Featuring new and iconic images, this follow-up to Prestel’s highly successful A Year in Photography: Magnum Archive includes some of the most striking photography ever collected in one volume. As readers flip the pages they will find themselves traveling from west to east across the globe. Each country is represented in three or four images captured by a single photographer. While renowned figures such as Robert Capa, Bruce Davidson, and Martin Parr are included, readers will also find younger photographers such as Olivia Arthur, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Mikhael Subotzky, all of whom present dazzling new views of our changing world. Shining a light on the human condition in every corner of the globe, this compilation exemplifies Magnum founder Henri Cartier-Bresson’s vision of “a community of thought, a shared human quality, a curiosity about what is going on in the world, a respect for what is going on and a desire to transcribe it visually.”
Introduction by Chris Steele-Perkins:
The Archive of Magnum Photos is its DNA. It represents the photographers who have been a part of this prestigious agency, now in its seventieth year, and it is a record of the intricate and textured world in which those photographers have lived and worked. It has a global reach and intersects great moments in history with quieter, more subtle observations: a hairdresser in Senegal, or a wedding in Santiago Atitlán, and on through hundreds of thousands of other distinctive moments – moments of joy, sorrow, humour, war, peace, turmoil, surprise, anger, love and awe.
The Magnum Archive can be viewed from diverse perspectives and can be “sampled” by curators with differing degrees of astuteness and imagination. At the time of writing I am aware of a number of projects drawn from it: an exhibition on youth culture; a book on Magnum’s co-founder George Rodger’s lost colour photographs from the Sudan; an exhibition of screen idols; a presentation of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s first photographs; and naturally this collection, Magnum Atlas, which traces Magnum photographers in their extensive wanderings around the globe.
The reason it is possible to work with these images in so many different ways, and for the outcome to remain so interesting, is because of the quality and depth of the photographs created by individuals with unique visions and distinctive points of view. If you are seeking a clichéd vision of the world, Magnum Photos is not the place to go. Not because Magnum photographers have a dark and dystopian vision of the world (although they sometimes do), but because they have sought out truth in a hard-lived life, and have looked into the dark corners of the world (as well as the bright), and have found beauty and understanding beyond the superficial and the obvious.
Millions of photographs are made daily. ”Everybody is a photographer now”, goes the popular saying. However, people need quality and conviction in a world in which everything is disposable and in which Snapchat is the natural evolution of the disposable image. There is a similarity to be drawn between photography and poetry in that anybody can make a rhyme but that does not make them a poet, and so it is with this special craft. Magnum photographers strive for an authorship and poetry in their work, which separates them from the masses.
This collection of photographs, curated by Elisa Mazza along with Hamish Crooks, who probably knows the Magnum archive better than anyone, can be seen as a poetic anthology on the theme of travel. Travelling around the whole world, you are offered glimpses from places near and far filtered through the eyes and lenses of Magnum photographers. A collection of well-known images, yes, but also a fascinating treasury of lesser-known masterpieces that deserve attention and that promise an undeniable reward.
ISBN: 978-3-7913-8376-7
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