Inside Magnum: Collecting Photography

The Arts have always relied on individual patronage as well as institutional support, and this is also reflected in the history of Magnum Photos, an agency whose founding members included artistic as well as photojournalistic backgrounds.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, a Surrealist photographer before he became a photojournalist, had forged strong relationships with a hugely influential group of artists, gallerists and patrons, when a young artist in Paris during the late 1920s. This network was to lead to his work being exhibited internationally and incorporated into private and museum collections from early on, particularly in the US. He was first exhibited at the Julian Levy Gallery in New York in 1933 and shown and sold there, alongside photographers such as Walker Evans and Manuel Alvarez Bravo, through the mid 1930s.

Founded in 1947, in the spirit of post Second World War humanistic endeavours, the Magnum Photos collective focused primarily on work for picture magazines in its first decades. Huge magazine circulations insured significant budgets for the production of socially engaged photographic essays for the masses. Magnum’s business model was based on revenue from these commissions and the resale of photographers’ work, for which they retained the copyright (a central tenet of Magnum’s founders intentions).

While the editorial market was primary to the work of the agency, engagement with the cultural world was always a part of Magnum’s DNA. New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged a retrospective of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work in 1947. Other early members such as Werner Bischof, Rene Burri, Ernest Haas, and associated photographers such as Herbert List, came into Magnum trained in European artistic traditions such as Bauhaus and “New Objectivity”.

Edward Steichen, MOMA’s influential Director of Photography, acquired, exhibited and guided photographers, such as Elliott Erwitt in the 1950’s. In 1955, he curated the influential and widely toured humanistic exhibition ‘The Family of Man’, which comprised of 503 images and featured work by Magnum photographers Wayne Miller (his assistant on the project), Eve Arnold,  Bischof, Cartier-Bresson, Cornell and Robert Capa, Elliott Erwitt, Burt Glinn, Ernest Haas, Hiroshi Hamaya, Herbert List, George Rodger, W. Eugene Smith, David Seymour and William Vandivert.

Alongside this cultural programming, major collecting families such as the Franco-American de Menil’s, based in Houston, commissioned photographers including Cartier-Bresson in 1957, and acquired works by Eve Arnold and Danny Lyon, amongst others. Yet, it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that a dedicated print sales department was founded in the Magnum New York office, recognizing that city as the epicentre of the market. In Paris, the Cultural department was set up to develop group projects for book publication and exhibition, a decade later.

It was in 1984 that Magnum Photos New York office hired a young graduate, Mary Virginia Swanson (now a respected educator and advisor working in photography in the US) to look into special projects for the agency. She had studied the history of photography at the University of Arizona, with Bill Jay, the noted British photo historian. She met Eve Arnold and George Rodger in London as a graduate student in 1977, and worked with Carroll T. “Ted” Hartwell, founding Curator of Photography at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Hartwell was an early collector of the work of Magnum photographers, such as Cartier-Bresson, Marc Riboud, Werner Bischof and Gilles Peress, and was to be the organiser of Magnum’s 40^th anniversary exhibition, In Our Time.

In the 1980s, Magnum’s physical print archive, known then as “library file prints” were the heart of the old news bureau. Library prints were still the primary means of researching, distributing, and licensing black and white photography. Each story was produced in a darkroom in the Magnum office as multiple sets of 8×10″ prints (if black and white), or duplicate transparencies held in clear sheets of 20 per page (if shot in colour). The prints were stamped with the Magnum address and sent out accompanied by caption sheets, to Magnum’s network of agents. This process continued into the early 1990s. Archive prints were not deemed valuable by the art market or photographers, despite the quality of the silver-gelatin printing being extremely good in many cases. However, this was to change.

Swanson still recalls with huge enthusiasm, how upon arrival she started to dive into the tightly packed print drawers in New York, and her excitement in pulling out treasures, not just by Magnum’s contemporaneous membership, but Ansel Adams, Erich Solomon and other photographers of international reputation, who had come through the agency at one time or another. She quickly realised that the folders contained some very valuable prints at risk from over handling. She says of this time “I believe I was the first person to articulate to the members, the extraordinary resources they had right within their four walls. I took it upon myself to look into the possibility of generating revenue from print sales; released vintage file prints, newly produced contemporary fine art prints, and began referring to the library files as the file print archive”.

Following her first “brand building” pop-up Magnum show in TriBeCa, Swanson, with advice from Dale Stulz, founder and long-time head of Photography at Christies auction house, and Peter MacGill, a contemporary of hers from graduate school, organised a very successful commercial show of this material at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, in New York. From that point on, Magnum’s role in initiating print sales opportunities for its photographers began.

Despite early support in the US, the inclusion of photojournalism in art museums in other countries has been a relatively recent phenomenon. Photography’s slipperiness as a medium, used as both communication tool and art form, led to it being viewed with suspicion by certain museum curators who were slow to acquire and exhibit it. In the UK for example, despite the support for the medium from Sue Davies, who founded The Photographers Gallery in 1971, and Mark Haworth-Booth, Photography Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1970 to 2004, the Tate did not hire a photography curator until 2009. However, since then Tate has worked to build up their photography collection: including a lifetime, signed, portfolio of prints by Rene Burri and a contemporary commission by Susan Meiselas have been acquired with Magnum’s help, and can be viewed at Tate Modern in thematic installations of the collection, hanging alongside painting, video, sculpture and drawing.

In 2010, Magnum Photos’ New York print archive was acquired by Michael Dell and gifted to the Ransom Center at the University of Austin, Texas. Vintage Magnum archive prints can now be found in numerous international museum collections and Magnum has worked with curators to support this process. In 2016, for example, a full set of vintage Werner Bischof prints of Chinese immigration into Hong Kong in the 1950s, with their original captions sheets written by the photographer, were acquired by M+ in Hong Kong, as a complete photojournalistic story. Over the past year, significant groups of archival prints by Ernest Cole, a black South African photographer whose work was distributed by the agency in the 1960’s and ‘70s, and whose Estate is now represented by Magnum, have entered the collections of Tate and MOMA amongst others. Such acquisitions continue to make an important contribution to these photographers’ legacies, affirming their significance within a wider cultural and artistic history.