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
Other photojournalists, short of quitting outright, find ways to resist making people into symbolic expressions of what the photographer believes or into an element of his art. Meiselas describes trying to photograph the dead "as people who were loved by someone" and learning "when you don't belong there." Peress asks his subjects, often in a wordless exchange, whether they wish to be photographed, "to show or hide." Other photographers incorporate the subject's surprised or playful or mournful response to the camera as a central aspect of the picture. In Burt Glinn's 1985 photo of a cancer ward in a Seattle hospital, a mother encased protectively from head to toe in plastic holds her baby, who is dressed in pink satin and lace. The little girl looks dolefully into the camera, confronting Glinn as directly, and unsettlingly, as Glinn confronts her.
Mostly, the photographers whose words and photos fill these pages try in their pictures to confess how little they actually know, how little they can know, about the people and places they see. Few have captured the world's incomprehensibility as well as Peress. Many of his photos baffle: Why is that Irish priest's head tossed back in what seems a fit of ecstasy? (Page 67). What is the small girl with the blank face doing? Why do the women in the window remain so calm? The picture conveys what Peress himself sees: information too piecemeal to craft into a coherent whole. Elliott Erwitt uses quite opposite means to make a similar point. In a 1968 photo taken in Ballycotton, Ireland, he parodies one of Cartier-Bresson's most famous pictures--a man jumping a puddle caught in perfect midleap. The picture is often used to illustrate Bresson's belief that one could capture "the decisive moment" when the underlying order in the world reveals itself. Erwitt's decisive moment is also in midleap, but the photographer adds an absurd twist: His subject is a little dog.
The first 50 years of Magnum have produced one of the richest archives of photojournalism in the world, but it's hard to know what will happen in the next half century. The market for photojournalism is different--and many believe bleaker--from when Life magazine assigned Eve Arnold to spend several years photographing Malcolm X, or Ladies' Home Journal sent Capa and John Steinbeck to the Soviet Union. The emergence of digital imaging, which makes it possible to alter pictures without a trace, and the massive consolidation of ownership of agencies and images also make the future of photojournalism uncertain. What will survive of the Magnum legacy is the deeply idiosyncratic, subjective perspective these photographers bring to their work. In a world where every place seems more and more like every place else, there remains the hunger for a singular vision, to know what one photographer saw as he ventured out into history.
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