The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market

By Nadya Bair

Since its founding in 1947, the legendary Magnum Photos agency has been telling its own story about photographers who were witnesses to history and artists on the hunt for decisive moments. Based on unprecedented archival research, The Decisive Network unravels Magnum’s mythologies to offer a new history of what it meant to shoot, edit, and sell news images after World War II.
 
Nadya Bair shows that between the 1940s and 1960s, Magnum expanded the human-interest story to global dimensions while bringing the aesthetic of news pictures into new markets. Working with a vast range of editorial and corporate clients, Magnum made photojournalism integral to postwar visual culture. But its photographers could not have done this alone. By unpacking the collaborative nature of photojournalism, this book shows how picture editors, sales agents, spouses, and publishers helped Magnum photographers succeed in their assignments and achieve fame. Bair concludes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when changing market conditions led Magnum to consolidate its brand. In that moment, Magnum’s photojournalists became artists and their assignments oeuvres. Bridging art history, media studies, cultural history, and the history of communication, The Decisive Network transforms our understanding of the photographic profession and the global circulation of images in the predigital world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780520971790

Nadya Bair

Nadya Bair is a Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art.

Book preview

THE DECISIVE NETWORK

THE PUBLISHER AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE AHMANSON • MURPHY IMPRINT IN FINE ARTS.

THE DECISIVE NETWORK

Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market

Nadya Bair

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2020 by Nadya Bair

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bair, Nadya, 1983- author.

Title: The decisive network : Magnum Photos and the postwar image market / Nadya Bair.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019036755 (print) | LCCN 2019036756 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520300354 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520971790 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Magnum Photos. | Documentary photography—History—20th century. | Photography—Marketing—Social aspects. | Photojournalism—Social aspects.

Classification: LCC TR820.5 .B265 2020 (print) | LCC TR820.5 (ebook) | DDC 770—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036755

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036756

Printed in Malaysia

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For Ethan

Magnum’s Midcentury Network. Original artwork by Monica Ong Reed, Yale University Digital Humanities Laboratory.

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Photo Agencies and the Magnum Model

2. Human-Interest Stories from the Postwar World

3. Freelancing for Life

4. Traveling for Holiday

5. Shooting for Corporations

6. Magnum Systems, Magnum Mythologies

Conclusion: The Magnum Archive

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

AN ANONYMOUS PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN AT THE HOME of Vogue editor Michel de Brunhoff on August 27, 1944, just after the Liberation of Paris, shows a room packed with the day’s leading photographers, magazine editors, and writers (fig. 1). Behind the dark-haired war photographer Robert Capa stands the Life editor John Morris. To Capa’s left are the photographers David (Chim) Seymour, in military uniform, and one over from him, Henri Cartier-Bresson. In the front row, Lee Miller is engrossed in conversation. Such figures had made World War II the most mediated event to date, yielding millions of photographs of the global conflict. ¹ As their images circulated widely in the United States and magazine subscriptions soared, the reading public began to expect that every significant event should be documented photographically. Holding glasses of champagne and putting their arms around each other, the photographers and editors huddled close and smiled for the camera. The war was on its way to being over, and they were elated. Within days, however, their celebrations were to be overshadowed by concerns about their future. This shared worry is the starting point for this book, which asks, What happened to the extensive system of press photography once World War II ended?

FIGURE 1 A party at the home of Paris Vogue editor Michel de Brunhoff, August 27, 1944. Unidentified photographer. © Magnum Photos. Courtesy of International Center of Photography.

Three years later, three of the people in this photograph—the Hungarian-Jewish-American Capa, the French Cartier-Bresson, and the Polish-Jewish-American Seymour—became the cofounders of Magnum Photos, a new picture agency that aimed to carry on the business of photography in all its branches, in any part of the world.² With one office in New York and one in Paris, Magnum inaugurated two new business policies: photographers were the shareholders of the organization rather than its employees, meaning they took charge of Magnum’s editorial direction as well as its finances. And Magnum photographers, not their clients, would own the negatives and their copyrights. Magnum began by supplying weekly and monthly magazines with in-depth photographic essays about events around the globe: the lives of regular people, political transitions, personalities and celebrities, fashion, business, and even animals and children. Not all of their coverage was exceptional or memorable, but many of their photographs became icons of the postwar world when they appeared in less ephemeral contexts such as photo books and touring exhibitions.

