The decisive network: Magnum Photos and the art of collaboration in postwar photojournalism

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THE DECISIVE NETWORK:

MAGNUM PHOTOS AND THE ART OF COLLABORATION
IN POSTWAR PHOTOJOURNALISM

Nadya Bair

A dissertation presented to
THE FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY
August 2016

i
Acknowledgments

I could not have completed this dissertation without the enthusiasm, generosity,
and daily support of my advisor and committee chair, Vanessa Schwartz. Never wary
when I crossed disciplinary boundaries and always excited to hear about a new archival
gem, Vanessa has believed in this project – and in me – from the first time I told her
about my interests in photojournalism. Her commitment to excellence has encouraged me
to think more deeply, to work harder, to read more, and to write better. I am grateful for
our many, many conversations and transatlantic adventures (from Desert Hot Springs and
Princeton to Paris and Toronto) and for her mentorship, which has far exceeded the duties
of an academic advisor. Most of all, I am deeply moved by Vanessa’s commitment to her
students and colleagues and I hope that like her, I can dedicate my career to helping
others win.
I am also grateful to my outstanding dissertation committee. Richard Meyer
offered invaluable insights into the art of looking and writing about press photography.
He encouraged me to ask basic and fundamental questions about the canon, about
managing image archives, and about analyzing page layouts. I am grateful that we could
continue working together after he moved to Stanford. Megan Luke breathed life into our
department with her intellectual rigor, her reflections on art historical methods, and her
deep knowledge of photo history. Her graduate seminars on the Photography of Sculpture
and International Constructivism remain the highlights of my graduate training – second
only to the experience of working with her on my major field. David Shneer has been an
unwavering source of support and a true friend for close to a decade. David has always

ii
taken the time to work with me: editing my graduate school applications, encouraging me
to serve as his curatorial assistant, and expertly modeling how to balance work and life.
His book, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, encouraged me to focus on the history of
photojournalism. I am so glad that he was able to join my committee as I completed this
project.
Funding from USC’s Department of Art History, the Science and Technology
Research Cluster, and the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate allowed me to travel to
archives each summer between 2011 and 2015. The Anne Friedberg Grant from the
Visual Studies Research Institute (VSRI) supported my work at the Fondation Henri
Cartier-Bresson in Paris, and USC’s Provost Fellowship allowed me to spend one year
conducting full-time research in the U.S. and abroad. Subsequently, a year-long
fellowship from the VSRI made it possible for me to write full-time while living outside
of Los Angeles. My last year of writing was supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation
Completion Fellowship.
I feel fortunate to have met a number of people who helped to found Magnum and
who are continuing to shape its legacy today. For sharing their memories and archives,
and for welcoming me into their homes, my sincere thanks to Inge Bondi, Phil Gittelman,
Ruth Hartmann, John G. Morris, and Jinx Rodger. I am grateful to Susan Meiselas for her
interest in my project and for helping me navigate the Magnum Foundation archives. My
thanks to John Jacob for allowing me to work in Inge Morath’s archives while the
collection was being packed up for its move to Yale. I likewise thank Aude Raimbault
and Agnes Sire of the FHCB; Adele Torrance at the UNESCO archive in Paris; Claartje
van Dijk and Cynthia Young at the ICP; the staff of the Rare Books and Manuscript

iii
Library at Columbia University; and Marco Bischof. Thanks to Dana Astmann and
Miriam Stanton for hosting me during my research at Yale and the University of
Pennsylvania, and to Susanna and Puran Bair for hosting me in Tucson while I worked at
the Center for Creative Photography. My thanks also to the ILL team at the USC library,
who helped me track down and scan many primary sources.
I have benefited from conversations with USC faculty at various stages of my
research and writing, especially Daniela Bleichmar, John Bowlt, Suzanne Hudson, Karen
Lang, Mia Mizuta, and Sean Roberts. My thinking on the postwar period took shape as a
result of Paul Lerner’s excellent seminar on Twentieth Century Europe. I thank Kate Flint
for her warm support and guidance as Chair of the Art History department, and Jennifer
Greenhill for reading my chapter on Holiday and helping me to articulate its argument
and structure. I also benefited from conversations with scholars outside of USC, who
listened to my ideas and graciously encouraged this project. My thanks to: Deborah
Achtenberg, Stuart Alexander, T.J. Clark, Dennis Dworkin, Thierry Gervais, Mark Von
Hagen, Steven Hoelscher, Michael Leja, David Lubin, Gaëlle Morel, Alexander
Nemerov, Mary Panzer, Sally Stein, and Fred Turner.
My peers at USC offered tremendous support and friendship. Thank you, cousins:
Sam Adams, Rika Hiro, Megan Mastroianni, Bess Murphy, MacKenzie Stevens, Lana
Swartz, and Kay Wells. Two members of the team warrant special mention: Brendan
McMahon was always there to read drafts, construct new memes and witticisms, and lift
my spirits. Thank you for introducing me to binoculars. I am one fortunate Strizzles. Lida
Sunderland began as my classmate and became a sister. Her wisdom, intellect, emotional

iv
awareness, and sense of style knows no bounds. My thanks also to my colleagues
Catherine E. Clark, Jason Hill, Ellen Macfarlane, Nick Underwood, and Julie Weise.
The VSRI-CTCS dissertation writing group offered a much-needed intellectual
community and source of support. My thanks to Laura Serna and Jennifer Greenhill for
their leadership, and to Umayyah Cable, Samantha Carrick, Allison Kozberg, Ellen
Macfarlane, C. C. Marsh, Luci Marzola, Joshua Mitchell, Kate Page-Lippsmeyer,
Roxanne Samer, Lana Swartz, and Stephanie Sparling Williams for their comments on
my work.
My friends have sustained me through the research and writing process. My love
and thanks to Anthe Vorkas (who always had a place for me to stay in NY), Paul Baker
Prindle, Liron Elkan, Rebecca Metter, Beth Oelberger, Jonathan Astmann, Becky Patel,
and Sana Krasikov. For their regular hospitality in LA and loving generosity throughout
my Ph.D. program, I thank my adopted parents, Cindy Potthast and Craig Woods.
I am grateful to my father for setting me on this path through his own love of
books and knowledge. He has been my sounding board, editor, friend and confidant at
every stage. My mother has always believed in me and reminded me to cultivate my full
self, and I thank her for her wisdom. I also thank my teachers in the Iyengar community,
without whom this work of the mind would not have been possible: B.K.S. Iyengar,
Manouso Manos, Marla Apt, Paul Cabanis, Gloria Goldberg, Diane Gysbers, Vladimir
Jandov, Keri Lee, and James Murphy.
Although he’ll never know it, Parker’s unconditional cuddles and fluffy presence
made the writing process a happier one.

v
My husband, Ethan Bair, has been my main source of love, strength and support.
Regardless of whether I had written one page or ten, he was always encouraging and
affirming, and always invested in my success. He listened with enthusiasm as I told him
about my new epiphanies and saw in me what I could not see for myself. Thank you, my
favorite one. You make every day worth it.
I dedicate this project to my grandparents. Abram Strizhevskiy, Mera
Strizhevskaya, Vilen Volgin, and Emma Volgina lived through World War II and re-
started their lives in postwar Moscow. Were it not for their resilience and creativity, I
would not be here to reconstruct the tumultuous history through which they lived.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments i

Introduction
The Decisive Network 1

Chapter 1
In the Shadow of War: Magnum Photos and the Global Human Interest Story 51

Chapter 2
The “Quiet Middle” Won’t Do: Covering the World in 1948 109

Chapter 3
On Holiday: Magnum’s Photojournalism Enters the Travel Market 163

Chapter 4
Their Daily Bread: Magnum’s First Decade of Public Relations Photography 229

Chapter 5
Magnum Mythologies: Between the Concerned Photographer and 288
the Decisive Moment

Conclusion
Institutionalizing Mythologies at the ICP 352

Images 367

Bibliography 564

1
Introduction

The Decisive Network

For the war photographer Robert Capa, “the liberation of Paris was the most
unforgettable day in the world.” The photographs he took as he rode into the French
capital showed cheering crowds pouring into the streets. On the sidewalks and on the
balconies, people were smiling, shouting, and embracing, and Capa was crying. “The
thousands of faces in the finder of my camera became more and more blurred; that finder
was very wet,” he recalled later, attempting to recreate the mood that day.
1
Soon, he was
celebrating. An anonymous photograph taken at the home of Vogue editor Michel de
Brunhoff shows a room packed with the leading photographers, magazine editors, and
writers who had been covering the war in Europe. [Figure I.1] Behind Capa is the Life
editor John Morris; to his left are the photographers David Seymour and Henri Cartier-
Bresson, among others. Such figures had helped to make World War II the most mediated
event that the world had ever experienced, yielding millions of photographs and millions
of feet of motion picture footage.
2
Their images circulated widely in the United States as
magazine subscriptions soared and the reading public increasingly began to expect that
every significant event could and should be documented photographically.
3
Holding
glasses of champagne and putting their arms around each other, they huddled close and

1
Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus (New York: The Modern Library, 2001 [1947]), 188.
2
Yet only a small fraction has come to represent that experience in the war’s aftermath. Michael Griffin,
“The Great War Photographs: Constructing Myths of History and Photojournalism” in Bonnie Brennen and
Hanno Hardt, eds. Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1999), 125. On radio during WWII see Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson, The Murrow Boys: Pioneers
on the Frontlines of Broadcast Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). On the wartime rise of
television news see Mike Conway, The Origins of Television News in America: The Visualizers of CBS in
the 1940s (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009).
3
George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War II (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 5 and Susan D. Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the
American Experience of Combat (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 200.

