18 Good Weekend December

Home , Cornell Capa, Elliott Erwitt, Gerda Taro, Magnum Photos

18 Good Weekend December 8, 2007 Big shots: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, photographed in 1963 by Eve Arnold at the local pub in Shepperton, England, where Burton was filming Becket. Elizabeth’s packet of sausages would be cooked for her dinner by the chef at her hotel. a moment in time A great photograph legant composition, coupled with the sensitive portrayal of often can open a window vulnerable human subjects. Com- on history for all of us, passion without sentimentality. and for 60 years many Since 1947, when the agency Ewas founded in New York, these have been the of the most famous hallmarks of a Magnum photograph. Today its images of all have been enormous archive, much of it in black and white, captured by members forms a catalogue of the critical events and catastrophes that have afflicted the world. of the photographic But Magnum Photos has been concerned co-operative Magnum with more than just politics and tragedy over the Photos. Robert past six decades. Photographers such as Elliott Erwitt leavened Magnum’s traditional appetite McFarlane reports. for social issues with their wry humour. The co-operative’s photographers also anticipated changing social and artistic currents after World War II – especially in cinema. When Frank Taylor, producer of John Huston’s The Misfits, invited Magnum photojournalists to visit the film’s Nevada desert location in 1960, it changed forever how films would be publicised, especially in America. Each Magnum photographer, from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Elliott Erwitt and Inge Morath, brought an independent vision and, above all, sensitivity to covering the making of Huston’s enduring, elegiac film. Their response was to photograph what they found – not fabricate predictable publicity pictures. In the process, their images redefined the fading image of film legend Marilyn Monroe, then working on what would be her last completed film, scripted by her husband, playwright Arthur Miller. The natural warmth of Cornell Capa’s black-and- white close-up of Clark Gable and Monroe (page 22) assumes added poignancy considering both died soon after the film was finished. In an extraordinary postscript, Magnum photographer

December 8, 2007 Good Weekend 19 Inge Morath would marry Arthur Miller in 1962, six months before Monroe’s death. Traditionally, photographers were invited to join Magnum for their visual style as much as for the intimate, human content of their pictures. From the co-operative photo agency’s founding – appropriately for bon-vivant co-founder Robert Capa in the penthouse restaurant of New York’s Museum of Modern Art – Magnum attracted the best eyes of each generation. There is a story told of a talented young Life photographer who approached Magnum in the late 1950s, when its members were redefining magazine photojournalism, especially in photo essays. Feeling confident, he asked whether he might be invited to join the famous co-operative. “We like your pictures,” came the measured response of Magnum’s Cornell Capa, “we think you’re very talented. But we are only hiring Photographers were invited genius.” The young photographer left crestfallen to join Magnum for their and angry but recovered to build an impressive, LL CAPA 2001 CAPA LL E visual style as much as RN if not stellar, international career. O Such Magnum “chutzpah” probably derived © C Close encounters: Segre near Fraga, during for the intimate, human from one of its founders, Robert Capa, whose (clockwise from top) Alek the Spanish Civil War; raph g content of their pictures. O Soth’s Canadian image in Polish photographer T initial fame as a photojournalist was not so much O Impala, 2005; Magnum David Seymour’s 1948 PH earned as invented. Growing up Jewish in right- s ’ co-founder Robert image, Teresa, who grew

apa wing Hungary, the handsome, charismatic young

C Capa’s 1938 image of up in a concentration rt student – then named Andre Friedmann – was a loyalist troops during an camp, draws a picture of

Robe member of many leftist organisations. The rise of offensive along the Rio “home” on a blackboard.

December 8, 2007 Good Weekend 21 fascism and an already well-developed instinct for Robert Capa would survival saw him move to Paris in 1933 for both famously declare, “If his personal safety and a career in photography. your pictures aren’t When little interest was expressed in the pictures he was taking early in that politically turbulent good enough, you’re decade, the young Hungarian reinvented himself. not close enough.” Conspiring with his talented Polish photojournalist girlfriend Gerda Taro, Friedmann assumed the identity of a supposedly famous (but non-existent) American photographer on assignment in Europe. Magnum force: (above) The pair named this mythical celebrity Robert in Jonas Bendiksen’s Capa, intending to appropriate the surname of 2000 photograph, popular American film director Frank Capra. Russian villagers collect scrap from a crashed However, typically for someone who spoke five spacecraft, surrounded by languages, few of them well, the young man white butterflies; (left) the misspelled Capra’s name. Gerda Taro contacted departure of a military train magazine editors saying Robert Capa’s pictures from Barcelona for the were available for publication at 150 francs each front was captured in this 1936 Robert Capa image – three times the going rate. from the Spanish Civil War; (below) in 1960 Cornell hat friedmann was already a fine Capa, Robert’s brother, photojournalist helped this conceit succeed captured Clark Gable and for a time. In 1932 his first published Marilyn Monroe on the T scene of The Misfits. photograph had captured the fiery, fist-shaking oratory of Leon Trotsky in Copenhagen – in close- up and with the beginnings of the Capa visceral, personal style. Capa would famously declare, “If LL CAPA 2001 CAPA LL E

your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close RN enough.” He later modified this to a more enig- O © C matic and confusing, “If your pictures are not raph g O good enough, perhaps you are too close.” Capa T O

also once argued that “it was not enough to have PH s ’