By the late sixties, the rise of television news and a burgeoning art market for photography signaled the start of a new era. Leading magazines and competing photo agencies began to close their doors, but Magnum survived. Now with offices in Paris, New York, London, and Tokyo and a roster of over ninety photographers, Magnum has become a highly respected and recognizable photographic brand. The Magnum name is inseparable from the concerned and humanist images that its founders made in the tumultuous decades after World War II, and Capa and Cartier-Bresson have become household names. The agency’s identity has been built through dozens of coffee-table books, traveling exhibitions, and lavish catalogs that rehearse the agency’s commitment to editorial freedom and applaud the emotional power of its iconic photographs.³ Such projects rarely reproduce the magazine spreads for which Magnum’s pictures were made.⁴ And in the effort to cover the entire seventy-plus years of Magnum’s photography, publications and exhibitions lose sight of the historical specificity of the immediate post-1945 era.⁵

Looking at Magnum’s photography on its own terms sidelines a much larger history of publishing and the press of which Magnum was an integral part. Photography has always been a mass medium and a form of communication, even when it was valued chiefly for its aesthetic power.⁶ We cannot study it without considering the industries and contexts for which it was made, or without asking how those industries facilitated photography’s aesthetic and technological development. Two other questions that inspired this book are as basic, and yet as complicated, as the first: What were the unique technological, cultural, and economic demands of photojournalism that Magnum navigated in the aftermath of World War II?⁷ And if Magnum was so important to post-1945 photography, how do we know so little beyond its self-produced, mythical narratives?⁸

Answering these questions requires more than reading the Magnum photographs and stories that appeared in print, or studying photographers’ contact sheets to get a sense of their working process.⁹ As Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz write in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, no understanding of a news picture and its significance can bypass the material history of the making of the picture itself, nor the history of the media institutions and people that organize such pictures and transmit them to an eager and interested public.¹⁰ In the effort to reconstruct Magnum’s early activities—that is, to understand Magnum’s practice and not just its images—I began to search for a paper trail, only to be told that no real archives existed.¹¹ Rehearsing key mythologies about photographers’ creative independence and their impatience with bureaucratic management models, foundation directors, curators, and photographers’ spouses said that Magnum photographers did not work from shooting scripts or keep notes. Sales and assignments were, apparently, discussed over the phone and sealed with a handshake over martini lunches. Yet as I persisted, I found thousands of pages of letters, contracts, scripts, and story research notes in dozens of private and public collections in the U.S. and Europe that attested to a different story. The papers I accessed were rich in detail about Magnum’s New York bureau and the agency’s American clients, and as a result, this book focuses mostly on the United States. With a different archival base, a compendium history could be written from the perspective of Magnum’s Paris operations, which dealt with European magazines.¹²

Photographers averse to business could not have gone into business for themselves. Magnum’s founders were unabashed entrepreneurs who had an expert understanding of the industry of photojournalism. Traveling to remote locations, the photographers sent streams of letters and telegrams to office staff in New York and Paris about what they were learning and photographing. Through its international system of daily communication and coordination, Magnum anticipated magazines’ demands for global picture stories. The agency cannily reimagined the popular genre of the human-interest story—about the extraordinary and ordinary events that happened to everyday people—on a global scale while partnering with powerful magazine editors to assure that their work was published.

The broad definition of photography with which Magnum worked beckons us to reconsider how we have been telling the history of the medium and to work across multiple fields, including art history, history, communication, and media studies.¹³ For Magnum, photography was a profession, a technology, an impetus for global travel, a form of communication and entertainment, and a mode of expression. Its photography resulted in undeveloped film, contact sheets, and press prints as well as caption sheets and story research. And it was bound up with the supports through which it circulated, especially the magazine page. If the medium in which the agency worked had any single defining quality, it was overproduction. And perhaps most obviously, Magnum’s photography was a commodity and a source of employment. Taking this expansive view of Magnum’s photography is what allows me to tell a different story about the agency at a transformational moment for both photojournalism and for the world.¹⁴

