There is a nice cafe located in the Dandenong Ranges named “Grants on Sherbrooke”. It is a pretty ordinary place for one small exception – lots of Cockatoos and Rosellas  live nearby and come to feed there. This cafe is a family business, so they took advantage of this situation, and created an organized place where people can buy bird food and feed the birds.

Click here for Part I

The first great and glorious era of modern art left the stage to the accompaniment of shots of World War II. Photography, ever since the Man Ray, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, sought after its particular poetry, took over the role of the informant, an agitator and propagandist. Editorial images from the war and political life of the rear attracted attention and aroused the emotions much lighter and stronger than the most sophisticated pictorialistic shot, which relies on the beauty and harmony of the plot and form. Reportage photography, having unprecedented resources and technical equipment at its disposal during the wartime, realized its power. It rejected the simple descriptiveness, making the photographic document into a work of art.
After the war, the attitude of a busy and feverishly anxious world towards photography hasn’t changed. News and reportage photography began to play a leading role, while the amateur photography, which affected profoundly the photographic industry, followed its steps. This was not at all surprising: the increasing number of magazines consumed tons of photos. Intense competition demanded for original, unique shots. An unexpected opportunity unraveled before the amateur photographers – to bring their images into the world of professional photography.

Photo by Robert Capa. Click on the photo to enlarge.

“Earn with your camera!” – Called ads in newspapers and magazines during the 1940s and 1950s as strongly as ever: “Photograph, and your life will be richer!”.
The quality of newspaper photography was growing rapidly. A new type of photography emerged, it served for the artistic decoration of newspapers, which before the war, editors firmly rejected as unnecessary clutter of valuable newspaper-space. Competition with television forced photographic magazines to compensate for the lack of “currentness” by perfection of technical execution and aesthetic impact. Painstakingly prepared photo-essays began to appear. And at the head of this new direction was the “Magnum” agency with amazing images of exotic, incredibly bold frames.

“MAGNUM” again revived the fashion for “pictures of everyday life,” which found the most complete and artistically most significant expression in the collection of photographs of Cartier-Bresson, published in a book titled “The Europeans”, in Paris in 1955. Under the influence of work of Robert Capa, David Seymour, and Cartier-Bresson, western photography discovered the everyday life, and deeply penetrated into it capturing its dramas and diversity. Edward Steichen organized the exhibition “The Family of Man”, which contained pictures, selected from hundreds of thousands of photographs, and was the biggest event of the photographic life at the time. It was also the apex of reportage photography, the victory of photojournalism over the pictorial and poetic photography.

But then this rich source began dry up. Television won the battle in a dominating fashion, basically condemning the Hollywood and illustrated magazines to die. The publishers could no longer be satisfied with pictures of amateur singles that had very limited resources. They started more often to commission creative teams that actually, became photo agencies long before. These agencies could fulfil any commission, from military photos, and ending to the spicy photos of beauties that adorned the covers of fashion magazines.

Photo by Rene Burri. Click on the photo to enlarge.

“MAGNUM” secured its place in the history of photography. It firmly entrenched in its chosen field of photography and distributed materials mainly for the “Life” magazine. It did not resort to gangster methods of “scandalous” photographers stalking their victims in the back streets of “sweet life” on the Via Veneto. Agency managed to thrive without the assistance of gangs of apaches and did not resort to extortion, relying entirely on the simple but proven means of ensuring the success of the enterprise: darkrooms, helicopters, money, cooperation of diplomats or even prime ministers.

The optimistic ads prompting amateur photographers to earn money with their own cameras disappeared from the pages of magazines. Nobody believed them anyway. Nobody would pay several hundred dollars for a new camera just because it would allow for a few milliseconds shorter shutter speeds. Those decoys became a thing of the past (or did they? – Greg’s note).

Amateur photography all over the world returned to its true nature of simply love for photography, photographic trade and industry started to decline, but with renewed vigour sounded the photographic poetry, while the so-called “photography of everyday life” started losing his fans. All these phenomena were closely related to each other, although the “Photo-dealer” (a big photo equipment seller) said the source of all evil was Japanese produce and required high duties on imports of Japanese cameras.

Photo by Rene Burri. Click on the photo to enlarge.

However the “Magnum” agency moved its central office from Paris to New York, closer to the editors of the “Life” magazine, closer to sources of funding. This wasn’t particularly surprising: New York, Paris, Cape Town or Sydney – does it matter? This was just a station in endless traveling and the pursuit of pictures.

Photos of “Magnum” agency are still selected very carefully. No imperfect or weak images are allowed to slip to the press. 99 percent of production goes to trash, nevertheless what is left after the selection are images representing the very best of the Western storytelling photography.

But the agency founders are dead – and so is the noble motto of their creative team, calling for humanity and against the war. What remains is the perfectly organized company.

