Magnum reviewing archive as concerns raised about images of child sexual exploitation

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Admin

Agency to review historical photographs after issue raised on website and social media

Magnum Photos, one of the world’s most celebrated photographic agencies, is to re-examine the content of its archive of more than 1 million images after accusations it made available photographs that critics said may show the sexual exploitation of minors.

In a statement, the president of Magnum, Olivia Arthur, said the agency, whose founders included Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, had begun an “in-depth internal review to make sure that we fully understand the implications of the work in the archive, both in terms of imagery and context.

Barriers, barbed wire and borders in the head: Josef Koudelka’s Holy Land

Posted on December 24, 2019 by Admin

The Magnum photographer grew up behind the iron curtain. As a documentary charts his journey where Israel and Palestine meet, Koudelka talks about challenging official narratives – and himself

There’s a surreal moment near the start of Koudelka Shooting Holy Land, a documentary about the acclaimed photographer Josef Koudelka. He has pointed his lens at one of the concrete barriers that separate Israel and Palestine but has been stopped by an official and a heavily armed soldier. His local assistant, Gilad Baram, is trying to smooth things over. “It might result in a book,” Baram tells the soldier. “He is a one of the most renowned photographers worldwide. He is a photographer with an agency called Magnum.”

Suddenly the atmosphere changes. “Magnum? Ah, I know it,” says the soldier, his stern face breaking into a smile. A short discussion later, a friendly handshake and all is well.

The big picture: boy with balloons in Santiago, Chile

Posted on October 6, 2019 by Admin

Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey pays homage to Cartier-Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’

David Alan Harvey’s photograph of a boy with balloons on a street in Santiago, Chile, was taken in 1997. It is included in Streetwise, a new collection of pictures from the archives of the Magnum agency. The Magnum name became synonymous with street photography in the 1950s and 1960s under the guiding influence of co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. The current volume pays homage to Cartier-Bresson’s black-and-white “decisive moments” and examines the way that that spirit has been taken forward, particularly after advances in digital photography and printing enabled a revolution in colour in the 1980s.

Harvey was elected into the agency – there is a voting process among the membership – in the year that this picture was taken. By then, as a staff photographer for National Geographic, he had been taking pictures for more than three decades. A principle subject was the Hispanic diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic – the “divided soul”, as he terms it, of Latin culture.

California Trip: how Dennis Stock caught the darkness beyond the hippy dream

Posted on September 26, 2019 by Admin

His iconic portraits of James Dean in a wintry New York won him fame. But it was his travels in the west coast that brought out his true genius, as he captured the cracks in the 60s counterculture

‘For many years California frightened me,” Dennis Stock wrote in the preface to California Trip, first published in 1970. “For a young man with traditional concerns for spiritual and aesthetic order, California seemed too unreal. I ran.”

Stock, a naturally sceptical New Yorker who had served in the US Navy before hustling his way into the ranks of the esteemed Magnum photo agency, had instinctively picked up on the edgy undercurrents of the late 1960s Californian hippy dream. As the idealism of that decade peaked and faded, California became what Stock called a “head lab” – fomenting various radically alternative lifestyles fuelled by eastern mysticism, experiments in communal living, and all kinds of post-LSD mind expansion.

Bruce Davidson photographs donated to Telfair Museums – in pictures

Posted on January 11, 2019 by Admin

An anonymous donor has given hundreds of photographs by the Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson to the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia. The collection spans his career from 1956 to 2008, and includes images from his most famous works including Brooklyn Gang and Circus.