HUMANISM AND CAPITALISM AFTER 1945

The postwar world in which Magnum was founded was not exactly peaceful. The wave of decolonization wars beginning in the 1940s, coupled with the rise of the Cold War and its proxy conflicts, meant that numerous photographers took their cameras into new battles. Two of Magnum’s founders died covering postwar conflicts in Indochina (Capa, d. 1954) and the Suez (Seymour, d. 1956). War photography, already central to the photographers’ reputations in 1945, became important for Magnum’s legacy. And yet it was actually a small fraction of what Magnum—or any other photographer—covered on a regular basis.¹⁵

Magnum produced and sold massive numbers of pictures from around the world, and it also sold ideas about what those pictures could do. Between the late 1940s and 1960s, the agency brought the aesthetic and production mode of news photography into new markets. Many of its photographs, from classic to now forgotten, were produced as humanitarian aid promotion or for travel campaigns, corporate public relations, and as advertising. Shot on the move with 35mm cameras, Magnum’s photo essays exploited the human-interest angle and the spontaneous, action-packed look of journalism.¹⁶ They helped transform corporate annual reports into captivating illustrated publications about their global operations. Even life insurance ads started to look like photographic news.¹⁷ Magnum was at the forefront of these shifts, working systematically to make newsy pictures popular and ubiquitous.

Today, however, the agency’s early photographs are known as humanist documents: pictures that, by focusing on everyday people and events, created an identification between the viewer and subject and thus instilled empathy for the universal human condition.¹⁸ Such pictures are often used as evidence of the founders’ pacifism and their hopeful dream that by emphasizing interconnectedness, the very aesthetic of Magnum’s photographs could help avert another global conflict.¹⁹ Yet some of the best-known humanist pictures acquired their reputations not on their aesthetic merit, but because of the universalizing captions that first accompanied them in magazines.²⁰ Reprinted in books and exhibition catalogs for decades, the careful humanist smokescreen surrounding Ernst Haas’s photographs of returning POWs in Vienna, or David Seymour’s portrait of the orphan Tereska drawing her home, became accepted as the authoritative interpretation of Magnum’s pictures.²¹ At the same time, there is a lack of specificity about what humanist photography actually is.²² Often the genre is defined by way of Edward Steichen’s 1955 blockbuster exhibition The Family of Man (which featured dozens of Magnum photographs) as well as the scathing critique of the show by Roland Barthes.²³ When the exhibit came to France in 1956, Barthes famously accused Steichen of using photography to reinforce the saccharine tautology that everyone is born and dies without accounting for the weight of culture or history.²⁴ The Family of Man is also the point at which most postwar histories of photography begin: not in 1945, but in 1955.²⁵ We miss an important chapter in photography’s post-1945 development if we continue to reduce it to humanism and the global circulation of The Family of Man.

Magnum opened shop at a moment when the scale and interconnectedness of the world captivated both the producers and consumers of popular culture: from Cold War warriors invested in the ascent of the American Century, to pacifists committed to seeing an international body govern One World in the atomic age.²⁶ These competing visions of the postwar world have occupied intellectual histories of the twentieth century.²⁷ Yet such ideas about the globe cannot be understood without considering the work of photography—and specifically, the work produced by Magnum’s peripatetic, cosmopolitan photographers—in shaping global consciousness for a full decade before The Family of Man. Amid the escalation of the Cold War, Magnum’s European photographers aligned their business practice within the liberal humanist ideology embodied by such organizations as the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). They shot pictures that, through careful editing and layout strategies, were used to uphold the democratic principles of dignity, equality and mutual respect of men promoted by the United Nations agencies.²⁸ But Magnum did not stop there. As early as the start of the Marshall Plan in 1948, postwar universalism gave way to the global expansion of American corporate capitalism and the rise of international travel.²⁹ Magnum rapidly kept up with and often anticipated the changing ways in which global consciousness manifested in the 1940s and 1950s.

