In Susan Sontag’s 1977 essay collection “On Photography,” the first book by an American critic to take the full measure of still images and their impact on the way the world regarded itself, Sontag writes that perhaps the most important end result of “the photographic enterprise” in the 20th century was “to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images.” In the years following World War II, no organization did more to populate that sweeping mental inventory of the planet than Magnum Photos.
Founded in New York in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David “Chim” Seymour and Bill Vandivert, Magnum recruited the world’s finest photojournalists and provided them with artistic and financial autonomy by functioning as a cooperative. From its modest origins, it eventually grew into an international agency with a photographic archive of Alexandrian proportions, a great many images from which have come to define for millions of people what the world looked like in the aftermath of the war.
In 1956 Henri Cartier-Bresson traveled down the Rhine River on a photo assignment for The Lamp, Standard Oil’s company magazine.
Photo: Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum PhotosThe Decisive Network
By Nadya Bair
California, 322 pages, $49.95
Magnum’s First
Edited by Andrea Holzherr
Silvana Editoriale, 126 pages, $35
We’re familiar with the basic contours of the Magnum story, thanks to a steady trickle of monographs, biographies and art books over the years. Two recent titles now offer contrasting views of an organization that has become synonymous with photography as the apex of humanist visual art. One polishes that myth; the other explodes it.
Edited by the agency’s current global exhibition director, Andrea Holzherr, “Magnum’s First” commemorates a little-known exhibit that traveled across Austria from June 1955 to February 1956—the earliest Magnum group show on record. Some of the often-reproduced images are here: Cartier-Bresson’s haunting pictures of Gandhi’s funeral, taken days after the photographer had shot the last living pictures of the Indian hero; Inge Morath’s candid glances at life in London; Werner Bischof’s immaculately composed images of village life in Japan, Peru and India. Taken together, the images offer up familiar evidence of Magnum photographers as the 20th century’s seekers of authenticity and emotional truth, the cultural emissaries of the human-interest angle whose work helped transform photography into an art form.
Nadya Bair, an academic historian of photography and the press, carefully and persuasively pulls apart these preconceptions in “The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market,” presenting a far more complex view of the revered photo agency. Ms. Bair skirts the usual narrative attached to Magnum and focuses instead on Magnum as a for-profit business that generated revenue with magazine photo spreads, print-advertising assignments and industrial commissions. (Who knew that Cartier-Bresson shot for Standard Oil?)
In so doing, Ms. Bair reveals how the pragmatic endeavor of developing its commercial-photography business mediated the Magnum aesthetic and created an alternate universe where titans such as Rodger and Elliot Erwitt shot lucrative jobs for baby lotion, men’s ties, the oil company Schlumberger and even the United Nations, which enlisted Magnum to photograph the bombed-out rubble of Western Europe in support of the Marshall Plan. Ms. Bair persuasively argues that Magnum functioned less as a middleman for museums and art galleries and more like a collective in which artistic vision was a shared business enterprise, its services available to the highest bidder.
The immediate postwar era was a fortuitous time to open shop. World War II was the first global conflict whose story was told in images, many millions of them, making it, as Ms. Bair writes, human history’s “most mediated event.” Life and Look, both wildly popular large-format picture magazines, splashed the horrors of warfare onto millions of coffee tables for the duration of the war. Capa and Cartier-Bresson had already established a beachhead at Henry Luce’s Life, and their images—Capa’s photo essay of the Allies’ Normandy invasion, in particular—were burned into the collective consciousness of a generation.
By 1947, the world had been unalterably changed. Europe was in ruins; decolonization had begun in earnest; tourism became a growth industry; and corporate interests were tapping natural resources in Africa and the Middle East. Into this radically altered landscape came Magnum’s all-star team, eager to document the global changes but also savvy enough to recognize the business opportunities this presented to the agency.
This is where Ms. Bair’s “decisive network” comes in, the “writers, spouses, secretaries, editors, darkroom assistants, publishers, corporate leaders, and museum curators” that drove the agency and made it hum. As it turns out, most of Cartier-Bresson’s most famous postwar images were not handpicked by the photographer himself, but by Magnum’s executive editor John Morris, who had to sift through piles of negatives that Cartier-Bresson shipped from the field to the agency’s office in New York. Magnum’s tilt into advertising—a move that alienated the agency’s high-minded aesthetes—was led by Inge Bondi, a former secretary at Magnum who would bring in more profits from ad revenue than any of the agency’s star photographers.
Ms. Bair’s book excels at revealing Magnum’s secret history as a supplier for companies eager to appropriate Magnum’s empathetic point of view—the feel-good soft sell of the 1950s and ’60s. Magnum’s eye-level photography, Ms. Bair contends, was not only appropriated by corporations but nurtured by them: Multinationals underwrote countless assignments that allowed Magnum’s members to hone their craft.
This precarious balancing act, of Magnum’s artists working loan-outs to everyone from Unesco to Hollywood movie studios, led to ideological rifts. Cartier-Bresson, who had a one-man show at MoMA the same year he co-founded Magnum, grew uneasy with the agency’s willingness to sacrifice its principles for profit. He also rejected color photography, as he felt it adulterated and cheapened his work, and left the agency for good in 1966.
Cartier-Bresson wasn’t wrong. A typical issue of the Saturday Evening Post in the mid-50s might contain more Magnum color advertising than bylined, black-and-white Magnum photo essays, thanks to the efforts of Ms. Bondi. Art exhibits alone weren’t going to keep the lights on; after Cartier-Bresson’s exit, Magnum leaned into commercial work like never before.
“In teaching us a new visual code,” Sontag wrote, “photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.” Ms. Bair's “The Decisive Network” reminds us that, when it came to what is worth looking at, Magnum didn’t discriminate. This hardly diminishes its artistic legacy; if anything, it demonstrates that Magnum has left behind a far more expansive contribution to the 20th century’s “anthology of images” than was once believed.
—Mr. Weingarten is the author of “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution.”
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