From Library Journal
Like the traveling exhibition it accompanies, this 55-year retrospective celebrates the founding of Magnum, a photographers' collective, in 1947. Manchester's lively essay is weak in the area of photo history, but, as we might expect, the photographs (by 52 members) are the book's real strength. Well reproduced, they show every aspect of human experience from the Spanish Civil War to the late 1980s: war, asylums, poverty and famine, family life, drugs, religion, crime, government, leisure, high society, and celebrities. Images by lesser-known names hold their own next to those by Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and other legendary photographers. The absence of an index makes it difficult, however, to get back to particular images, which are grouped neither chronologically nor by photographer. An important book for photo history and journalism collections.
- Kathleen Collins, Great Barrington, Mass.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“The year's most important book of photographs. . . . [Magnum] has acted as the conscience of our times—as far as journalistic photography is concerned.” (Peter S. Prescott -
Newsweek )
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.