Much of what later became reframed as humanist began as photography in the service of global capitalism, because corporations and global industries relied on the same human-interest aesthetic that Magnum produced for the press. Focusing on the lives of everyday people around the world, Magnum photographers shot travel features in Paris for the American magazine Holiday and explored oil reserves in Africa for the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey’s house organ The Lamp. They capitalized on their cosmopolitan reputations, allowing clients to promote them as progressive and cultured global emissaries. The photographers’ international backgrounds and commitment to news reporting worked in the service of promoting global capitalism, its industries, and its products. Instead of taking on such assignments begrudgingly and with the fear of selling out, photographers embraced the partnerships that allowed them to travel the world, master new technologies including color film, and produce work that they felt had documentary and aesthetic value. Today scholars are still more drawn to studying art and artists on the left rather than engaging seriously with those who worked in the service of American business and publicity.³⁰ Perhaps for better and worse, Magnum is part of a larger history of capitalist aesthetics after 1945.³¹ Its own business imperative, coupled with its flexibility and commitment to high-quality photographic reporting, led photographers to work across a range of genres and markets, often at the same time.³²

NETWORKS AND COLLABORATION

Magnum’s photographers could not have accomplished any of this alone. Despite the habit of studying the work of individual artists, often dubbed creative geniuses, this book argues that Magnum photographers were core members of a larger decisive network that included writers, spouses, secretaries, editors, darkroom assistants, publishers, corporate leaders, and museum curators. My title invokes Henri Cartier-Bresson’s theory of the decisive moment, which equated the ideal photograph with the intuitive skill of the photographer who could notice and swiftly capture a perfectly balanced scene.³³ This concept places all of the attention on the individual in his moment of inspiration and action.³⁴ Yet magazine editors often identified the decisive moments in Cartier-Bresson’s negatives, which he usually shipped undeveloped to New York. Cartier-Bresson’s wife Ratna Mohini worked with him in the field, often writing the captions and story texts that allowed editors to arrange his pictures into the photo essays that later brought him fame.

My shift from moment to network is metaphorical as well as methodological: it asks that we see photography as an ongoing, collective process in which it is difficult to draw a clear boundary between the actions of a photographer and those of his collaborators.³⁵ This approach necessarily harkens to a longer study of networks in the social sciences, and particularly one that Howard Becker called an art world: a network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, plus their ability to mobilize resources, produces the kind of art works that art world is noted for.³⁶ Thinking about Magnum as a network means looking at the entire system of commercial photography rather than focusing on singular individuals or objects, and it means noticing when technologies shaped human activity.³⁷ My goal is to show not simply that everything is connected, but rather that some connections are decisive. For instance, I consider how photographers’ shared wartime experiences with editors and moviemakers, or their relationships with their spouses, shaped the kind of work they made and sold after World War II. In other cases, I identify moments when photographers’ passports determined the kind of stories they covered, or how the agency’s sales network determined why certain images appeared as news in Holiday rather than Life, or in England’s Illustrated magazine rather than Picture Post.³⁸

Yet the most fundamental repercussion of moving from moment to network is recognizing that autonomous activity is itself a myth.³⁹ Many people in the business helped Magnum photographers to attain their technical, creative, and economic successes. They edited their film, laid out their pictures into stories, captioned photographs, and pitched their work to clients. That process of collaborative postproduction has long preoccupied historians of film and the book.⁴⁰ Yet in photo histories, such figures often occupy the same position as John Morris does in the Paris Liberation party snapshot: peering over the heads of famous photographers, struggling to be seen. By putting photo editors and other professionals in the spotlight, this book joins new scholarship that looks at photojournalism as an inherently collaborative process.⁴¹ Magnum photographers’ status as artists, meanwhile, mattered little until years later, when their post-1945 work began to be displayed in exhibitions and republished in photo books. In those contexts, which I examine in the last chapter, critics and curators pitted photographers’ individual visions—whether personal or political—against the commercial and editorial constraints of photojournalism.⁴² What made Magnum’s network decisive, then, is not only that it ensured that photographers’ pictures could be made, sold, and circulated, but that it also shaped our very conception of the meaning of those pictures as something other than commercial photography.