2
smiled for the camera. The image commemorates the moment just after the cosmopolitan
capital had regained its freedom and suggests that the photographers who had covered the
war effort thus far would soon document a final victory. On August 27, 1944, they were
elated; but within days, they would begin to worry about their postwar careers. Their
shared concern is the starting point for this project, which asks, what happened to the
extensive system of war photography once World War II ended?
Less than three years after this picture was taken, a group of photographers that
included the Hungarian-Jewish Robert Capa, the French Henri Cartier-Bresson, the
Polish-Jewish David “Chim” Seymour, and the British George Rodger created a new
organization called Magnum Photos. They aimed to cover the postwar world through
photography and sell their images to international press outlets. According to many
accounts, they returned to a plan they had made almost a decade before, and which they
discussed again at the liberation of Paris.
4
Capa, Cartier-Bresson, and Chim had met in
the French capital in the 1930s, where they traveled in leftist circles and worked for such
magazines as Vu, Regards, and the Communist daily Ce Soir.
5
Capa and Chim had left
their homes in Budapest and Warsaw for Berlin and Leipzig, respectively, but relocated
to Paris amidst the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany. Cartier-Bresson spent the early
1930s photographing in Africa, Mexico, and New York under the influence of
Surrealism, and began working for the illustrated press after 1935.
6
All three documented
the civil war in Spain for illustrated magazines in France (VU and the Communist

4
Carole Naggar, George Rodger: An Adventure in Photography (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press,
2003), 118; Richard Whelan, Robert Capa: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1985), 251; Russell Miller,
Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 144.
5
Bernard Lebrun and Michel Lefebvre, Robert Capa: The Paris Years, 1933-1954 (New York: Abrams,
2011), 63; Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years 24.
6
Peter Galassi, “Old Worlds, Modern Times” in Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century (New York:
MOMA 2012), 1.

3
Regards), England (Picture Post), and the United States (Life).
7
Following the Fascist
victory in Spain, both Capa and Chim immigrated to the United States. Chim became a
US citizen and enlisted in the US army, where he served as a photo interpreter for the US
Air Force intelligence, while Capa covered the war as a staff journalist at Life. The
American magazine had made him internationally famous when it published his “Falling
Soldier” photograph in 1937 [Figure I.2] and through Life Capa became friends with
George Rodger when they were both covering the war in Italy.
8
After the war, Capa
would introduce Rodger to Chim and Cartier-Bresson, though Rodger already knew their
press work.
9
Cartier-Bresson was hardest to locate during the war because when France
collapsed in June 1940, he was taken prisoner in a labor camp in Germany. After his
escape in 1943, he spent the rest of the war working underground for the French
Resistance. For nearly a decade, the photographers had drifted in and out of each other’s
lives in Paris and New York, crossing paths at newspapers, magazines, photo agencies,
and on front lines, linked by their profession, their anti-fascist politics, and their
peripatetic lives. At the onset of peace, they did not settle down but took more control
over their travels and their work, incorporating Magnum Photos in 1947.
While Magnum’s competitors closed their doors following the rise of television
and decline of print journalism in the late 1960s, and sold their photographic collections
to large visual content providers such as Getty Images and Corbis, Magnum persists

7
See Peter Galassi, Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work (NY: MOMA, 1987) and Cynthia Young, ed.
The Mexican Suitcase: The Rediscovered Spanish Civil War Negatives of Capa, Chim, and Taro (New
York: International Center of Photography, 2010).
8
Naggar, George Rodger, 112-113. On the controversies surrounding the production of this image, see
Sally Stein, “Close-ups from Afar: Contested Framings of the Spanish Civil War in U.S. Print Media,
1936” in Jordana Mendelson, ed. Magazines, Modernity and War (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofia, 2008), 117-139.
9
Naggar, George Rodger, 43-44.

4
today.
10
With a roster including over ninety photographers, Magnum now functions as an
international picture agency of active freelancers and as a commercial picture library,
which manages the copyrights to work by all Magnum photographers, living and
deceased.
11
Magnum has its original headquarters in Paris and New York as well as
offices in London and Tokyo. Magnum photographs are commissioned and sell for
thousands of dollars, and are collected by museums around the world. Magnum is a
highly respected and recognizable photographic brand, whose identity has been
perpetuated through many coffee table books and exhibition catalogs about the
international cooperative. Such volumes have celebrated the organization’s ability to
weather the technological, economic, and cultural shifts in the production of news images
over the last sixty years.
12
In 2017, the London-based production company that brought
viewers Downton Abbey will contribute to that narrative by debuting a televised drama

10
Today, “visual content providers” refers to corporations that have purchased most independent picture
agencies and their archives and which now sell their images in digital format, online and through sales
agents to editorial and commercial clients. Established in 1989, Corbis purchased the SYGMA and SABA
agencies, among many others. On Corbis’ origins as the Bettman archive in interwar Germany, see Estelle
Blaschke, “Photography and the Commodification of Images – From the Bettman Archive to Corbis” (PhD
diss., École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales, 2011). Getty Images, established in 1995, has
purchased such collections as the Hulton Press Library (containing the picture archive of the British Picture
Post) and the collections of such photographers as Bill Brandt, Weegee, and Ernst Haas. On the role of
visual content providers in contemporary photojournalism see Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, Image Brokers:
Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2016). In the first chapter, “What Precedes the Digital News Image?” Gürsel offers a helpful analysis of the
cultural clash between the model of the “wire services and small photo agencies, both of which had profit
structures in place but also regularly emphasized their role as providers of journalistic or documentary
visual knowledge to the world, as suppliers of a critical public good” and that of the “profit-oriented
corporate giants Corbis and Getty and the established agencies they had swallowed.” Gürsel, Image
Brokers, 59.
11
Reflecting its structure as a cooperative rather than an agency, individual Magnum photographers (or
estates run by family members of deceased Magnum photographers) own and manage their own physical
photographic archives. The Magnum offices process sales of photographers’ work, which must be credited
as © [Photographer] - Magnum Photos.
12
Mary Blume, After the War Was Over: 168 Masterpieces by Magnum Photographers (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1985); William Manchester et al, In Our Time: The World As Seen by Magnum
Photographers (New York: The American Federation of Arts in association with WW Norton & Co, 1989);
Michael Ignatieff, Magnum Degrees (London: Phaidon, 2000); Chris Boot, Magnum Stories (London:
Phaidon, 2004); Kristen Luben, Magnum Contact Sheets (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011); Steven
Hoelscher, ed. Reading Magnum: A Visual Archive of the Modern World (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2013). All of these volumes were created in some form of collaboration with Magnum Photos.

5
about Magnum’s founders.
13
This enthusiasm is understandable: Professional
photographers and scholars alike agree that Magnum’s photographers have set the gold
standard for journalistic and documentary photography since 1947.
14
Magnum’s
continued existence despite the seeming “death” of photojournalism is itself a reason to
applaud the organization and its members.
15
Yet it remains unclear how Magnum actually
transformed the industry of photojournalism and expanded the scope and role of the
photojournalistic profession in the immediate years after World War II.
16

Rather than looking backward from today to seek the causes of Magnum’s
continued success, I recover the agency’s early history to show how Magnum redefined
the editorial and geographic parameters of photojournalism between the late forties and
early sixties. “The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Art of Collaboration in
Postwar Photojournalism” demonstrates that the desire to remain employed inspired
rather than frustrated postwar photographers, who were faced with documenting the

13
“Magnum Photos and Carnival Films join Forces,” Magnum Photos, accessed January 21, 2016,
http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=CMS3&VF=MAGO31_4&IID=2K1HRG6CC66C and
“Ronan Bennet to Write TV Drama on Magnum Photo Agency” The Guardian, June 8, 2015, accessed on
January 21, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jun/08/ronan-bennett-tv-drama-magnum-
photo-agency.
14
Gürsel, Image Brokers, 130.
15
The closing of Life in 1972 is often identified as the moment in which photojournalism, already
struggling from competition with television news, “died.” For an analysis of photojournalism’s 20
th
century
explosion and its decline in the late 1960s, see Mary Panzer, Things as They Are: Photojournalism in
Context since 1955 (New York: World Press Photo, 2005). By focusing on photojournalism’s evolution
from the 1960s to the 2000s, Panzer attempts to refute its demise, as did the photography critic A.D.
Coleman in 1973. See “Life May Have Died, But Photography Lives On” in A.D. Coleman, Light
Readings: A Photography Critic’s Writings, 1968-1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 134-
137. While photojournalism certainly continued as a form of visual reporting past the seventies, this
dissertation takes seriously the historical specificity of the two decades after WWII, when illustrated
magazines produced by a range of interest groups were the go-to for visualizing the world and trafficking in
photographs.
16
The volumes in note 12 each offer an overview of the entire history of Magnum, i.e. from 1947 to the
moment in which each book was published. I have found that this results in a loss of historical specificity
about the immediate postwar period, which is often the stepping stone to “today’s” successes. The fact that
Magnum is still operational – and still searching for clients – suggests that such scholarship is also a form
of necessary publicity for the organization. As a result, such accounts can take a laudatory rather than an
analytical tone. A recent paean to Magnum’s origins is La Nascita di Magnum (Milan: Silvana Editoriale,
2014). A Magnum retrospective exhibition and catalog is also being planned for the organization’s 70
th

anniversary in 2017 at the Centre Pompidou, curated by Clement Chéroux.

