Magnum's First

Magnum Photos, founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David Seymour, and Bill Vandivert, is one of the most famous photo agencies in the world. Until only recently, it was thought that the earliest Magnum group exhibition was the one curated by L. Fritz Gruber for the photokina in Cologne in the fall of 1956. However, more than fifty years later, an even earlier show has been rediscovered, Magnum Photo: Face of Time, which traveled to five Austrian cities in 1955/56. This is the first publication to provide a complete documentation of the exhibition. A total of eighty-three vintage prints by eight Magnum photographers—Werner Bischof, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Ernst Haas, Erich Lessing, Jean Marquis, Inge Morath, and Marc Riboud—are featured in large-format reproductions. The show’s main theme was “photographic humanism”: people and their living spaces, photographed without any kind of sensationalism by committed photojournalists who believed in educating and bettering the world through their authentic documentation of it.   Exhibition schedule:  WestLicht, Schauplatz für Fotografie, Vienna, April 8–May 18, 2008 ·  Flo Peters Gallery, Hamburg, September–October 2008 · Kunstfoyer der Versicherungskammer Bayern, Munich, February–May 2009