The world's most famous photo agency is 50 years old. But is history, Charles Darwentwonders, entirely safe in its hands?
Semioticians of the book will have a field day with Magnum, a hefty volume published this week to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the eponymous photographic agency.
Take the book's title, which uses a pictogram as well as a word to show its intent. (The degree symbol is apparently meant to suggest that Magnum is "taking the world's temperature": a piece of sophistry that manages to be obscure and corny at the same time.) Then there is its foreword. The point of these is usually that they are just that: toward the front and composed of words. Not in Magnum, though.
Riffle through the book for some indication of what it is about and you will reach page 50 before you stumble on an essay; before, all is photography. When you do track down Magnum's brief avant-propos, you will find that it is written, for no obvious reason, without capital letters. ("magnum is an agency, a tradition. in the de-cisive moment that makes a photograph, instinct and tradition come together. without instinct, no picture", and so on and so on.) The foreword is also printed in a minute point size, and in dazzlingly illegible orange-on-white lettering. Somehow, you feel, the book sets out to shunt the word into second place, some way after the photograph and the pictogram. Reasonable enough, you might say, given its subject. Whether you will still feel that way by the end of Magnum is another matter.
Ironically enough, it is the book's foreword that gives the game away. Written by Michael Ignatieff, it sets out to put the work of modern Magnum photographers into the context of their agency's history. Magnum pointedly avoids reproducing the iconic images of Robert Capa, Ernst Haas or George Rodger: no dying Spanish civil war soldiers dropping their guns, no pictures of Belsen or the Blitz. Instead, the book concentrates on the work of people such as Carl de Keyzer and Inge Morath, produced in the 1990s. There is no questioning the fact that many of these images are either fearsome or fearsomely beautiful, and occasionally both. It is the balletic composition of James Nachtwey's shots of a Zairean cholera camp that makes them terrifying; Larry Towell's image of a sunlit square in Gaza City is nothing short of poetic.
Ignatieff singles out a quite different set of modern Magnum images for special mention, among them "the carbonised bodies on the basra [sic] road; the faces of israeli soldiers and what the work of repression has done to them; the kurds at the turkish border in 1991, begging to be fed; the man in front of the tank in tiananmen square; the bodies piled high by bulldozers in goma". Read between the lines and you will see that the agenda of his choice is less aesthetic than political: roughly, that Ignatieff is anti-American (the Americans having prosecuted the war against Iraq and shorn up the state of Israel), anti-Chinese and pro the underdogs of the developing world.
The point is not so much that his political views are right or wrong as that they should have been prompted by the pictures in this book. This is not coincidence: Ignatieff's politically charged reading of the work of Magnum's photo-graphers derives from the highly political nature of the work itself. The image of a Chinese student standing in front of a tank or of Israeli soldiers patrolling the streets of occupied east Jerusalem is not a neutral one. If, as Ignatieff says, Gilles Peress's work in Rwanda "seems inspired by cold fury [at] a genocide which nobody did anything to stop", then that work is making a political judgement.
Whether the judgement in question happens to coincide with our own is beside the point. This needs to be borne in mind as you flip through Magnum, because the romantic belief - and one to which Ignatieff subscribes - is that "the [Magnum] photographer eschews any relationship with the subject".
It is certainly true that Peress is unlikely to have spoken to any of the people in his lovely, dreadful photographs; but that is not at all the same as saying that he did not have an interest in the way he portrayed them, or in choosing to portray them at all. If Magnum has managed to survive in an age of moving, talking, colour television, it is because the formal quality of its photographers' work makes it something akin to art. That the pictures in Magnum are aesthetically choosy should not obscure the fact that they are also politically so. The hoary old question of whether nice- looking photographic reportage glamourises things such as war isn't really the point. The truth is that beauty in an image suggests that that image was made simply with beauty in mind; put another way, the prettiness of a picture suggests its neutrality.
It is a dangerous assumption to make. As you turn the pages of Magnum, you have the sense of watching history in the making. These images are so patently true, their formal compositions so cool in the face of horror, that, as Ignatieff puts it, "our moral imagination is extended to situations we have never been in ourselves". We believe that we have experienced these things, and thought them through on our own terms. But we haven't: Magnum's photographers have made our political decisions for us.
A question you might like to ask yourself as you go through this book is whether the pictures in it reflect some kind of liberal consensus, or whether, on the contrary, they set out to shape one. Did people think about the Spanish civil war in the same way before Capa photographed it, or did his pictures actually change history? If so, is it right that they should have done so? There is one photograph in this book that seems to me to be particularly telling. Taken by Werner Bischof in 1951, it shows a crowd of press photographers elbowing each other out of the way to get shots of the Korean war. You can't help asking yourself whether history is safe in their hands.
"Magnum" is published by Phaidon Press at £39.95. Charles Darwent is the art critic of the "Independent on Sunday"
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