Image Makers
The photojournalist is a witness, an adventurer, an interpreter of history. And for the past half century, Magnum photographers have defined the craft
In the photo, taken in 1943, Robert Capa and George Rodger stand smoking and talking on a Naples terrace. They are dashing in their khakis and boots and combed-back hair, scarves knotted at their necks; it's easy to imagine them in pith helmets shouldering rifles, galloping through desert sands, consorting with spies. The two men, however, are romantic figures of a different sort: photojournalists. Four years after the picture was taken, they became founding members of the Magnum photo agency, a group of exceptional photographers whose images have helped define a half century of history. Through their work, they have taken us to Algeria's anticolonial war, to Iran during revolution, to an Africa besieged by famine. They led us through a crack den in Harlem. They placed us at Martin Luther King Jr.'s side.
The men and women behind the cameras are adventurers, and their exploits have become legend: Capa's love of high-stakes poker and beautiful women, his vagabond youth and violent death. Susan Meiselas's narrow escape on a small dirt road outside San Salvador--the car she was riding in hit a claymore mine, the explosion wounding her and killing the driver. Michael Nichols's encounter in Africa with an enraged gorilla and his quick-witted response: a submissive pose that stavedoff the attack.
Yet the photojournalist is different from the spy or the explorer or the big-game hunter, rifle at the ready. He cannot bag his prey from afar but has to step in close, where he can look into his subjects' eyes. Nor does he have quite the imperial arrogance and moral certitude of those other audacious men. There are few admiring portraits of the powerful in the Magnum archives, few good and noble wars. At the coronation of King George VI, Henri Cartier-Bresson ignored the staged event entirely, shooting the edges of the crowd, making the center of his portrait a man sleeping in the trash.
Capa once said that if your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough. These photographers are close enough to see the cracked skin and oozing lesions on a group of starving men's shins, close enough to see the fangs of a snarling U.S. Army attack dog, close enough that when Harry Gruyaert took a picture of a young woman in Morocco, she covered her face to avoid violating the laws of her faith.
That photographers can be aggressive, even destructive intruders in other people's lives has been brought home powerfully in recent weeks, forcing photojournalists to ask to what degree they share the sins of their tabloid relatives, the paparazzi. One group of photojournalists was alarmed enough by the vitriol aimed their way after Diana's death to make a public statement in their own defense: Their subject matter and motives, they said, distinguish them from those who stalk celebrities. Unlike the paparazzi, the photojournalist "feels a powerful social responsibility to document atrocities" and to give "a greater understanding of our world."
Yet the more important distinction, and the quality that makes Magnum photos like those on the following pages so powerful, is that these photojournalists, at their best, struggle with their responsibility to the particular human beings they capture on film. There are lapses: Gruyaert's attempt to capture the young girl's face may be far worse than shooting a celebrity--the girl never invited public attention, is without the means to secure her privacy, and believes that her very soul is at stake. As a rule, however, photojournalists aspire to empathy rather than predation. They strive to share their subjects' world, to live among them over time, to allow them some role in their own representation. Compare this with the paparazzi, whose slang for their work reveals its aggression: They were "doing Di" or "banging" her or "hosing" her, language that explicitly borrows the imagery of sexual assault.
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