THE PHOTO AGENCY AND POSTWAR VISUAL CULTURE

As a photo agency, Magnum aimed to maximize sales and image circulation. Its operations thus offer a macro perspective on the production of postwar visual culture—a story that is bigger than Magnum itself and that cannot be gleaned from looking at individual photographers or even the picture stories in such high-circulating magazines as Life. Following the agency’s pictures into their many print contexts reveals visual and thematic connections across different magazines (i.e., from Life to those targeting women or travelers) and shows how the many settings for photography (from editorial essays and advertisements to photo albums and exhibitions) were in conversation with each other. In this book, Magnum is the lens through which the cultural and visual history of the post-1945 period comes into focus. Its cast of characters is by necessity extensive—spanning heretofore anonymous Magnum staff as well as the people who commissioned and edited the photographic content of a host of magazines, including This Week, Ladies’ Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Life, Holiday, and Standard Oil’s The Lamp. The people discussed here lived, documented, and mediated the public’s comprehension of such issues as European reconstruction, the founding of the state of Israel, and the introduction of the tourist fare on airplanes. Like recent media histories by Anna McCarthy and Fred Turner, this book reconstitutes the diverse networks of professionals who shaped the public’s comprehension of politics and culture after World War II.⁴³ Yet while Turner and McCarthy suggest that network television and multimedia displays made photography obsolete as a source of information and entertainment soon after 1945, I demonstrate that Magnum’s embrace of noneditorial markets and other sites for photography, including corporate annual reports, made the aesthetic of the news a feature of everyday life well beyond the pages of magazines.

This book tells a chronological and overlapping story about Magnum’s first two decades, from the agency’s inception in 1947 to the rise of Magnum’s sister organization, the International Center of Photography, in the late 1960s amid the closure of illustrated magazines and a growing art market for photographs. Each chapter responds to specific myths about the agency while unearthing the intellectual and cultural climates and economic markets in which Magnum produced its pictures. We will see that Magnum’s activities were deeply embedded not only with the history of magazines, but also within the changing fields of American journalism, sociology, geography, public relations, and advertising. Based on the available archival evidence, I have chosen projects for each chapter that allow us to see not only how a photo story was made and sold, but also how it subsequently worked within or challenged Magnum’s legacy. Some of the projects I discuss are considered canonical (for instance, Seymour’s 1948 Children of Europe portfolio for UNESCO) while others (such as George Rodger’s mid-1950s work for Standard Oil in Africa) are largely unknown. Yet all of the cases reflect a kind of historical amnesia: they show that we have inherited an incomplete picture not only because some episodes have been excluded from the historical record, but also because other stories have been told the same way too many times.

Part of the work of unraveling Magnum’s mythologies is seeing how embedded the agency was in the larger business of making and selling photographs. The book therefore begins by situating Magnum into the longer history of photo agencies from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II. It then shows how exactly Magnum ran its business: the many capable women it hired for its New York and Paris offices, how staff and photographers stayed in touch through formalized memos and weekly reports, and which magazines the agency cultivated as its primary markets in the U.S. and Europe.

The next four chapters turn to the most important markets with which Magnum worked, reconstructing the networks of professionals in those markets and looking in depth at how select Magnum photographers met the creative, journalistic, and logistical demands of their assignments. Because Magnum worked with each of its major markets from the start, these chapters all begin in the late 1940s but then progressively move the agency’s history forward, reflecting the importance of editorial work in the late 1940s and early 1950s (chapters 2 and 3); the advent of travel photography in the early to mid-1950s (chapter 4); and the centrality of corporate photography by the 1960s (chapter 5). I show that Magnum’s photography always blurred the line between news and something else, and that this is precisely what allowed their pictures to circulate widely and accrue cultural and monetary value. One of the main reasons that its photographs could appear in so many different settings is because of the high demand for human-interest pictures from around the world. The agency’s early history thus opens onto a parallel story about how images of ordinary people were put to use by different kinds of players, from magazines reporting on news headlines to international companies eager to boost their public image.

The last chapter shows how in under twenty-five years, Magnum’s active picture files—from which editors used to request images to illustrate news or publicity stories—began to be broken up and transformed into archives that represented photographers’ unified oeuvres and that were used to uphold lasting mythologies about the origins of Magnum and its place in twentieth-century photojournalism. But to understand what Magnum’s picture files even contained, we have to start at the beginning: when Magnum’s founders decided they would try to satiate the picture hunger of man.⁴⁴

