2min chapter

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Alex Webb - Still Photographer

Team Deakins

CHAPTER

What Is Magnum?

Magnum is a photographic agency. It was founded right after the Second World War by Cartier-Bresson, George Roger, David Seymour, and Robert Kappa. At that point, Life Magazine and the other magazines wanted to own all rights to all photographers' material. Magnum fought against that, refused to work with life, and ultimately was established that photographers own their own copyright.

00:00
Speaker 2
I think we need to ask this question for the people who don't know what is Magnum.
Speaker 1
Okay. So, Magnum is a photographic agency. It was founded right after the Second World War by Cartier-Bresson, George Roger, David Seymour, and Robert Kappa. And it was an agency that was founded, among other things, to protect photographers' rights. At that point, Life Magazine and the other magazines wanted to own all rights to all photographers' material, and Magnum fought against that, refused to work with life, and ultimately was established that photographers own their own copyright. Great. I think it was also an agency founded out of a certain kind of optimism after the Second World War. There was a sort of humanitarian belief, a belief in human possibility in contrast to what had happened in the Second World War. And it's also an agency that sort of invented the notion which enabled photographers to make a living as editorial photographers of distribution, which is that, I don't know, you do a project and you sell it to Life Magazine, but at the same time, you make 10 sets of the same prints, and they go to Sharon Magazine and Perry Match and some Norwegian magazine or whatever. And you can actually recoup what you spent making those pictures and live off of the income from multiple publications across many platforms. Great. That has basically disappeared entirely, particularly with the internet. So there are lots of questions about what is the meaning of a photographic agency in 2020, and that's what Magnum is facing.

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