6
world in the absence of war and predetermined news headlines. I demonstrate that
Magnum took advantage of its international structure and cannily reimagined how to
expand human interest stories – accounts of both extraordinary and ordinary events
happening to everyday people – to a global scale while partnering with powerful editors
to have their work published. At the same time, Magnum brought the aesthetic and values
of news feature photography into new markets over the course of the 1950s, including
into travel campaigns, corporate publicity, and advertising.
Magnum was exceptional in its ability to adapt to the demands of the market and
develop a global network of photographers and staff that could purport to keep up with
the changes of the postwar world. It was also exceptional because it yielded vast archives
of correspondence, reports, and financial statements, which allow the historian to
reconstruct the network of people and stages of production involved in Magnum’s far-
reaching operations. Finally, the fact that Magnum’s success generated a series of well-
established aphorisms about photographic practice, which are commonly used in surveys
of photographic history and in classrooms – including the “decisive moment” and
“concerned photography” – suggests that Magnum is a valuable starting point from which
to understand key omissions and generalizations in photographic discourse more broadly.
Magnum’s early operations shed as much light on the changing landscape of
photojournalism as on the writing of photographic history itself.
This study looks beyond the iconic photographs Magnum’s legendary founders
took and considers instead the many lesser-known photographic reports they produced.
Working against the recurring narrative of the ruggedly individualistic Magnum
photographer working alone in the field, I shift our attention to the many people

7
photographers relied upon, whether in producing magazine features, annual reports,
single-authored photography books, or group exhibitions. I demonstrate that Magnum
photographers were core members of a larger, “decisive network” of writers, spouses,
secretaries, editors, dark room assistants, publishers and museum curators in New York
and Paris who helped the organization attain technical, creative, and economic success.
By drawing on original research from over a dozen archives around the world – most of
which have never been considered in relationship to Magnum and postwar
photojournalism – I recover the collaborative labor and multiple stages of production that
were central to Magnum’s operations and which are crucial dimensions for any history of
photography more generally.
Surveying “the history of photography” in 2001, Douglas Nickel posed a number
of important questions about meaning of “photography” itself: “Is photography […] a
medium? A set of social practices? A technology with its own identity, unique in its
imagistic capacities?”
17
Precisely because the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and
because of the omissions inherent to relying on any single definition of photography, this
project encompasses far more than the final image and the content contained therein. It
takes up the operations of the photo agency in order to engage with the full range of
photographic processes, applications, and transactions that Magnum photographers and
staff dealt with. For Magnum, photography represented a profession, a technology, an
impetus for global travel, a form of communication and entertainment, and a mode of
expression. Magnum’s “photography” included undeveloped film, contact sheets, and
press prints; caption sheets and story research; and it was bound up with the supports
through which it circulated, especially the magazine page. Perhaps most obviously,

17
Douglas Nickel, “History of Photography: The State of Research,” Art Bulletin (September 2001), 548.

8
Magnum’s “photography” was also a commodity and a source of employment. To fully
understand photography as a medium requires the historian to grapple with how all of
these dimensions interacted and to approach photography as a collective system. As the
media critic Marshall McLuhan eloquently observed, “nobody can commit photography
alone.”
18
Magnum’s very structure as a cooperative supports McLuhan’s claim and the
goal of this study is to demonstrate to what ends, how, and with whom Magnum
“committed” its photography.
McLuhan’s word choice – “committing” photography – is a reminder that
photographs are irreversible interventions into the world on the level of consumption and
production. They affect the viewer by turning him or her into a member of a larger,
image-consuming collective; they also transform the photographic subject, for instance
turning an actor or political leader into a celebrity.
19
Indeed one of the premises of this
project is that the early postwar period – i.e. 1945-1955 – cannot be understood without
attending to the role that photographic images played in mediating and producing
Americans’ knowledge about the world.
20
These images circulated especially in feature

18
Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994 [1964]),
189.
19
The former idea can be traced back to Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the modern spectator, who is turned
into a member of a spectacle-consuming collective. On this phenomena and its implications for history
writing and research see Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Walter Benjamin for Historians.” American Historical
Review 106:5 (December 2001), 1721-1743.
20
Accounts of “postwar” photography regularly begin not in 1945 but in 1955 with The Family of Man,
when the historical specificities of postwar – characterized by recovery, rehabilitation, retribution, and
rebuilding – gave way to the politics and cultural propaganda of the Cold War. For instance this is the case
in Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and its Nation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
Jason Hill promises to rectify the issue in his forthcoming Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and
the PM News Picture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017). Historians of the immediate postwar
period have focused more on the politics and economics of recovery and the experiences of displaced
persons than visual culture. See Wolfgang Schivelbush, In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in
Berlin, 1945-1948. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Tomasz Gross Deak and Tony Judt,
eds. The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000); and Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

9
and illustrated magazines as well as other publications and sites of display that such
magazines influenced.
21
But in order to mediate and produce knowledge, Magnum’s
photographs had to circulate as something else: as news feature photographs or publicity
photographs, and eventually as icons or museum photographs. At each stage, the
photographs became something else as a result of the collective processes of committing
photography.
22

Beginnings

No snapshots or minutes remain from the mythical meeting in the spring of 1947
at which Magnum was founded.
23
Robert Capa likely convened the meeting. The
photographer Bill Vandivert and his wife Rita were in attendance; Rita would become
Magnum’s first President. Maria Eisner, a picture editor and former director of the
French agency Alliance Photo, which had published Capa’s work in the thirties, was
there as well.
24
She became the Secretary, Treasurer, and director of Magnum’s Paris
office.

The remaining founders were not actually in New York at that time.
25
Henri
Cartier-Bresson was traversing the United States for an assignment for Harper’s

21
Chapters 1through 4 demonstrate how humanitarian publications, advertisements, corporate publications
and annual reports were modeled on such magazines as Life, hiring Magnum photojournalists and asking
them to produce photo essays with newsworthiness and a human interest element.
22
In this way my approach echoes anthropologist Zeynep Dverim Gürsel’s study of contemporary image
brokers and their role in shaping the visual content of the news in the digital era. Gürsel’s starting premise
is that photographs become news images by circulating in particular types of networks. She therefore
analyzes how images move and acquire value today by studying the everyday decisions of staff at visual
content provider companies, wire services, and news magazines. Gürsel, Image Brokers.
23
Depending on the source, the meeting took place on the second-floor, or more glamorously in the
penthouse restaurant, of the Museum of Modern Art. Maria Eisner noted that the restaurant was in the
penthouse of MOMA in Harvey V. Fondiller, “Magnum – Image and Reality” 35mm Photography (Winter
1976), 60 while Russell Miller notes it was on the second floor. Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years, 60.
24
On Alliance Photo see Thomas Michael Gunther and Marie de Thezy, Alliance Photo: Agence
Photographique 1934-1940 (Paris: Bibliotheque Historique de la Ville de Paris, 1988).
25
Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years, 49-71.

10
Bazaar.
26
George Rodger had recently finished a long trip through Africa for London’s
Illustrated and was exploring the Mediterranean.
27
And Chim was documenting the
reconstruction of postwar Europe for This Week magazine.
28
They received telegrams
from Robert Capa, and then more official letters from Rita Vandivert, welcoming them
into a cooperative of photojournalists of which they had become shareholders, and which
was tentatively called “Magnum Photos.”
29
At the founding meeting, each photographer
received a region of the globe: Rodger would take the “Near East,” Chim would cover
Europe, Capa would begin in Russia, Cartier-Bresson would set out for the “Far East,”
and Bill Vandivert would remain in the US. With this international network of
photographers, Magnum would be able to “carry on the business of photography in all its
branches, in any part of the world.”
30

By creating a photographic agency, Magnum entered into the market for current
photography, which had been in development since the early twentieth century and which
was dominated by two kinds of image suppliers – picture agencies and wire services.
31

The latter used telegraphic or telephonic wires to distribute images quickly and across
large distances to a subscriber network of newspapers on a daily basis. Wire service
photographers learned to cover breaking news with a single image that could encapsulate

26
On Henri Cartier-Bresson’s American road trip, see Agnes Sire et. al, Henri Cartier-Bresson/Walker
Evans: Photographing America, 1929-1947 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), and Documentary and
Anti-Graphic Photographs: Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans (Gottingen:
Steidl, 2004).
27
Naggar, George Rodger, 150-153.
28
Carole Naggar, “Lives of Chim” in Cynthia Young, We Went Back! Photographs from Europe, 1933-
1956 by Chim (New York: International Center of Photography, 2013), 19-21.
29
Rita Vandivert to Henri Cartier Bresson, May 22, 1947, Magnum Foundation, New York (MFNY).
30
Magnum certificate of incorporation, May 22, 1947, quoted in Fondiller, 61.
31
I use “contemporary” to distinguish the work of photographic agencies from the libraries, archives, and
image banks which stored and distributed stock images, non-current photographs, and reproductions of
works of art, including the Bettman image archive or Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planete. See Estelle
Blaschke, “From Bettman to Corbis” and Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert
Kahn’s Archives de la Planete (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