talent … you must also be Hungarian!” apa C

Eventually Capa and Taro’s ploy was discovered rt

by Lucien Vogel, their editor at Vue magazine, Robe

22 Good Weekend December 8, 2007 Between them, Magnum Now and then: London during the Blitz; who was still sufficiently impressed by Capa’s (clockwise from above) refugees exercising to pictures to commission him and Taro to cover co-founders Capa, Cartier- Trent Parke’s Town Hall drive away lethargy and Station, Sydney, Australia despair in Henri Cartier- the Spanish Civil War. Bresson and Seymour had 2006; George Rodger’s Bresson’s 1947 image of There Capa took a now legendary 1936 photo- covered the Spanish Civil 1940 vision of life in a camp in the Punjab. graph of a Loyalist soldier apparently at the precise moment he was killed by gunfire. The contro- War, the Sino-Japanese versial picture, and Capa’s wider coverage of this conflict and World War II. bloody prelude to World War II, would make him famous. His career as a photojournalist prospered and his photographs of civilians experiencing air attacks for the first time were widely published. Tragically, Capa would lose his companion Gerda Taro in 1937 when she was fatally injured by an out-of-control Loyalist tank. When Capa invited George Rodger, Henri Cartier-Bresson and David (Chim) Seymour to form Magnum in 1947, it was primarily to estab- lish and protect ownership of pictures for which they had sometimes risked their lives. Magnum would also encourage each photographer to freely pursue projects of their choice. The founding of Magnum Photos effectively invented photo graphers’ copyright. From the beginning Capa had understood that he and his gifted, courageous colleagues were witnessing history with their compact Contax, Leica and Rolleiflex cameras. Consider the com- bined life experience Capa, Cartier-Bresson and Seymour (Rodger was unable to attend) brought to the historic founding meeting at the Museum

24 Good Weekend December 8, 2007 of Modern Art in April 1947. Between them, they worthy of its title in size as well, with a shipping Parke achieves this with a sense of light that had covered the Spanish Civil War, the Sino- weight of more than seven kilograms. seems to dance between citizens and high-rise Japanese conflict and World War II. Henri There are signs in the book that the agency cityscapes, as in Town Hall Station, Sydney, Cartier-Bresson had escaped from imprisonment has reinvented itself for the changing photo- Australia 2006, makes his acceptance into in Germany and joined the French Resistance, graphic market of the 21st century. Even as Magnum anything but surprising. while Robert Capa, ever the gambler, chose to go print markets decline, a wave of younger pho- Colour emerges as an important factor in ashore on D-Day in 1944 at Omaha Beach and tographers joining the co-operative promise an Magnum’s new photography. Thomas Hoepker’s photograph the first wave of US forces invading evolving new language in photojournalism, in- relaxed observation of September 11, 2001, shows German-occupied France. David Seymour had cluding digital photography. Where Magnum’s four men and a woman sitting beside New York documented the Spanish Civil War for two years pioneers used miniature Leica and Contax cam- harbour, across which the twin towers of the and been decorated for his service with US eras for lightness, portability and work in low World Trade Centre and much of Lower Intelligence in World War II. light, Alec Soth, for example, chooses a massive Manhattan have vanished beneath a pall of George Rodger had photographed the liberation 20cm x 25cm camera to create his large, ironic, smoke. Astonishingly, no one seems to be looking of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and been explicit environmental portraits. Soth’s studied at the disaster, with all absorbed in conversation. traumatised by documenting the effects of the vision has few precedents at Magnum, with the In a surprisingly poetic comment on techno- Holocaust. In the 1989 book In Our Time – The possible exception of Bruce Davidson’s large- logical pollution, Jonas Bendiksen’s 2000 colour World As Seen By Magnum Photographers, Fred format portraiture from his 1966 book, East photograph shows Russian youths scavenging Ritchin wrote that Rodger had found it “obscene to 100th Street. scrap from a spent, damaged spacecraft lying in a … frame … atrocities in [the] viewfinder – getting Magnum Magnum is also an acknowledgement country field amid a cloud of butterflies. The once the dead into nice photographic compositions”. of the art world’s belated embrace of documen- advanced spacecraft looks about as high tech as After helping found Magnum, George Rodger tary photography as fine art. Soth’s recent discarded boilers from an industrial laundry. decided “to get away where the air was clean” and exhibition at New York’s Gagosian Gallery For now, it seems the challenge for new began a 50,000-kilometre odyssey through tribal explored – in the peerless detail only large- Magnum members (the agency is, after all, owned Africa “to find and depict a purity of [the] human format photography can give – an introspective, by its members) is to balance the elegance and experience”. His pictures, especially of the Nuba off-balance America, recalling the pioneering somewhat static beauty of artists such as Soth wrestling culture, influenced generations of pho- visions of Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson. A and Bendiksen with the need to continue covering tojournalists from Leni Riefenstahl to this year’s single colour print was reported to have sold for controversial political issues, and to capture the winner of the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Human close to Robert Capa’s entire fee for his 1948 difficult, compassionate pictures that need still to istic Photography, Australia’s Stephen Dupont. Magnum assignment in Russia, and Soth’s total be seen. There is little evidence the world has lost History in the making: in sales reached six figures. any of its bad habits, and while the charm of ow, 60 years later, magnum photos Thomas Hoepker’s version It is easy to see what attracted the legendary Soth, Bendiksen and even the constantly surpris- has published an epic survey of the sur- of September 11, 2001, photographers’ co-operative to offer Australia’s ing Parke is all very well, who will they send to Nvival and prosperity of the extraordinary young people chat while Trent Parke full membership in Magnum. Parke photograph the hard places? co-operative photo agency in Magnum Magnum, a huge plume of smoke has consistently striven to create a visual signature rises in the background in which today’s member photographers com- following the attack on the that sets a human presence against the extreme Magnum Magnum, edited by Brigitte Lardinois, is published ment on fellow members’ pictures. It is a book World Trade Centre. scale of often bleak urban environments. That this month by Thames & Hudson; rrp $285.

26 Good Weekend December 8, 2007