Many of the greatest photographers of the postwar era have at one time or another been associated with the distinguished and highly influential collective, Magnum Photos, Inc. This revolutionary cooperative agency for photojournalists was founded in New York in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David Seymour (nick-named "Chim"), and William and Rita Vandivert (both of whom shortly resigned). Since then, its members and affiliates have covered virtually every major world event, the political, scientific, and artistic figures that make them happen, and the people who are affected by them. Today, Magnum enjoys a worldwide reputation for quality and sells thousands of photographs each year through its bureaus in New York, Paris, and London.
Magnum photographers have published more than one hundred books on topics ranging from East 100th Street in Harlem to Mother Teresa's Missions of Charity in Calcutta. Their work has been included innumerous museum and gallery exhibitions, from the Museum of Modern Art's 1955 landmark The Family of Man to each of the many large scale retrospectives mounted in honor of the medium's 1989 sesquicentennial. Currently, an extensive survey of the agency's work has been assembled in a traveling exhibition organized by the American Federation of Arts in cooperation with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers comprises more than three hundred photographs, in black-and-white and in color, by sixth photographers connected with the agency since its founding, with additional pre-Magnum material from the 1930s by founding members Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Rodger, and Chim. With funding from the Professional Photography Division of Eastman Kodak, the exhibition will tour the United States, Europe, Japan, and the South Pacific over the next two years.
With photographs documenting every conflict, insurrection, and calamity of the past four decades, from Capa's coverage of the Spanish Civil War to Patrick Zachmann's reportage from Tiananmen Square, the exhibition succeeds in reminding us of the prevalence of conflict and struggle selected for coverage by the media.
This material presented the curators - Robert Delpire, director of the Centre National de la Photographie, Pars; Fred Ritchin, writer and former picture editor of the New York Times Magazine; and Carroll T. Hartwell, curator of photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts - with a singular opportunity to outline recent history as told through the lenses of Magnum photographers. The historical perspective afforded by these photographs is not only their intended sphere, it is their salient aspect.
Yet, as a historical exercise, In Our Time is a complete failure. The installation is arranged neither chronologically nor by photographer but only loosely by theme. Were supporting data provide, describing the circumstances surrounding each picture, the apparently random array would be forgivable. Regardless of the universality conveyed in these often dramatic images, the viewer always wants to know who, what, when, where, and why the picture was taken. But background information so scant that wall labels frequently consist of only the country and year in which an image was taken. Instead of a systematic delineation of recent history, the exhibition presents a confused and poorly explicated jumble that leaps from decade to decade in a mad rush for the next
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