1

PHOTO AGENCIES AND THE MAGNUM MODEL

THE MYTHICAL STORY OF MAGNUM’S creation has been told the same way for decades, filled with glamorous, contradictory details. The entrepreneurial Robert Capa had wanted to start his own photographic agency since the early thirties. He discussed the idea with his friends Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour in interwar Paris, and again while celebrating the city’s liberation—perhaps at the very same party where the photographers, coupes of champagne in hand, posed for the August 27 picture. When World War II finally ended, Capa returned to his new home in the United States and got to work. Sometime in the spring of 1947, he convened a meeting in the penthouse (or was it second-floor?) restaurant of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. ¹ The Life photographer Bill Vandivert and his wife, Rita, were in attendance, and so was Maria Eisner, a picture editor and former director of the French picture agency Alliance Photo. Len Spooner, editor of Illustrated magazine in London, could have been there too, but the three other cofounding photographers—Cartier-Bresson, Seymour, and George Rodger—certainly were not. ² After a long (or short) discussion that included (or did not include) a magnum of champagne (for maybe the magnum was consumed in Paris), Rita Vandivert became the president of a wholly new enterprise: an international picture agency called Magnum. Vandivert would preside over Magnum’s New York office while Eisner would serve as secretary, treasurer, and director of the Paris headquarters, installed in her apartment.

On the occasion of Magnum’s seventieth anniversary, a notable curator of photography cast doubt over the champagne lunch story. Yet his observation that the creation of Magnum, like the creation of the world, was not accomplished in a single day shows that Magnum’s founding is still treated as an event of biblical proportions.³ Indeed, the image of Magnum rising out of the rubble of World War II has served the agency’s mythology well by insisting that Magnum was a utopian enterprise in a league of its own, and that it was founded mostly on principle. As a result, neither its business model nor its activities have been examined within the social, economic, and material history of photography, or the social and intellectual climate of the postwar period.

As the only cooperative picture agency in the world, Magnum’s unique business model—the story goes—emulated the left-leaning artist and worker collectives that its founders had supported in the interwar period.⁴ Some of the facts are certainly correct. Members were indeed voted in on the basis of merit. They became shareholders, investing 30–50 percent of their earnings into the organization. With that pool of money, they employed editors and agents to sell their images to the press. Photographers owned all the negatives and the reproduction rights to their work. But other ideas do not always hold up. We read that photographers (rather than agents) made all final decisions about whether to accept or decline an assignment or sale and that this business structure gave photographers maximum editorial freedom. They chose what to photograph and how much time to spend on that subject. They were free to express their views on the stories they documented, and they could refuse to sell their work to a publication if they did not agree with how their images would be presented. Today one would be at pains to find work on photojournalism that did not rehearse the idea that, above all, Magnum prioritized editorial and artistic freedom.⁵ The assumption in that logic is that what photographers wanted was not necessarily what the market wanted.

But is that really the case? While there is no image or piece of paper recording the founding meeting, Magnum’s certificate of incorporation survives, and it tells a different story. Filed on May 22 with the New York State County Clerk Office, the document describes a business ready to make money from photography in every way imaginable. Magnum Photos Inc. was established, it reads, to engage in a photographic, portrait, picture, and painting business and to make . . . and produce likenesses . . . of persons, places, landscapes, scenes, objects of art and commerce using cameras, still or moving pictures. The agency was going to shoot all kinds of photographs—commercial, industrial, artistic, and aerial—and it would also deal with photographers and their equipment. Magnum could foresee hiring all types of professionals in order to carry on the business of photography in all of its branches, in any part of the world.⁶ As this founding document’s ample references to retail suggest, Magnum’s photographers were not simply creating an artistic haven for talented photographers. They were launching a business within a much larger, commercial industry of selling photographs.

Magnum implemented its business model so well that within a decade its name became synonymous with the modern photo agency and the ultimate denial of what commercial photo agencies do. But is it really necessary to see art and commerce—or editorial freedom and savvy picture selling—in opposition to each other? No photo agency can subsist on photographers’ talents alone. To succeed, Magnum had to be commercial, because photo agencies are, by definition, commercial enterprises that rely on many people and ample resources to produce and distribute photographs. But Magnum also helped expand the boundaries of what it meant to be a commercially viable and prestigious photo agency. On the business end, it hired talented staff and established privileged relationships with magazine editors and sales agents to edit, sell, and promote the work of its photographers. On the publicity end, Magnum took its own brand seriously from the start. While the final chapter of this book will deal exclusively with Magnum’s public relations efforts and the rise of its illustrious reputation, this chapter looks at the origins of Magnum with a focus on its business history: showing what Magnum photographers and staff learned from the longer history of photojournalism, and how they ran their agency day to day. As we will see, Magnum was and is exceptional, just not for the reasons propagated in its founding myth.

