Magnum at Paris Photo

We thought we’d kick off our Paris Photo coverage with a look at one of the most revered photographic agencies in the world, Magnum. It was founded by four photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour two years after the end of World War II, partly out of a desire to find and document what that terrible conflict had not managed to destroy.

According to Rodger, “Bresson recognised the unique quality of miniature cameras, so quick and so quiet, and also the unique qualities that we ourselves had acquired during several years of contact with all the emotional excesses that go with war. He saw a future in this combination of mini cameras and maxi-minds."

The agency was founded as a co-operative in which the staff would support rather than direct the photographers. Copyright would be held by the authors of the imagery, not by the magazines that published the work. This meant that a photographer could decide to cover a famine somewhere, publish the pictures in say Life magazine, and the agency could then sell the photographs to magazines in other countries, such as Paris Match and Picture Post, giving the photographers the means to work on projects that particularly inspired them, even without an assignment.
 
The agency still operates on the same principles today. It boasts just 69 members, each of whom has had to undergo a lengthy vetting process lasting up to four years. Potential new members are assessed at an annual meeting and it’s not uncommon for none of the thousands of names submitted to be accepted.

The theme of this year’s Paris Photo is Africa and for their contribution to this, Magnum will be showing a number of incredible images on their stand C13, including two by photographers whose work we really admire at Phaidon: Ian Berry and Magnum co-founder George Rodger.

Berry was born in Lancashire in the north west of England. In his early twenties he moved to South Africa where he was exposed to the political turmoil going on in that country, starting in March 1960 with the Sharpeville Massacre in which a peaceful protest turned violent, leading to the deaths of 69 people and the wounding of 178 others by police. There were no other photographs documenting the events, and Berry's were entered into evidence in court proceedings in order to prove the victims had done nothing wrong. On returning to Europe two years later, Magnum founder Henri Cartier-Bresson invited him to join the agency. Soon after, he became the first ever contract photographer for the Observer magazine. His assignments have seen him shoot all over the globe. However, the major body of his African work can be found in Living Apart. More recent projects have seen him covering the Spanish fishing industry and child slavery in Ghana.

George Rodger, meanwhile, planned on becoming a writer before trying his hand at photography. He was in his twenties when his photographs of the London Blitz brought him to the attention of America’s Life magazine. Most notably, he was the first photographer to enter the German concentration camps in 1945. His photographs of the few survivors and piles of corpses were published in Life and Time magazines and were influential in showing the reality of the death camps. He later recalled how, after spending several hours at Belsen, he was appalled to realise that he had spent most of the time looking for graphically pleasing compositions of the piles of bodies lying among the trees and buildings. He stopped war photography as a result of the experience. Soon after co-founding Magnum, he undertook the first of 40 expeditions to Africa and the Middle East. He became the first photographer to document the Nuba tribe’s fighting conquests in Sudan and the only person ever to capture on the film the rainforest Pygmies’ courtship dances in Uganda. The photographs are collected together in a number of books including Village Of The Nubas and Humanity And Inhumanity. Paris Photo is at the Grand Palais from November 10-13.