In one of my articles I told you about the wonderful old Czech photo magazine Revue Fotografie. I also complied a pdf photo album with some of the photographs from one of its issues. Since then I have found quite a lot of Revue Fotografie issues, and red many of its great articles, but unfortunately they were all in Russian language, so I can’t display them here. However, just recently I red this article by Ludwig Soucek about the “Magnum” photo agency, which still exists today. This article was written in 1965 and it describes not only the history of the agency but the overall photographic history leading up to that time. I loved this article so much that I decided to translate and share it here. I had to “revise” it a bit because it speaks of some events in present tense while they already long gone – for example when this article was written Henry Cartier-Bresson was still alive and working at Magnum!

I’m sure this article will be of interest to anyone who is into photography.

Photo by Henry Cartier-Bresson. Click on the photo to enlarge.

The author of the fundamental piece “The Arts” Hendrik Willem van Loon wrote in 1939: “I am confident that after a hundred years, art researcher will dedicate the same amount of chapters in his book to photography, as well as to painting.” And when this prophecy comes true, then one of the largest chapters will probably be dedicated to the famous “Magnum” agency – a typical phenomenon of the global photography of our age that discovered and showed the world new forms of expression.
In the spring of 1947 three friends gathered together around a bottle of champagne: Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour, tramps who roamed all the seas and oceans, people with colourful biographies. Judging by their pseudonyms one can hardly guess that the first one is a Hungarian, the second – a Frenchman, and the third – a Pole. They founded a creative team that set a goal to introduce a fair share of sensationalism and emotion into journalistic and documentary photography (through which it would be able to sustain an unequal battle with television) – the humanistic tendencies and personality traits.
They had much to tell. During the Spanish Civil War they were on the same side of the front along with Ernest Hemingway, Ludwig Renn, General Walter (whose real name was Karol Sverzhevsky), and a physician Allen Gorgon. During the Second World War, Henry Cartier-Bresson was taken prisoner, tried to escape twice but without success, and only the third time was successful. Capa and Seymour fought as well – Capa armed with a rifle, Seymour with a camera.
Over a bottle of champagne this new group set its motto: “No to war!” Capa dreamed of photographing children and his beloved country, Greece; Bresson was going to visit the countries in which freedom was just being born – China and India.

Photo by Erich Lessing. Click on the photo to enlarge.

However,  Robert Capa hit a mine, while as a war correspondent he was shooting a dirty war in Vietnam in 1954. And David Seymour was caught in machine gun fire, when he was in Israeli trenches shooting the report on the Suez conflict in 1956.  Henri Cartier-Bresson was the lone survivor of the group. He became a press photographer of the magazine “Life” and has won great popularity. He also continued to work for “MAGNUM” flying all over the world, and constantly photographing. He would take hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of images, but did not publish them, did not care about their application and did not create photo-essays from them. All that was dealt with by the Magnum’s headquarters staff group, which called itself “Cooperative for allocation and distribution of reportage photographs”
Agency’s funds, once very scarce – only sufficed for a bottle of champagne – had increased significantly. For the photo on the cover of the Life magazine  in 1965, photographer could  receive anywhere between 500 to 2000 dollars (according to his fame), and fees for the reportage would be twice or three times as much. The number of cooperative members grew. Englishman George Rodger, Austrian Ernst Haas, a Swiss Werner Bischof were the fourth, fifth and sixth members. Werner Bischof died tragically in 1954, falling into the abyss near Lima, where he was sent by the agency to shoot the holy city of the Incas – Machu Picchu.
“MAGNUM” didn’t suffer from lack of personnel though – it was a dream of every photojournalist to become a member of the agency. This popularity brought the agency vast new possibilities and glory. The agency welcomed several new photographers: Marc Riboud, Erich Lessing, Rene Burri, Brian Brake, Inge Morath, and others. All of them used Leicas, advertising the brand, as their shots were way better than any other type of advertising. Those photographers were setting the tone and dictated the fashion in the photography world.
After the Second World War photography captivated the world. Shares of the photographic industry, which was building more and more factories were the most reliable and profitable investment. During 1956 alone, more cameras were sold worldwide than during the hundred years that have passed since the invention of photography. After the WWII small-format cameras alone had sold about 125 million. Photographic companies that had billions in capital, united into powerful monopolies. In Japan, for example, the combined plants Aires, Canon, Fujica, Kalimar, Minolta, Nikon, Yashica, Mamiya, Ricoh, Bronica, Sankyo and others constituted one of the most powerful monopolies in the country. Before that happened, market conditions seemed secured for years to come. Hundreds of millions of amateur photographers, thanks to whom there was photographic market, were willing to buy new cameras having even the most minor improvements.

Photo by Robert Capa. Click on the photo to enlarge.

But in 1962, the first time since the Second World War, the number of units sold and materials ceased to grow. Prices have fallen – in some cases up to the one fourth of the original cost. Temporary instability of the market transformed into a crisis. The numbers of the first half of 1964 were very disappointing: out of the hundreds of factories, only three or four (Swedish “Hasselblad” American “Kodak”, German “Franke and Heidecke”) sustained the volume of production. Others clung to a straw – new and cheap models. They promised the maximal use of the film, and ensured  completely successful photographs, but all their efforts were in vain: the photography craze that swept the world twelve years before, vanished.

This phenomenon was caused by a number of reasons. One of them was “Magnum.”

To be continued…