't want to allow anything, especially not the new attention that my work is receiving with the nomination, to distract me from my focus on long-term, sustained, and engaged projects."
Chim was my kind caring uncle, who brought gifts of books and took photos of me and my family. My mother, Eileen Shneiderman, was his older sister, and she loved him dearly. Chim’s untimely death at age 45 during the Suez Crisis in 1956 was a tragic event in our home that as a 9-year old I remember well. My mother devoted her life to her brother’s legacy, helping with the founding of ICP, and promoting his work wherever possible, until she died at age 96, just two years ago.
With my sister, I have had the privilege, responsibility, and pleasure of taking care of Chim’s archives, working with Magnum, and donating his vintage prints to ICP and other major museums that exhibit his work. It is inspiring to see how much the Magnum community treasures their founders and satisfying to find museum curators and photo scholars who are eager to become part of Chim’s still growing family of admirers.
Chim’s work is special because of his unique gentle personality. He had a remarkable capacity to engage with his subjects and make them partners in telling their story. If you look at many of Chim’s photos and ask yourself what happened in the 2 minutes before the photo you will repeatedly discover that there must have been a bond of friendship and a relationship of trust. This style occasionally occurs in the work of Chim’s close colleagues Henri Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa, but one of Magnum’s strengths was the diversity of its founders. Henri wanted to be invisible, and Capa was devoted to being close enough to capture the action.
Chim’s style was to get close enough emotionally, a style the resonates through the work of Susan Meiselas and other Magnum photographers.
Michael Kimmelman enthusiastically reviewed the 1996 ICP exhibit in the New York Times with these words:
"Chim was a dreamer, and along with Capa and Cartier-Bresson, one of the heroic and pioneering liberal photojournalists who thought he could actually improve the world by showing people what was going on in it."
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.
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.
Due to the fact that our former blog editor relocated to Stockholm it's been quiet on the Magnum Blog for a while. Time for a new start and some changes.
First of all I am going to briefly introduce myself. I am Martin Fuchs, an Austrian photographer and former intern at Magnum. Following my internship I have been freelancing for Magnum In Motion, the multimedia department, and various other departments for about two years. For my internship in 2005 I created my first blog (which is not updated anymore) and the blogging fever assumed power over me. It didn't let me go ever since and because I wanted to create a blog less tied to a certain location I created "Journal Of A Photographer".
The time I worked for Magnum proved to be a very valuable one. Imagine all the people you get to know and all the stories you get to hear... And over the long run I was even able to incorporate my blogging experience into Magnum. A couple of months ago I created the Magnum Blog and now I am very excited about the fact that I was asked to take over the editorial responsibilities for it.
This does not mean that I will be the one writing each and every article for this blog. It just means that I will try to gather as much information, stories, anecdotes and funny snippets for it as I can. Trying to give you a better insight into Magnum and what's going on. I will be in close touch with the photographers and one of our goals is to get them directly involved, to create a better way of communication and conversation between them and you.
Some of them such as Alec Soth and David Alan Harvey (the first two to start with) will become regular contributors to the blog. Both Alec and David have very interesting and successful blogs already. In case you don't know them yet check out Alec's blog and one or all four blogs of David Alan Harvey (1, 2, 3, 4).
There are many ideas and improvement suggestions that we want to incorporate and that we are working on. I am currently collecting content, I might change certain areas of the blog such as the links section a bit. But after all - you, our readers and visitors are the reason for this blog to exist and therefore I want this blog to become a more vital and valuable place for you to be.
I would like to ask you for a favor: It would be really great to hear your suggestions and ideas. What would you like to see and read here, what did you like so far and what did you find kind of odd? Please post your thoughts or e-mail me with any concerns you have about the blog at martin@magnumphotos.com.
This is a challenge and it's a good one. I am looking forward to all your comments and suggestions.
With an archive comprised of photos from 110+ artists shot over the span of 70 years, the task of digitizing Magnum's archive is a daunting one, to say the least. While Magnum's active photographers are still producing and submitting new work, the archive is the greatest source of images being added to the digital database. While the word archive evokes images of rows of print-boxes, cabinets containing duplicate slides and shelves of contact sheets and captions, which one might find in three of Magnum's four offices, the term might be applied to all material which exists in and out of the office in their original form, i.e. negatives and original chromes.
Magnum's New York office
As mentioned above, various forms of photos exist in the physical archives. There is an estimated one million photographs in the New York office archive. These can be either prints (most are black and white on either resin or fiber-based paper), slides of black and white prints, duplicate color slides and original color slides of all sizes, though the vast majority of these chromes are 35mm. The black and white material is stored in folders within custom-made boxes and the chromes are stored within archival sleeves which hang in filing cabinets.
I was asked by Magnum’s Tokyo office to attend the opening of a newly curated Magnum Group exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Tokyo, as aficionados know, offers many things to the passing visitor: disarming politeness, a profusion of electronic noises and gadgets, a city district dedicated to people’s obsessions, and rice wine.
Tokyo, Japan. 1997. Restaurant. Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos. Part of the exhibition “Tokyo Seen by Magnum Photographers" at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
Alienated by jet lag and language difficulties such offerings are a welcome sign of having arrived somewhere with a distinct local culture but at the same at a truly global city.
Magnum New York's Vice President Larry Towell spent last week working with the NY office and gave staff and interns the opportunity to show him their work. Photo by James Wendell.
A three inch tall James Dean rests on the black work top. And another one, and yet another. After some hands-on dodge and burn adjustments with a Dennis Stock image, three small cut outs of the trench coat-clad film icon - hands in pockets, cigarette in mouth - litter the work surfaces of the darkroom at Magnum Photos' New York office. The man with the scissors, the Ilford 500H multi grade enlargers and access to innumerable priceless negatives, is Pablo Inirio. He has claimed the small cubic space as his own since 1992, often working up to 90 hours a week.
Two weeks before Christmas, one of the monthly photographers' meetings has just wrapped up, meaning frequent visits to the darkroom. "Just a minute," comes the reply as Hiroji Kubota taps gently on the light gray door. Later, once it is open, Chien-Chi Chang silently runs back and forth over the threshold asking questions. Many of the photographers place large orders at this time of year, the reason for which Inirio hasn't pondered, probably hasn't had the time to ponder as he deals with the work flow calmly, not a word of complaint, not a single stress-induced, cross word.
Magnum Photos is delighted to introduce the Magnum Blog, an online forum for discussing photography and photojournalism. The blog is a new medium for us to illuminate the stories behind the images, to explore the motivations behind the projects, to discuss the systematic issues that affect all photographers, and to explore the industrial and societal changes that inform our expectations of photography.
Continue reading 'The Imagemakers'
Chim was my kind caring uncle, who brought gifts of books and took photos of me and my family. My mother, Eileen Shneiderman, was his older sister, and she loved him dearly. Chim’s untimely death at age 45 during the Suez Crisis in 1956 was a tragic event in our home that as a 9-year old I remember well. My mother devoted her life to her brother’s legacy, helping with the founding of ICP, and promoting his work wherever possible, until she died at age 96, just two years ago. 
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.