11
a story in one frame, and newspaper editors valued such work primarily for its speed.
Picture agencies, on the other hand, represented freelance photographers who supplied
magazines with more in-depth reporting in the form of photographic essays that could be
published a few days or even weeks after the event.
32

Individual photographers in London and Paris had founded the first photographic
agencies to systematize the sale of their images to an expanding market that included the
press, the publishing sector, and advertisers. At first, agencies including the Illustrated
Journal Photographic Supply Company, Branger, Meurisse, Rol and Trampus largely
specialized in photographic genres, including aviation, sports, society events,
architecture, and fashion.
33
As competition increased, agencies began to diversify their
products and professionalize as companies in order to take advantage of new markets and
to better manage and exploit their growing picture archives.
34
Concurrently, the advent of
new film, printing technologies such as rotogravure, and the commercial availability of
smaller cameras including the 35 mm Lecia (1911) and the Ermanox (1925) meant that
photographers could get out into the field without having to carry heavy equipment, and
that they could print and reproduce their images quickly.
35
This led not only to the
establishment of new illustrated magazines such as the Soviet Ogoniok (1923), the
German AIZ (1924), the French Vu (1928), the British Picture Post (1938), and
America’s Life (1936), but also to the creation of more photo agencies. German and

32
Gürsel, Image Brokers, 54-57. See also Zeynem Devrim Gürsel, “A Short History of Wire Service
Photography” in Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the
News (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 206-211.
33
Michel Frizot and Cedric de Veigy, VU: The Story of a Magazine (London: Thames & Hudson, 2009),
13-15.
34
Blaschke, “From Bettman to Corbis,” 10-26.
35
Not all editors embraced the Leica right away and until the 1940s, agencies including United Press
International, ACME, and International News Photos relied on medium format negatives, which did not
need to be enlarged to create a photographic print. Blaschke, “From Bettman to Corbis,” 25.

12
French agencies proliferated, including Rapho (1933), France Presse (1933), Dephot
(Deutsche Photodienst, 1928), and Alliance Photo (1934), with the latter two employing
Capa and Chim during their Berlin and Paris years.
36
As Hitler’s rise to power sent
Jewish photographers, magazine editors, and agency directors into exile, new agencies
opened in New York, where they carried on the work that they had begun on the other
side of the Atlantic. The German Jewish publisher Ernst Mayer and former Berliner
Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ) editor Kurt Korff founded Black Star in New York in 1935, and
the photographers Leon Daniel and Alfred Eisenstaedt created PIX the following year.
Both employed predominantly émigré, Jewish photographers from Europe and as Black
Star developed especially close ties with Life, the American magazine benefitted from the
formal and technical skills that publishers and photographers had recently perfected in
Europe.
37

The only cooperative picture agency, Magnum integrated a number of features
that had been central to left-leaning artist and worker collectives that its founders
supported in the interwar period.
38
Photographers became shareholders who invested

36
Ibid. and Loengard, Life Photographers. What they Saw (New York: Little Brown, 1998), 249. In those
same years, wire photo services also developed extensive international networks. The American Keystone
agency (1924), the Associated Press News Photo Service (1926), and the New York Times’ Wide World
agency (1919) opened international branches in London and Paris, where they hired many European
photographers to work for them. Frizot, VU, 13-15.
37
Zoe Smith, “Émigré Contributions to ‘Life’: The German Influence in the Development of America’s
First Picture Magazine,” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in
Journalism, July 1982) and Zoe Smith, “The History of Black Star Picture Agency: ‘Life’s’ European
Connection,” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and
Mass Communication, August 1984). Hendrik Neubauer suggests that the relationship between Black Star
and Life modeled the ties between BIZ and the Berlin agency Mauritius, founded by Ernst Mayer in 1929.
Neubauer, “Inside Black Star: The History of an American Photojournalistic Agency” in Black Star: 60
Years of Photojournalism (Köln: Könemann, 1997), 11.
38
Chris Boot is one of many to note that Magnum’s vision for a collective came out of the 1930s
environment of French anti-Fascism, the Popular Front, and the movement for worker’s rights. Boot,
Magnum Stories, 5. On photography collectives of the interwar period see Beaumont Newhall, “Photo Eye
of the 1920s: The Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition of 1929” in Jorge Ribalta, ed. Public Photographic
Spaces: Propaganda Exhibitions from Pressa to The Family of Man, 1928-55 (Museu D'Art Contemporani
de Barcelona: 2009).

13
thirty to fifty per cent of their earnings back into the organization. Instead of serving as
salaried employees of agency, Magnum photographers employed editors and agents to
sell their images to as many markets as possible, with photographers’ income depending
on the quantity of work they produced. Photographers (rather than the agents) made the
final decisions about whether to accept or decline an assignment or sale, and
photographers retained the rights to their negatives, which meant that they could resell
their work for maximum profit rather than giving away ownership of an image or photo
story to any one magazine. Such policies set Magnum apart from its main competitors,
including Black Star and PIX, which managed photographers as a gallery manages the
work of an artist: taking a third to half of the profits and providing photographers with
steady income, but mandating which assignments had to be fulfilled and then retaining
the rights to those images for the agency. In print, a Black Star photograph would receive
the credit line “Black Star” with no mention of the photographer’s name. By contrast,
Magnum asked its clients to use a hyphenated credit line that also retained the
photographer’s name, i.e. “Robert Capa – Magnum Photos,” demonstrating that the
individual was as important as the collective.
39

In his 1947 telegram, Robert Capa famously welcomed his colleagues to the
“Time Inc. Stink Club,” referencing the fact that a number of the founders had been
employed at Life during the Second World War but were breaking away to create a rogue
organization.
40
At Henry Luce’s Time-Life empire, staff photographers often felt that
they were “second-class citizens” to the editors who made most of the decisions

39
As Patricia Vettel-Becker explained, “A cooperative promised the same ‘prestige’ [of a photographic
agency] with the added connotations of entrepreneurship.” Patricia Vettel-Becker, Shooting form the Hip:
Photography, Masculinity, and Postwar America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 6.
40
Life was founded with 13 staff photographers, and the number grew to 40 by 1952, mostly through the
recruiting efforts of Life’s picture editor Wilson Hicks. Loengard, Life Photographers, 19.

14
regarding the magazine’s editorial content, picture selection, and story layout.
41
Capa’s
tongue-in-cheek telegraph effectively illustrates the tension between magazine editors
and photographers that is inherent to the history of photojournalism.
42
Yet the agency
needed to cooperate with a variety of editorial boards and magazine hierarchies to sell
photographers’ work. Instead of bypassing this system altogether, Magnum established
parameters to increase control over how its images appeared in print. Magnum asked
editors to preserve the spirit of the captions that accompanied their images, supplied by
the photographers themselves. Cartier-Bresson had a strict policy that prohibited editors
from his cropping photographs and in some instances, younger Magnum photographers
asked for the same treatment of their images.
43
On some occasions photographers could
stipulate that they wanted to be involved in the editing, captioning, and laying out of their
images when taking on an assignment.
44
These parameters meant that Magnum
photographers would be free to express their views on the stories they documented, and
that they could refuse to sell their work to a publication if they did not agree with how or
where the images would be presented. Such operating principles represented Magnum’s
ideals but they were not enforced as strictly as one might expect. For the most part,
Magnum’s photographers were already shooting new assignments when editors laid out

41
Rudolf Janssens and Gertjan Kalff, “Time Incorporated Stink Club: The Influence of Life on the
Founding of Magnum Photos,” in Mick Gidley, ed. American Photographs in Europe (Amsterdam: VU
University Press, 1995), 223-242. On the collective process of photo editing and the photographer’s
secondary role at magazines see Glenn G. Willumson, W. Eugene Smith and the Photographic Essay
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 13-20.
42
For an overview of this dynamic see Nadya Bair, “Photo Editing and Collaboration” in Hill and
Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 228-235.
43
Cartier-Bresson’s policy comes up in many letters between the photographer, Magnum staff, and
magazine editors, including Rita Vandivert to Douglas Borgstedt, n.d. (circa December 16, 1947) and
Robert Capa to Henri Cartier-Bresson, January 23, 1948, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris (FHCB).
44
A preliminary contract for advertising assignments, created by John G. Morris circa 1957, indicates that
photographers would take part in making image selections and layouts at least once and makes explicit that
clients would need to cover photographers’ expenses for additional consultations. Yet advertising
assignments came with much longer turnarounds than news features. “Elements to be known as a guide for
eventual dealing in advertising photojournalism,” n.d. (circa 1957), Archive of John G. Morris (AJGM).

15
their stories and they mostly saw their work once it was in print. Although Magnum staff
tried to edit photographers’ film in-house, there were ample instances in which entire
rolls of unedited films were sent directly to the magazine for developing and editing,
because not doing so would have meant missing a deadline. Because they needed to make
money, photographers were enthusiastically flexible when it came to accepting
assignments and working with a range of clients.
Equally important, photographers’ desire to see their work in print challenged
them to articulate, shoot, research and edit picture stories by keeping the needs of
magazine editors in mind. Though it may seem self-evident, Magnum photographers and
staff read the leading magazines of the day to understand their individual approaches to
picture stories and the news. Rather than breaking with editors, Magnum internalized and
replicated editorial thinking in-house – key elements of which were laid out in Rita
Vandivert’s first letter as Magnum’s President, which notified each member who was not
at the meeting about Magnum’s creation and quickly delved into the details of how the
agency would operate.
The way Capa sees it working out for himself and the others is this: he
makes a deal with a publication to send him somewhere, gets expense
money, etc. and does the agreed number of stories or pages for them. Then
he shoots as much material as he can on the side, keeping closely in touch
with both offices so that we know what he can get, just where he will be
and how long he thinks it worth while to stay. Only by this close
cooperation can we hope to save waste of time, energy and material – the
photographer must know what the magazines are interested in, what they
are hoping to get, and the agency girls must know at all times what the
photographers are up to (except on their evenings off).
45

45
Rita Vandivert to George and Cicely Rodger, May 19, 1947, Smarden Archive of George Rodger,
Smarden, UK (SA). The same text also appears in Rita Vandivert to Henri Cartier-Bresson, May 22, 1947,
MFNY.

