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I'm tweeting a lot about @MagnumPhotos. If you follow me & you're not part of the photo world, you might be wondering why. Simply put, Magnum embodies the best & the worst tendencies of the last 70 years of western photojournalism.
All this tweeting was set off by this article, which documents a persistent pattern of sexual harassment by a star photographers & complicity by the agency. It's part of a larger & very old pattern within photojournalism as a whole. https://twitter.com/AliciaVera/status/1341057572753858560?s=20
Magnum occupies a large space within photo history & the photo business. The mythology surrounding it & its photographers is probably even larger. Its photos & the media they appeared in allowed them to profoundly shape the way that western audiences saw the rest of the world.
Throughout most of Magnum's history, especially during the crucial Cold War years, its gaze was western, white, male, & neo-colonial.
Magnum must, of course, reckon with the ways that it has protected & enabled David Alan Harvey. It must also apologize & try to find ways to repair the damage, if that's what survivors want. But there's more that the agency & the entire photo world need to think about.
I won't bother to sing the praises of Magnum's photographers, except to say that most are very good at what they do. They've been celebrated more than enough, & a simple search will lead you to plenty of sources.
The photographers' significance is as much historical as aesthetic. For decades, their skill & the media platforms they worked for shaped the way that western audiences saw, understood, & imagined the Global South & marginalized communities within their own societies.
Magnum's gaze was far from neutral, as I've said. Most of its members professed to be both humanists & men (mostly) of the left. And it's true that they avoided the overt racism & sexism that was so much a part of western visual culture.
Yet the agency didn't escape the racism & sexism of the society in which it was created & through which it operated. For most of its life, it was a white boys' club, having no members of African descent, almost none from Asia or Latin America, & very few women.
Outside of the West, Magnum operated within colonial & neo-colonial systems. At its founding, in the late '40s, members informally divided the world among themselves. George Roger, for instance, took Africa; Henri Cartier-Bresson got Asia.
The photographers' attachment to British & French colonialism & American neo-colonialism gave them power, opening doors & borders. European & American picture magazines, like @LIFE, paid the bills & provided audiences that could number in the tens of millions.
Some Magnum members were anticolonial in sentiment. But their relationship to the Global South & to marginalized communities in the West mirrored colonial relationships.
Magnum photographers extracted wealth in the form of images & asserted their right to represent -- that is, to speak -- for the "natives."
What did the people in Magnum's images get in return? Photography's impact is always hard to assess. Did sympathetic photos of Black Americans make whites more open to civil rights movement? Did photos from Vietnam help swing US public opinion away from the war? Probably.
But Magnum's photos acted in concert with many other images &, crucially, in concert with large social movements.
What about the many other photos from the Global South? Did they make people's lives better? Or were the images a form of colonial extraction?
It's hard to see many benefits from the photos & easy to see the costs. The images photos reinforced ways of seeing the Global South & marginalized people that didn't conform to ways that people wished to be seen. They were spoken for, but did not speak.
Neither Magnum nor most of its members have shown much interest in helping people they photographed to represent themselves, to tell their own stories. The agency has been exceedingly slow to bring on photographers of African, Asian, Latin American, & Middle Eastern descent.
It has also been slow to increase the number of women members, even white women.
Interestingly, Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of Magnum's founding members, was friendly with photographers in the Kamoinge collective. He knew their work. Yet he never gave even a hint of nominating any for Magnum membership. More on Kamoinge, here. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/22/arts/design/take-beautiful-pictures-of-our-people.html
What I've said about Magnum applies to most of western photojournalism. To the extent that the profession hasn't acknowledged these dynamics, it's been complicit with these & similar abuses. Magnum is a symptom of a larger problem. It's long past time for everyone to take stock.
PS Having said all this, let me point to the excellent work that the largely independent @MagnumFND is doing to increase the capacity of photographers from the Global South & marginalized communities to tell their own stories & to open doors to western media outlets for them.
