Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World

摘要

'In December of 2009, a collection of 200,000 photographs, known at that time as the Magnum archive, was moved from the Magnum Photos office in New York City to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin' (p. 17). So begins Alison Nordstroem's contribution to this magnificent book of essays concerned with the making and re-making of one of the most significant collections in the history of photojournalism. The move from New York to Austin completed the transition from working photo library to treasured archive that had begun some years earlier with the turn to digital. The physical form of the collection - 'folders of dog-eared, labeled, and written upon prints' as Nordstrom puts it - reveals much about the business model that Magnum had operated since its foundation in 1947, in which photographers joined together to create what effectively was an image lending library, whose function was to sell their work to different newspapers, magazines and book publishers in a way that protected the interests of their makers. For most of their working lives, these press prints had no commercial or aesthetic value in themselves. Rather, they were the medium through which the circulation and sale of the images could be achieved, notably through the so-called 'distro': a packaged set of 8×10 or 11 × 14 inch prints, accompanied by captions and often a brief narrative created by the photographer or by Magnum editors. Magnum's New York bureau (along with those in Paris and, latterly, London) maintained a library of such prints, many of them bearing on their reverse sides material evidence of their circulation through the circuits of photojournalism and the economy of print more widely: standard copyright lines, scribbled notes to publishers, statements and re-statements of policy on reproduction, glued down labels with instructions on the use of captions and a stamp indicating that the photo must be returned to the Magnum Photo Library. As presented here, this is as much an archive of distribution as it is of production.