16
Vandivert’s letter demonstrated that at least three things would be central to Magnum’s
operations: the needs of its clients, entrepreneurialism and creativity on the part of the
photographer, and close communication between photographers and office staff.
Wherever he worked, each photographer would make the maximum number of stories
that he could, whether assigned or unassigned. Guaranteed assignments were given by a
client such as Life or Holiday in advance of the trip and covered the photographer’s travel
expenses. Depending on the client’s budget, photographers could also be reimbursed for
their film, processing, and research or translating assistance and receive a daily rate (the
latter became typical with industrial and advertising clients, discussed in chapter 4). Most
assignments stipulated a predetermined amount for the photographer’s images (with color
fetching higher prices than black and white) and included expectations for the quantity of
material needed – i.e. enough pictures for a photo essay spanning x number of pages.
Clients assigning Magnum photographers generally received “first reproduction rights,”
which meant “the right to be the first to reproduce a photograph or picture story,” either
throughout the world (“first world rights,” in the case of publications with an
international running such as Life’s international version) or in the United States (“first
U.S. rights”).
46

Guaranteed assignments offered photographers financial stability and helped get
them to a specific location, but their work would not end once the assigned story was
completed. Photographers aimed to maximize their earnings by staying on the lookout for
additional stories that could of interest to Magnum’s other clients, mostly in the United

46
John Morris, Report on 1957 Operations, March 15, 1958, AJGM. First reproduction rights gave
publications exclusive rights over the images until their publication, and expired automatically when the
next issue of the periodical went on sale. During this time Magnum could not re-sell those photographs to
any other publication. Ibid.

17
States and Europe. They kept Magnum staff informed of their travel plans via regular
telegrams and letters to New York and Paris so that staff could send them new
assignments in the area or find clients for work that had not yet been produced.
47

Unassigned stories were generally sold in one of two ways: By a Magnum staff member
pitching a story possibility to a magazine before the story was completed, or after the
story was already shot, developed (at one of Magnum’s regular film labs in Paris, New
York or London), edited, and captioned. The editing process took place in-house at
Magnum with or without the involvement of the photographer, and a Magnum staff
member would then try to sell the story to a magazine editor in person or over the phone.
Both photographers and staff solicited assignments and tried to sell previously-made
work but for the most part, staff negotiated prices and working conditions on behalf of
the photographers.
48

Vandivert’s letter also reflected the highly gendered nature of labor that supported
Magnum.
49
While its male photographers traveled around the world, teams of mostly
female secretaries, sales agents, and editors stayed “home.” Even though Magnum
accepted its first female photographers, Eve Arnold and Inge Morath, in 1951 and 1954
respectively, the organization has long been perceived as a boys club: a 1972 article on
the agency was titled, tellingly, “The Last Happy Band of Brothers.”
50
Yet the women in

47
In the first postwar decade, American magazines constituted a more lucrative market for Magnum than
European publications. The Paris office also coordinated a network of sales agents throughout Europe, who
sold Magnum picture stories for a commission. I discuss this set-up further in chapter 2.
48
On Magnum’s business structure, see also Fred Ritchin, “What is Magnum?” in Manchester, In Our
Time, 417-444 and Alison Nordstrom, “On Becoming an Archive,” in Hoelscher, Reading Magnum, 17-35.
49
Such power and labor dynamics are currently just below the surface in each chapter and in revising this
dissertation for a book I aim to foreground specific figures and relationships more clearly, including
George Rodger’s collaborative relationship with his second wife Jinx Rodger (discussed in chapter 4) as
well as Inge Bondi’s personal and professional growth at Magnum (discussed in chapter 4 and 5 and which
is also connected to the history of advertising photography at Magnum, not currently discussed at length.)
50
James Baker Hall, “The Last Happy Band of Brothers,” Esquire, April 1972, 117-126, 233-237.

18
Magnum’s New York and Paris offices were integral to making the operation run. As at
Life, where women frequently occupied photo editing positions, the Magnum “girls”
made daily editing and captioning decisions, and they negotiated fees and sales in a
magazine world dominated by male editors.
51
They also offered professional and personal
support to Magnum photographers stationed in faraway places, giving advice when
photographers struggled to establish rapport with journalists with whom they were
assigned to work, or when they struggled to navigate local bureaucracies.
52
In much of
their early correspondence, photographers also asked for updates on Magnum’s finances
and feedback on their own films and published stories, which meant that “the agency
girls” had a command of the same technical matters as photographers, including shutter
speeds, lenses and exposures and were trusted for their aesthetic and journalistic sense.
53

Thus in addition to cultivating talented photographers, Magnum served as a
laboratory and training ground for a decisive network of (female) professionals who
shaped the broader postwar visual economy well beyond Magnum, and who are often
missing from histories of photography. In 1948, Joan Bush left Life to work in Magnum’s
Paris office, where she sold stories to French editors and coordinated photographers’
assignments. Upon leaving Magnum, she became a photo editor at Picture Post and then
the World Health Organization, where she eventually led the WHO’s international media
presence.
54
Inge Bondi, hired as a secretary in 1950, rapidly expanded her portfolio of

51
At Life, all film had to pass through the hands of Peggy Sargent, whom Magnum photographers lauded
for her editing work. Cornell Capa to Magnum, September 8, 1955, AJGM. See also Chris Vials, “The
Popular Front in the American Century: Life Magazine, Margaret Bourke-White, and Consumer Realism,
1936-1941,” American Periodicals 16:1 (2006), 94.
52
I analyze such correspondence, especially between Rita Vandivert and Chim, in chapter 1.
53
These technical exchanges are analyzed in chapter 2.
54
On Bush, see Davide Rodogno and Thomas David, “All the World Loves a Picture: The World Health
Organization’s Visual Politics, 1948-1973” in Heide Fehrenback and Davide Rodogno, Humanitarian
Photography: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015), 235 and OMS Archives, Joan

19
responsibilities and by 1958 became Magnum’s Editor of Advertising and Special
Projects. In that capacity, she forged lucrative relationships between Magnum and
Madison Avenue advertising agencies and was responsible for overseeing Magnum’s
inclusion in a range of prestigious museum exhibitions in the United States.
55
Jinx
Rodger first worked as an editor at Ladies’ Home Journal before marrying George
Rodger in 1953.
56
In the early fifties, she intermittently worked at the Magnum offices
and served as the photographer’s key collaborator over the course of their travels from
the late 1940s to the 1960s – a relationship to which I return in chapter 4.
Magnum’s membership, reputation, and finances expanded rapidly in its first ten
years. By 1957, Magnum adopted official by-laws and signed contracts with twenty-one
photographers, who were ranked as Contributors, Associates, or Members based on the
length of their tenure and the amount of capital they put into the agency.
57
The group now
included Ernst Haas (accepted as Associate in 1950), Werner Bischof (1950), Erich
Hartmann (1951), Eve Arnold (1951), Elliott Erwitt (1951), Cornell Capa (1954), Marc

BUSH Taylor (WHO 1957-1982), accessed May 9, 2016,
http://www.who.int/formerstaff/history/bush_taylor_joan2306.pdf
55
I discuss Bondi’s role in Magnum exhibitions in chapter 5. Bondi also acted as the public face of
Magnum on many occasions, giving radio interviews and traveling on lecture circuits in the US and Europe
to discuss Magnum’s photography. Inge Bondi, interview with the author, February 15, 2015 and emails to
the author, March 14 and 17, 2015; Transcript of 1955 Radio Interview, Inge Bondi Archive, Princeton,
New Jersey; Inge Bondi and Alexey Brodovitch, “The Photographer’s ‘Two Masters’” Print 13.2 (March 1,
1959), 22-29.
56
George Rodger’s archive includes a newspaper clipping from January 28, 1953 titled “Globetrotters Stop
Here to Be Married,” announcing Rodger’s marriage to Jinx in Akron, Ohio, and explaining that while
Rodger takes photographs, Jinx, a “free-lance writer,” does all the research. The name of the newspaper
and page number are both missing. SA.
57
In the first years of the organization, Magnum did not have a standard process for admitting new
photographers, many of whom joined following personal invitations from the founders. A majority of
Magnum shareholders was necessary to vote in Associate and Member photographers. John G. Morris
began working on the three-level system in July 1953 and it was ratified by the summer of 1955.
Contributing photographers did not put capital into the organization and were therefore not shareholders.
Associates began by contributing $500 while Members contributed $1000 and could be on the Magnum
Board.. John Morris to Magnum Shareholders, July 6, 1953, and Report to Members on the State of
Magnum, July 1, 1955, AJGM.

