You can find whatever emotion you want in the retrospective exhibit of photojournalism from the Magnum agency, one of the world’s premier photo agencies for over 40 years. Want a look at the essence of anger, that sheet of red that slides up into your field of vision? Gaze for a while at Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1945 image of a Gestapo informer being exposed in postwar Germany to the jeers of refugees. Want horror? Gilles Peress has been photographing Northern Ireland’s spasms of violence since 1970. Want to feel your blood surge with the righteousness of a just cause? Look at Josef Koudelka’s pictures of Czech protesters holding back tanks in the Prague Spring. For sheer human gumption in the face of adversity, there’s James Nachtwey’s photo of a child swinging on the barrel of a tank abandoned in Nicaragua. For the sublimely ridiculous, there’s Elliott Erwitt’s cameo of a nattily dressed Chihuahua in New York City.
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The agency’s birth coincided with the high-water mark of photojournalism, with the heyday of Life, Look, and the other picture magazines. This exhibition also traces the subsequent growth of a style of photography more closely linked to graphic design than to emotion: images of computer chips and of businessmen, the sort of thing that companies put in their annual reports. It’s a market that opened up for Magnum as the growth of television nudged newsmagazines out of the picture.