THE BUSINESS OF PHOTO SUPPLY, 1840–1939

By creating a photo agency, Magnum entered the market for current photography, which was then dominated by two kinds of image suppliers working with different production schedules and journalistic values: picture agencies, the earliest of which were first established in the late nineteenth century, and wire services, created in the 1920s and 1930s.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, the press demanded photographs and nurtured an extensive industry to supply those images, even though there was initially no way to reproduce an actual photograph with text. The first illustrated weeklies, including The Illustrated London News (1842), L’Illustration in France (1843), the Illustrirte Zeitung in Germany (1843), and the American Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News (1852), purchased photographs as raw material from a growing number of amateur and independent photographers. They passed them on to illustrators, who often added or excised certain details through cropping and retouching, and then to engravers, who turned the altered photographs into prints that could appear alongside news stories. Publications also began to employ photographers on their staff to cover more pressing events and to have privileged access to their pictures, as in the case of Jimmy Hare’s coverage of the Spanish-American war for Collier’s Weekly.⁷ Yet for decades, photography was subservient to the aesthetic and cultural norms of illustration.⁸

With the development of the halftone screen in the 1890s, which allowed a photograph to be printed on the same page as the text it accompanied, the demand for photographs continuously increased, as did the number of illustrated newspapers and magazines ready to print those pictures.⁹ Photographers soon needed a way to systematize the sale of their pictures to a growing network of buyers that included both editorial and advertising clients.¹⁰ Thus well before Capa envisioned Magnum, a slew of businesses—many of them created by photographers—were established to source, gather, and distribute photographs to the press, to advertisers, and to the publishing sector. These photographic or picture agencies became repositories of huge image collections that needed a constant supply of fresh imagery, which they received from photographers who were either paid a monthly salary or who sold work on a one-time basis. In both cases, photographers were paid only once for work produced, and they had little control over where agencies sold their pictures or for how much. Among the first picture agencies were the American Underwood and Underwood (1881) and Keystone (1882); the Illustrated Journal Photographic Supply Company in London (1894); and in France, Photopress Agency (1905) and L’Agence Meurisse (1909).¹¹

Developments in camera, film, and printing technologies helped the picture supply business expand throughout the twentieth century. The advent of new film and the commercial availability of smaller cameras such as the 35mm Leica (1911) and Ermanox (1925) meant that photographers could get out into the field without having to carry heavy equipment.¹² Their images could be printed quickly and reproduced exceptionally well using the newly developed rotogravure printing, a photo engraving process that allowed for a much greater variation of tones than the halftone screen.¹³ Publishers across Europe and the United States created new illustrated magazines, including the German AIZ (1924), the French Vu (1928), the Soviet USSR in Construction (1930), the American Life (1936) and Look (1937), and the British Picture Post (1938). Rather than using photographs to illustrate text, these magazines reported on the news through photographic essays—visual narratives that combined photographs, text, and graphic design.¹⁴ The magazines’ reliance on photographic stories encouraged the creation of more photo agencies, among them Dephot (Deutscher Photodienst, 1928), Rapho (1933), and Alliance Photo (1934).¹⁵

The visual revolution of the 1920s and 1930s affected newspapers as well, albeit through a different set of technologies tailored to their daily production schedule. Newspapers could not publish images of breaking events if they had to wait for trains, ships, and planes to deliver film from the other side of the world.¹⁶ In the 1920s, companies such as AT&T turned in earnest to the development of wire picture services, which used telegraphic or telephonic wires to distribute images quickly and across large distances to a subscriber network of newspapers.¹⁷ Photographers working for new wire services such as Keystone News Photos, Wide World Photos, and the Associated Press Wirephoto learned to cover breaking news with a single image that could encapsulate a story in one frame, and newspaper editors valued their pictures primarily for their speed, because they could be sent over the wires in a matter of minutes.¹⁸ Although photographers working for wire services and photo agencies did not technically compete with each other—because agency photographers shot in-depth stories for magazines that were, in Zeynep Gürsel’s terms, valued for being good rather than fast—their subject matter often overlapped.¹⁹ As Jonathan Dentler points out, wire photos made and printed as spot news in the dailies often announced or nominated certain celebrities or events for iconic status, encouraging extensive coverage by photo agency photographers.²⁰ Indeed, by the 1930s, photo agency staff and photographers were taking great care to stay up to date on what was going on around them, subscribing to the daily papers and wire services to determine what stories photographers should cover. And although their picture stories could be published days or even weeks after the event, photo agencies still had to work quickly to fit magazines’ weekly production schedules. To do that, they enlisted people rather than the mechanical delivery mechanism of the wire photo industry: arranging for couriers to carry film on trains and planes and hiring motorcyclists to hand deliver film to editors.