20
Riboud (1954), Inge Morath (1954) and Erich Lessing (1955), among many others.
58
In
order to support the constant pace of the photographers’ global production, Magnum’s
office staff also grew to include an Executive Editor (former Life and then Ladies’ Home
Journal picture editor John G. Morris, hired in March 1953 to oversee both offices); a
New York office manager (Inge Bondi); a Paris bureau chief (Trudy Feliu, who followed
Maria Eisner and Margot Shore); a European Editor (Michel Chevalier, hired away from
Paris-Match in 1957); a Stock Sales manager (Sam Holmes); as well as bookkeepers,
secretaries, dark room assistants, delivery boys, and researchers. Magnum had also
become a massive logistical effort in photographic distribution and communication. In
1953, Magnum’s New York office began producing a weekly “Where’s Magnum?”
report, which it distributed to over 75 editors in Paris and New York with photographers’
whereabouts to better facilitate freelance assignments. [Figure I.3] Both offices sent
weekly updates on its operations to Magnum’s Board of Directors as well as monthly
story lists and regular “snippets” – individual updates to photographers about their sales
and assignments, cut out of a single report produced by all the office staff once a week.
[Figure I.4]
In late 1957, John Morris mapped out Magnum’s income, estimating that it had
grown eighty-fold since its inception, but the cost of running the international operation
had surpassed revenue for most of those ten years. [Figure I.5] Staff were struggling to
keep up with the quantity of film and caption lists that came through its offices, and they
could not devote enough time to editing or researching stories.
59
Magnum was also still

58
Erich Hartmann, Magnum Chronology, 1988, Erich Hartmann Estate, New York (EHE).
59
These issues come up repeatedly in Magnum reports and correspondence including Report to Members
on the State of Magnum, July 1, 1955; Cornell Capa to Magnum, September 8, 1955; Magnum Memo,

21
reeling from the loss of Robert Capa, who was killed in Indochina in 1954 and David
Seymour, killed in the Suez in 1956. (A third Magnum photographer, Werner Bischof,
also died while on assignment in Peru in 1954.) As President and Vice President
respectively, the co-founders had been in charge of Magnum’s story production and
finances, and they had provided the main oversight for its European operations.
60
Without
their leadership, photographers and staff were increasingly divided about their vision for
Magnum, and the agency considered splitting up its American and European operations
or closing down the Paris office altogether.
61
But despite these challenges, Magnum
stayed in business. Upon its ten-year anniversary, Morris wrote to Magnum Shareholders:
“It is no exaggeration to say that after ten years we have become recognized as the
outstanding – if not the only – international group of independent photographic
journalists.”
62
Perhaps because of its improbable success, the agency also entered the
business of promoting its accomplishments.

Magnum Mythologies
In 1957, Magnum’s New York office produced its first substantial piece of
publicity in the form of a brochure, composed by its Executive Editor John Morris and
edited by most of the Magnum photographers. Magnum’s office staff tucked the brochure
into a folder along with a long profile about Magnum just published in Popular
Photography on the occasion of its ten-year anniversary. That fall, the packet made its

December 19, 1955, all AJGM; and John Morris to Magnum Photographers, April 30, 1958, Magnum
Archive Box 104:3, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson (CCP).
60
Capa and Chim spent most of their time in Europe after the war and conducted most Magnum business
from the Paris office. Report of the Conference of the Stockholders of Magnum, December 15, 1952, SA.
61
George Rodger to Brian Brake, May 19, 1959, SA.
62
John Morris, A Report on 1957 Operations, March 15, 1958, AJGM.

22
way to thousands of Magnum’s clients, potential clients, and friends in the world of
photography.
63
The brochure defined what made Magnum unique and articulated its
mission:
Founded in 1947, Magnum Photos is the only international
cooperative picture agency. Magnum’s Member and Contributing
Photographers were born in twelve different countries and currently reside
in seven.
With headquarters in New York and Paris, London and Zurich,
Magnum photographers roam the world in pursuit of pictures – pictures
which have resulted in thousands of published pages …
Magnum represents no one school of photography. Magnum is
however dedicated to continuing photojournalism in the tradition
established by the three Magnum photographers who had died on
photographic assignments of their own choice: Robert Capa in Indo-
China, Werner Bischof in Peru, David (“Chim”) Seymour at Suez.
64

Summarizing the agency’s founding history and introducing readers to the organization’s
structure, this piece of publicity typified Magnum as working in what would soon
become known as the tradition of “concerned” photography, seen as founded by the
recently fallen Capa and Chim. The brochure also introduced the Magnum photographers
and staff members that clients might work with, and promoted the range of the agency’s
publications (including books, magazines, newspapers, calendars, textbooks and annual
reports). The Popular Photography article, which featured a portfolio of the best-known
images made by Magnum members over the past decade, helped in that effort. [Figure
I.6] “Ten years of large ideas and small cameras have built a unique reputation for this
cooperative picture agency,” the article led, gesturing towards Magnum’s unique

63
Magnum Memo, August 3, 1957, AJGM.
64
Magnum Photos publicity brochure, 1957, SA. Although the brochure indicated having headquarters in
London and Zurich, Magnum employed single sales agents there, unlike the New York and Magnum
offices, which had large staff devoted only to Magnum. Rosellina Bischof, Werner Bischof’s widow, was
Magnum’s agent in Zurich. In London, Magnum first worked through David Mitchell of the London
Pictorial service and then began working with a sales agent named J. Allen Cash when the 1957 brochure
was in production. Magnum Memo, June 6 and 30, 1956, AJGM.

23
organizational structure, its editorial initiative, and the photographers’ ongoing travels
around the world.
65

A few years earlier, a story by Morris in US Camera had also glamorized the
Magnum photographers as “roaming the world” and making pictures “of infinite and
beautiful variety” while emphasizing the effectiveness of Magnum’s organizational
structure, its editorial initiative, and its ability to partner with clients.

[Figure I.7] The
story was actually one of the first things that Morris attended to once he was hired in
1953. Leading with the Paris liberation party photograph, Morris described Magnum’s
founding in casual, unpretentious terms: “The dictionary defines magnum as a ‘two-quart
bottle for spirits’ and that seemed precisely the word for the container which five spirited
photographers sought to fashion for themselves in the spring of 1947. They were, and
are…a motley assortment….’”
66
Magnum was no stodgy business operation with
assignments, deadlines, and budgets, Morris suggested, but rather a jovial atmosphere, an
extended family of cosmopolitan image makers who had survived the war and now saw
their profession as “a way of life.”
67

There was nothing incorrect per se in the publicity that Magnum generated in the
1950s, but as the cooperative touted the same details and employed the same turns of
phrases to paint its origin story and explain its structure, the historical, cultural, and
economic specificity of what their operations entailed began to be displaced by

65
Byron Dobell, “Magnum: The First Ten Years,” Popular Photography (September 1957), 87.
66
John Morris, “Magnum: An International Cooperative,” US Camera (1954), 110-152.
67
Morris continued to excel in such mythical rhetoric after he left Magnum, including in his autobiography,
Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.) In
retrospect, such language also separated Magnum’s brand from the increasing corporatization of the media
in the postwar period. See Victor Pickard, America’s Battle for Media Democracy: The Triumph of
Corporate Libertarianism and the Future of Media Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
and Charles L. Ponce de Leon, That’s the Way it Is: A History of Television News in America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2015).

24
essentializing and lionizing narratives. Around the time of Magnum’s ten-year
anniversary, Roland Barthes defined such narratives as “mythologies:” powerful turns of
speech circulating in society through the mass media as if they were natural occurrences,
but which in fact required deciphering and historicizing. “Myth does not deny things,”
Barthes explained. “…on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it
purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it
gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact.”
68

Echoing Barthes’ emphasis on the media’s ability to propagate myths in the 1960s,
Marshal McLuhan beckoned readers to understand that they are shaped more by the
nature of the media through which they communicate than by the content of their
communication. McLuhan’s imperative that “it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of
any medium blinds us to the characteristics of the medium” applies powerfully to the way
that Magnum’s photography is discussed to this day: as visual evidence of the
photographers’ independence, humanism, and internationalism – often without
considering how they are also end-products of an economically-driven effort to integrate
images of people from around the world into the public’s experience of and relationship
to the globe.
69

In the 1960s – a period in photography writing readily associated with the high-
modernist approach of such figures as the Museum of Modern Art’s John Szarkowski –
critics and curators began to emphasize Magnum’s independence from editors and agents
and pitted photographers’ individual visions (whether creative or political) against the

68
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972 [1957]), 143.
69
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 9 and The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (Berkeley:
Gingko Press, 1996 [1967]), 8.

