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.

In 1967, the photojournalist and curator Cornell Capa curated The Concerned Photographer, which premiered in New York and traveled to Japan and Israel. This essay considers Capa’s notion of “concerned photography” as well as his central place among institutional leaders thinking about photography in light of their recent national pasts. In the United States, Capa adopted Lewis Hine as the spiritual father of concerned photography to make space for the European-born, Jewish photojournalists whose legacies he wanted to preserve. In Japan, The Concerned Photographer was part of a larger reckoning with Japanese fascism and imperialism, and in Israel, the exhibition codified tropes for representing the nation and advanced the collection of photography in Israeli museums. Capa’s efforts culminated in the creation of the International Center of Photography (ICP), whose origins open onto the larger story of Jewish émigrés’ involvement in photography’s institutional development around the world.

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photobook The Decisive Moment (1952) popularised the notion that the best photographs are made by the patient and gifted photographer who captures a fleeting moment with just one click of the shutter, creating an image with internal geometry and balance. The book solidified Cartier-Bresson’s reputation as an artist working with a camera and it encouraged scholars, curators, and hobbyists to understand photography as the product of trained individual vision and talent. Yet the book’s emphasis on personal vision also deflected attention away from the collective efforts and infrastructure necessary to promote Cartier-Bresson’s practice as art. By shifting our attention to the decisive network of magazine editors, book publishers, printers, and curators who helped Cartier-Bresson onto a highly orchestrated road to fame at mid-century, this article considers the ways in which collective work is central to the material and social history of photography, and how these realities challenge the decisive moment’s paradigm of individual and inspired creation.

While Spain is crucial to discussions of fascism and the thirties, this chapter demonstrates that Robert Capa’s legendary Spanish war photographs are crucial to understanding how photography’s relationship to politics and history has been narrated at different moments in the twentieth century. Between 1936 and 1939, Capa’s photographs of the civil war in Spain circulated widely, informing American and European magazine readers about the conflict and earning Capa international fame as a war photographer and documentarian of anti-fascism in Europe. In a range of print contexts, Capa became especially known for his images of refugees, frozen amid rubble or fleeing from fascist violence.  By the 1960s, those pictures became canonized as humanist imagery devoid of ideology. Looking beyond the mythologies of Robert Capa as the “Greatest War Photographer” and the founder of “Concerned” photography, this chapter asks, how have Capa’s photographs shaped memories and analyses of 1930s Spain, and what can this history teach us about using iconic images as historical documents? And what role have iconic images and legendary photographers played in perpetuating the idea that the rise of fascism was a European, rather than a global, phenomenon?

On the occasion of the 2020 exhibition "LIFE Magazine and the Power of Photography," this essay reevaluates longstanding myths about "the photo essay at life" while tracing how and by whom the magazine's varied photo features were actually produced over the course of LIFE's 36-year history.

In 1947, a group of seasoned photojournalists including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson founded the international photo cooperative Magnum. At first, Magnum's challenge was to cover the world with its limited network of photographers, and to get their pictures to as many magazine clients as possible before the novelty of those pictures expired. A decade later, Magnum's problems had to do with filing cabinets, log books, storage space, and " dead " material. In 1958, Magnum's New York-based executive editor John Morris begged photographers to " STOP shooting for a period of one month " so that staff could figure out a better system for editing, captioning, and selling their stories. Who has ever heard of the great Henri Cartier-Bresson being told to stop photographing? This paper demonstrates how Magnum's legacy – which rests on iconic images and the reputations of its technically skilled and socially concerned photographers – was produced in response to the problem of plenty at the photo agency. I show how editing, filing and retrieving images and story texts posed an ongoing problem within the agency's operations, and examine the myriad of ways in which it was handled behind the scenes by forgotten figures. I argue that Magnum's inability to deal with its image files also became a point of pride, signaling that the cooperative wouldn't succumb to the commercially-oriented practices of competing photo agencies such as Black Star. Such narratives still operate today, while the unresolved excess of the picture archive continues to pose fundamental challenges to understanding both the history of Magnum's operations and the role of photography in the postwar world.