The Magnum founders started their careers in this formative period for illustrated journalism and picture sales. In the decade leading up to the agency’s creation, they lived peripatetic lives, crossing paths at newspapers, magazines, photo agencies, and on front lines around the world. Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and David Seymour met in Paris in the 1930s, where they traveled in leftist circles, photographed for Vu, Regards, and the Communist daily Ce Soir, and were represented by Alliance Photo.²¹ The Jewish Capa (originally Endre Friedman) and Seymour (Dawid Szymin) had left their homes in Budapest and Warsaw for Berlin and Leipzig, respectively, but relocated to Paris amid the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany. Cartier-Bresson spent the early 1930s photographing in Africa, Mexico, and New York and began working for the illustrated press after 1935.²² All three documented the Civil War in Spain from the Republican side, and their pictures appeared in the leading illustrated magazines in France, England, and the United States.²³

Capa and others also experienced how picture agencies and magazines could turn photographers into celebrities. By the interwar period, magazine editors had more images to choose from than ever before. Photographers learned to cover events in ways that appealed to the individual tastes of editors and publishers, and they began to demonstrate their originality and stylistic distinctiveness in order to stand out and encourage editors to buy their work.²⁴ Changing attribution practices also helped photographers’ reputations. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photo agencies mostly traded in unattributed pictures. Individual photographers were credited when they shot an exceptional photograph or performed daring feats to get their pictures. There were no systematic crediting practices in print, and when, by the 1930s, credits appeared more frequently in the press, they went to the photo agency rather than the photographer. But that does not mean that photographic copyrights did not exist, or that Magnum invented the photographic copyright itself, as some have said.²⁵ In the United Kingdom such laws were established in 1862; in the U.S. in 1884; in Germany in 1907; and in France a 1793 law was applied in a way that included photography.²⁶ Yet photographic copyrights were almost impossible to enforce because of how easily and widely pictures could be reproduced by a publisher or agent.

In the interwar period, Dephot and Alliance were the primary photo agencies that made a practice of crediting individual photographers. They did not necessarily do so out of respect for the law. Instead, they recognized that they could use who made a photograph into a selling point with clients, branding their agencies via the quality of their pictures and the photographers they employed.²⁷ Illustrated magazine editors, in turn, promoted those same photographers in print. They used photographers’ status as celebrities (which they themselves were inventing) to attract readers and promote their own publications. That was precisely how Robert Capa had one of his first breaks. In December 1938, Picture Post’s article on the Spanish Civil War included a full-page portrait of Capa captioned, The Greatest War Photographer in the World.²⁸ Though he was far from the only photographer who covered the conflict in Spain, Capa became its best-known reporter thanks to the widespread distribution of his pictures by Alliance alongside text dubbing him a daring, committedly antifascist photographer.²⁹

When Hitler’s rise to power sent Robert Capa, David Seymour, and countless other Jewish photographers, magazine editors, and agency directors into exile, new agencies opened in New York, where they carried on the work they began on the other side of the Atlantic. Thus many of the photo agencies active from the 1930s to the 1970s (when agencies began to close or consolidate) were, like Magnum, inherently transatlantic: the best combined European and American sensibilities to navigate both markets with skill. Kurt Safranski, a publisher at Ullstein Verlag, Ernst Mayer, owner of the Mauritius photo agency in Berlin, and former Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ) editor Kurt Korff founded Black Star in New York in 1935. The following year, the editor Leon Daniel and the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt started the PIX agency, which operated until 1969.