25
commercial and editorial constraints of photojournalism.
70
A story about Magnum in
Creative Camera from 1969 explained that its photographers had always prioritized
independent projects which were not commissioned, which did not come with “the
pressure of deadlines, the fear of compromise to commercialism or the thought of failure
and success. These [independent projects] are the heart of Magnum’s power to influence
good photography.”
71
Three years later, a profile in Esquire explained that Magnum is
“more a club than a business, more a family than either” and quoted an early Magnum
staff member as saying, “It wasn’t a business we were involved in […] it was a story, a
romance.”
72
More recently, Brett Abbott observed that postwar documentary
photography, which appears objective and universally legible while also deeply personal
and subjective, has its roots in the Magnum enterprise: “The Magnum concept has given
rise to generations of independent photographers who have sought to combine their skills
as reporters and artists, developing extended photo essays that delve deeply into
humanistic topics and present distinct personal visions of the world.”
73
In Abbott’s
narrative, photojournalism since the 1960s has mostly existed apart from the commercial
world, again thanks to Magnum: “The organization was meant to harness commercial
assignments as a base from which to pursue independent work.”
74
The separation
between commercial and independent photojournalism continues to define the Magnum

70
On Szarkowski’s legacy see most notably Christopher Philips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography” in
Richard Bolton, ed. The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1989), 15-48. A helpful overview of the changes in photography criticism in the postwar period as it
relates to one of the Magnum founders can also be found in Claude Cookman, “Henri Cartier-Bresson
Reinterprets His Career,” History of Photography 32:1 (2008), 59-73.
71
“Magnum,” Creative Camera (March 1969), 114-115.
72
John Morris quoted in James Baker Hall, “The Last Happy Band of Brothers,” Esquire (April 1972),
122-125.
73
Brett Abbott, Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since the Sixties (Los Angeles: Getty
Research Institute, 2010), 13.
74
Ibid.

26
story, as if assignments – whether from magazines or corporations – were unfortunate
compromises, taken on to facilitate other projects that photographers found more
meaningful and personally satisfying. A new volume on Magnum’s “distros” –
distribution packets that included story text, captions, and a few dozen images produced
by one or more photographers as part of an unsolicited story, arranged in-house at the
agency and pitched to magazine clients – is now in production.
75
While acknowledging
the commercial system of press photography, Magnum’s own interest in distros has the
potential to place more value on independently-conceived stories than commissioned
work for magazines and corporate clients, even though the latter provided the vast
majority of Magnum’s revenue in its first two decades.
The notion of “independent” work effectively projects a modernist conception of
artistic autonomy onto Magnum photographers who actively depended on the
photographic market, and who collaborated with a variety professionals to produce and
sell their pictures. In an important essay about the agency, Michael Ignatieff went further
by projecting autonomy not only onto Magnum members but also onto their photographs.
He explained that when Magnum was founded, it did not need a manifesto because “all of
it was simply in the pictures. This laconic insistence that pictures must do all the talking
was not modest: it made an important claim about the medium’s essential dignity. It was
not just filler between advertisements; it was not just the illustration of a text. The
pictures had their own status, their own right to exist, to teach, to speak…”
76
Ignatieff
contended that Magnum’s images were supposed to exist “on their own terms,” unaided
by text or explanation, as a commitment to the medium of photography as both document

75
Susan Meiselas, email message to the author, April 13, 2015.
76
Ignatieff, Magnum Degrees, 54.

27
and as a means of artistic expression. This characterization is as much about the status of
photography in the 21
st
century, by which point Magnum’s work was being exhibited in
fine art settings and sold on the art market on a regular basis.
77
Ignatieff’s essay obscured
the historical reality that most Magnum images in the late 1940s and 1950s were also
used as illustrations, as publicity, and as educational tools. Magnum proactively sought
out such uses of its photography because its priorities included selling time-sensitive
material and reselling the photographs that made up its growing picture archive. Most
believed that the quality and integrity of their work could be preserved across these
markets.
78
At the same time, Magnum photographers were invested in seeing their work
appear outside of the magazines, including in museum exhibitions, books, and galleries,
where their images would be separated from their captions and series in order to function
“on their own terms.”
Rather than taking Ignatieff’s implied binary at face value, or accepting that there
is any one true and correct context in which to understand Magnum’s photography, this
project examines how Magnum photographers and staff kept a range of markets and
settings in mind when shooting, producing, and selling images and picture stories.
79
I

77
The relationship between photography and the art market can be traced back to the late 1960s and early
1970s if not earlier. Though a single work analyzing the place of photography on the art market does not
exist, sources for thinking about this relationship include A.D. Coleman, Light Readings and Tarnished
Silver: After the Photo Boom (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1996); Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality
of the Avant-Garde,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1985), 151-170; Stuart Alexander, “Photographic Institutions and Practices,” in Michel Frizot, A
New History of Photography. (Köln: Könemann Press, 1999), 695-707; and Jed Perl, “The Trouble with
Photography,” The New Republic (October 19, 1998), 31-38.
78
For instance, Robert Capa expressed this in his Magnum Stockholder Report, February 15, 1952, AJGM.
79
Thinking along these lines, Jason Hill offers an effective counterargument to such binaries in his work on
the tabloid photographer Weegee, which has influenced my own thinking. Hill challenges post-modern
critics’ “commonly held notion that the art museum upgraded press photography to an art at some point
subsequent to the fulfillment of its pedestrian journalistic function” and shows instead that Weegee shot
with an eye to both MOMA and his employer, the daily New York paper PM. Jason Hill, “In the Police
Wagon, in the Press, and in The Museum of Modern Art (A Note on Weegee’s Frank Pape, Arrested for
Homicide, November 10, 1944),” in Mitra Abbaspour, Lee Ann Daffner, and Maria Morris Hambourg,

28
argue that Magnum can not be reduced to a single direction of photographic activity, and
that this makes the photo agency a privileged site for understanding how multiple factors
– including newsworthiness, financial gain, aesthetics, professional partnerships, and
self-promotion – shaped photographic production and circulation in the postwar period.
Throughout this project I employ but also challenge the adjectives used to
describe the photographic genres in which Magnum worked, including “editorial,”
“journalistic,” “industrial,” “publicity,” “advertising,” “commercial” and “artistic”
photography. I demonstrate how they accrued such labels by circulating in particular
kinds of networks, and that Magnum photographers and staff debated the meaning of
these terms. Editorial and journalistic photography, often used interchangeably, refers to
images used to illustrate or narrate the news and current events; in Magnum’s case such
images appeared in feature magazines a few days or even weeks after the event occurred
and contributed to readers’ knowledge about the news and the world “today.” In 1940,
the sociologist Robert Park explained that “news” is an elementary form of knowledge
concerned with isolated events happening in the present, and that it often focuses on “the
unusual and the unexpected.” Yet Park also noted that most readers spend their time on
human interest stories because these tend to be the most memorable and entertaining.
80

Editorial photography, therefore, was as much about breaking news headlines as about
human interest stories, and in chapters 1 through 3, I demonstrate that both preoccupied
Magnum photographers.

eds. Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909–1949. An Online Project
of The Museum of Modern Art. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2014. Accessed May 1, 2016,
https://www.moma.org/interactives/objectphoto/#map/photo?dateBegin=1900&dateEnd=1950.
80
Robert Park, “News as a Form of Knowledge,” American Journal of Sociology, 45:5 (March 1940), 669-
686.

29
Although editorial photography is often juxtaposed to “commercial” content – i.e.
publicity and advertising images – and even though Magnum itself calculated editorial
and industrial work as separate sales categories, it is important to recognize that
photographs have always helped to sell publications. In this sense, all photography is
already “commercial,” and this especially true at photographic agency such as Magnum,
which trade in images as commodities. In common parlance, however, commercial
photography often refers to publicity or advertising photographs. Discussed further in
chapters 1 and 4, publicity images promote the activities and reputation of special
interest-groups, which can be public (i.e. an international organization such as the United
Nations) or private (i.e. oil companies such as Standard Oil); they can also help to raise
funds. If publicity photographs help to sell an entire industry, whether international
reconstruction, oil drilling, or tourism (hence the alternate label of “industrial”
photography), advertising photography aims to sell a product – such as Campbell’s soup,
a specific airline, or a tourist package to France. As this project shows, Magnum’s
industrial photography incorporated the visual language of editorial photography –
including unposed action shots of everyday individuals – and the mode of the photo essay
in order to sell its clients. This imagery appeared in the general illustrated press, often
posing as news in order to obscure their promotional quality, as well as in private
publications that emulated the visual strategies of such magazines as Life. In some
instances, editorial photographs were re-sold to corporate or advertising clients, taking on
a promotional function and accruing more financial value through secondary and tertiary
sales.
81

81
Such sales represented one of the main financial benefits to Magnum’s policy of retaining negatives and
copyrights.

30
Finally, Magnum’s photographs were also exhibited and circulated in certain
museum, gallery, and book contexts, discussed predominantly in chapter 5. Such contexts
emphasized the form (including content and style) in the images and often pulled singular
shots out of the longer photo essays and series in which they first circulated years or just
months prior. A photograph’s primary function and monetary value as an editorial image
or a publicity shot became de-emphasized while other labels, such as “documentary” and
“artistic” were predominantly used to describe it. This does not mean that magazine
editors and corporate leaders did not use such terms when presenting the work of
Magnum photographers in print, or that Magnum photographers did not also apply such
terms to their magazine work, and chapters 2 through 4 deal with such cases. Instead, I
am interested in how these loaded terms were used strategically: the extent to which the
value ascribed to Magnum’s photography reflected the priorities of specific archivists,
curators and institutions, and the ways in which these actors encouraged viewers to see
the inherent value of Magnum’s photography outside of the professional and commercial
contexts in which they were made. In this process of repurposing and relabeling, the
meaning of Magnum’s photography began to change, resulting finally in Ignatieff’s
assertions, discussed above.
Another mythical trope in Magnum histories is that the agency hoped to help
rebuild the war-torn world through the distribution of its images, which reflected the
founders’ pacifism and humanism following their traumatic experiences during World
War II.
82
Indeed, the war affected the first generation of Magnum photographers deeply
and personally. Chim’s parents died in Auschwitz. Although his mother and brother left

82
This assumption also stems from commonly-held notion that Magnum’s photojournalism is
predominantly about war and its effects. Ignatieff, Magnum Degrees, 54 and Susan Sontag, Regarding the
Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003).