Despite the growing literature on photography and the illustrated press, it has been difficult to understand how editorial features were produced behind the scenes; how they were meant to function alongside advertisements; and how specialty publications contributed to the cultural and visual landscape of illustrated journalism. My paper takes on such questions by examining the relationship between Magnum Photos, the photographic cooperative founded in 1947 by such photographers as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the editors of the American travel magazine Holiday, founded in 1946 by the Curtis Publishing Company. I argue that the collaborations between Magnum and Holiday worked to their mutual advantage as both sought to define their roles in postwar photojournalism, and I demonstrate the extent to which independent image suppliers could shape editorial decisions. Relying predominantly on free-lance labor, Holiday wanted to instill wanderlust in its educated, upper middle class readers through top-quality travel writing and photography. Magnum sought to cultivate new markets and generate the maximum number of assignments for its international network of photographers. Based in extensive research in Magnum archives, I study Magnum’s production of three photo essays about the lives of people around the world that were published in Holiday between 1953 and 1956. The photo agency brought its editorial aesthetic and penchant for human-interest photojournalism into the tourism industry, proving to Holiday editors that stories about “ordinary” people would make travel appear more personal and familiar than images of vistas alone. Holiday’s demands for more glamor and color, in turn, taught Magnum how to create stories that functioned both as international news and as promotion for global travel. The magazine would continue to blur the editorial-advertising divide in subsequent issues while Magnum photographers acquired the skills necessary for securing industrial and advertising assignments. Such projects would sustain the agency into the 1960s and 1970s while competition from television would lead illustrated magazines, including Holiday, to close their doors.

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 photo book The Decisive Moment popularized the idea that the best photographs are made by the patient and gifted photographer who captures a fleeting moment with just one click of the shutter, creating an image with internal geometry and balance. The project solidified Cartier-Bresson’s reputation as an artist working with a camera and encouraged scholars, curators, and hobbyists to understand photography as the product of individual vision and talent. Yet it also masked the collective efforts and infrastructure needed to elevate the photojournalist to the status of an artist. By shifting our attention to the decisive network of magazine editors, book publishers, printers, and curators who urged Cartier-Bresson onto a highly orchestrated road to fame, this paper considers the ways in which collective work is central to the material and social history of photography, and how it has threatened to overturn photography’s legitimacy as an art form.

During World War II, illustrated magazines paid high prices to war photographers, who supplied readers with images of a spectacular international conflict and increased their desire to see photographs from around the world on a daily basis. Transitioning to peacetime challenged war photographers to find new applications for the photographic medium and to make their pictures as marketable and moving as they had been during the war. Previous scholarship has not adequately addressed this moment of transition for photographers and for illustrated magazines. My paper examines the origins of Magnum Photos, an international photojournalist cooperative founded in 1947 by figures such as Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, alongside Magnum’s first photographic surveys of life in the postwar world. Two photographic projects published between 1948 and 1953, titled “People are People the World Over” and “Youth and the World,” demonstrate how Magnum photographers rethought the possibilities of photography and collective work after WWII.
The projects were practical - employing over a dozen photographers to document life around the world – as well as utopian, based on Magnum’s unique collaborative structure and left-leaning, pacifist ideology in a period when individual, autonomous authorship was eclipsing engaged, collective visual practices. I argue that while Magnum’s projects hoped to demonstrate the interconnectedness and shared experience of people around the world, they also pointed to the challenges of making peacetime and recovery visually appealing and photographically legible, especially within the confines of American illustrated magazines. At the same time, Magnum was unique for using photography to emphasize the ongoing effects of war on people’s lives for close to a decade after the armistice. Far from apolitical or idealistic, this body of work used photography to remember people’s shared experiences of World War II, offering these photographs as a form of resistance to the ideological and political binaries of the early Cold War.