31
in time to emigrate for the US, many of Capa’s other relatives perished in Hungary or in
the camps. Both photographers discovered these facts after 1945, when they returned to
Europe to photograph the aftermath for the American press but also to search for their
relations.
83
Cartier-Bresson spent most of the war imprisoned by the Germans. George
Rodger suffered nervous breakdowns for the rest of his life following his coverage of the
bombing of London and the liberation of Bergen-Belsen for Life magazine. Not long
before his death in 1995, Rodger reflected on his personal and professional desire to
distance himself from his wartime assignments circa 1947:
“[I] wanted a complete change. I wanted to join a primitive people who
lived at peace and tranquility so that I could join in their lives and get a bit
of it for myself, somewhere that was completely isolated and as I
described it, a country that was clean and a people that were clean. And
that’s why I went to Africa.”
84

Rodger’s desire to forget the war by photographing the fantasy of a “tranquil” African
continent was shared by many people on both sides of the Atlantic, as in the willful
amnesia described by Tony Judt in his epic history of postwar Europe.
85
In that postwar
moment, Robert Capa famously declared that he wanted nothing more than to be an
“unemployed war photographer.”
86
That turn of phrase has been cited time and again to
explain Capa’s, and by extension Magnum’s, proclivity towards photographing the
beauty and drama of ordinary people and everyday events – in other words, explaining
the humanism visible in their iconic images of the postwar world.

83
Whelan, Robert Capa, 256; Eileen Schneiderman, “My Brother David” in David Seymour – “Chim,”
1911-1956 (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974), 12.
84
Seona Robertson, Director, The Chosen People, 2000.
85
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).
86
“Found Soviets Eager for Peace, Capa, Steinbeck Tell Trib Forum,” The Daily Worker (October 24,
1947), 2; Illustrated (June 19, 1948), 5. Cornell Capa perpetuated the narrative in Cornell Capa, The
Concerned Photographer (New York: Grossman, 1968), as did John Morris, Get the Picture, 113.

32
In its application to photography, humanism is commonly understood as a
representational paradigm used by postwar French photographers including Robert
Doisneau, Izis, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Employed by a range of photographic
agencies and magazines rather than constituting a single group, these photographers
focused on everyday people and events, universalized human life, created an
identification between the viewer and subject, and instilled empathy for the human
condition.
87
As compared to the grainy, blurred, disorienting, and highly subjective
photography of the 1960s, humanist photography appears to have sanctified the human
figure and offered a comforting representation of humanity amidst the looming threat of
nuclear annihilation and the escalation of the Cold War.
88
Such a definition makes
particular sense considering that most scholars define humanist photography by way of
Edward Steichen’s 1955 The Family of Man exhibition and Roland Barthes’ scathing
critique of the show, in which Barthes accused Steichen of using photography to
reinforce the saccharine tautology that everyone is born and dies, without accounting for
the weight of culture or history.
89
Postmodern critics expanded Barthes’ critique of
humanist photography to question the larger mythology that photographs could ever
function as a universal language.
90
It is now difficult to disentangle humanist
photography from the decades of debates about its relationship to ideology, power, and
the role of the museum curator on the one hand, or the assumption that humanist

87
On the characteristics of humanist photography see Peter Hamilton, “Representing the Social: France and
Frenchness in Post-war Humanist Photography,” in Stuart Hall, ed. Representations: Cultural
Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), 75-150.
88
Erik Mortenson, “The Ghost of Humanism: Rethinking the Subjective Turn in Postwar American
Photography,” History of Photography 38:4 (November 2014), 418-434.
89
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 101-102. A range of works now employ this selective chronology with
regard to humanism, including Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 59-61.
90
Allan Sekula, “On the Invention of Photographic Meaning” Artforum 13 (January 1975), 36-45 and “The
Traffic in Photographs” Art Journal 41:1 (Spring 1981), 15-25. See also Bolton, Contest of Meaning.

33
photographers – Magnum founders among them – were hopeful, if not naïve, about
photography’s ability to shape global politics.
91
At the same time, there is a lack of
specificity about what humanist photography actually is, since critics and scholars have
also traced this paradigm back to early 20
th
century documentary photographers in
America, including Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and the photographic division of the Farm
Security Administration.
92

I set aside discussions of Magnum’s humanism so as not to presume that
photographers had clear political intentions; that their images were extensions of their
biographies; or that their images’ appearance in The Family of Man itself somehow
revealed the agency’s humanistic essence.
93
Instead, I focus on the agency’s innovations
in human interest reporting, which had been a staple of the illustrated press since the
nineteenth century. Magnum expanded human interest photography to an international
scale in the aftermath of the war and in each chapter, I demonstrate that such images were
created for and moved between the illustrated press, promotional contexts, exhibitions,
and books.

91
Blake Stimson summarizes the definition and inherent critique of humanist photography, which “has
always been ideological: it obscures real social and political issues with an abstract image of humanity; it
falsely elevates the common and unwittingly serves to protect elites from any meaningful sense of social
responsibility; it vests too much in ideals and institutions and not enough in the specific needs of particular
people: it is a form of retreat from social responsibility into the protected enclave of the self.” Blake
Stimson, “What Was Humanism?” Either/And (May 30, 2013), accessed April 1, 2016,
http://eitherand.org/humanism-dead/what-was-humanism/.
92
Cornell Capa, The Concerned Photographer, Volume II (New York, Grossman Publishers with the
International Fund for Concerned Photography, 1972); Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to
the Present (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 235-246; Louis Kaplan, American Exposures:
Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2005), 48-49.
93
Magnum photographers contributed 14% of the images in The Family of Man’s exhibition and I return to
Magnum’s relationship to Steichen in chapters 1, 4, and 5 by placing both the agency and curator into the
broader context of postwar photojournalism. I have found that writing about Magnum’s photography via its
inclusion in The Family of Man becomes a slippery slope into debates about humanism as such. Ignatieff
proposes that Barthes’ attack was also an attack on Magnum’ liberal humanist ethics, for instance, but I
have not found any such historical connections. Ignatieff, Magnum Degrees, 56.

34
Many of the institutions or individuals with whom Magnum first partnered in the
aftermath of World War II were committed to the spirit of “one-world” liberal humanism,
embodied by such organizations as the United Nations.
94
In chapter 1, I examine how
Magnum situated its business practice within that impulse by producing photo essays for
UNESCO and Ladies’ Home Journal’s “People are People the World Over” series. But
when postwar humanism gave way to an internationalism of a different sort – including
the rise of international travel (treated in chapter 3) or the international expansion of
American corporations (chapter 4) – Magnum evolved with it and in some cases even
anticipated the changing ways in which global consciousness manifested itself in the
postwar period. Without discounting the photographers’ personal experiences nor
avoiding the visual content of their work, I contend that conviction does not explain the
social and material history of photojournalism, and that knowing a photographer’s
commitments does not necessarily explain the choices they (and their editors) made after
the war.
95

Scholars have also relied on the personas of Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-
Bresson to explain the ways in which Magnum is unique. On the occasion of a 1989
Magnum retrospective, which generated an extensive research effort into the agency’s

94
The idea of “one world,” analyzed in chapter 1, was canonized in the air travel memoir by Wendell L.
Wilkie, One World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1943). It gained new urgency in the aftermath of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki through Dexter Masters and Katharine Way, eds. One World or None: A Report to
the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb (New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., Inc., 1946).
95
In so doing I work against the biographical interpretations of iconic images by Magnum photographers,
including Chim’s portrait of the orphaned Polish Tereska drawing a picture of her house on a blackboard.
Biographers have read this image through Chim’s discovery of his own parents’ death in Poland a few
weeks before, suggesting that like his subject, the photographer was also trying to make sense of his home
and wartime experiences. See Carole Naggar, “Chim’s Children – A Second Look,” accessed March 9,
2012, http://www.brandeis.edu/hbi/childrenholocaust/workingpapers/naggar.pdf; Inge Bondi, Chim: The
Photographs of David Seymour (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), 90-93, and Tom Beck,
David Seymour (Chim) (Oxford: Phaidon, 2005). By contrast, I consider her portrait as a postwar
humanitarian image (in chapter 1) and later as a summary of Chim’s photographic oeuvre following his
death (in chapter 5).

35
history by a group of scholars and friends of Magnum, the photo critic Fred Ritchin
composed a foundational account that also re-entrenched many of the myths that had
been circulating about the agency since the 1950s. In particular, he claimed that to
understand Magnum, one needed to understand Capa and Cartier-Bresson as archetypes
of the essential qualities of photojournalism and as the two poles of the agency. Capa
represented the documentary, narrative aspect of photography, while Cartier-Bresson
represented the personal, subjective vision and the idea that a photography was self-
sufficient and therefore did not require captions or story texts to explain its meaning.
96

Capa was the intrepid reporter getting close to the heart of the action, insisting to his
Magnum colleagues that “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,”
while Cartier-Bresson was the artist with a camera, taking pride in his sixth sense for
capturing “decisive moments.”
97
Readers were led to understand that all Magnum
photographers, by extension, worked between these poles.
98

The persistent Cartier-Bresson-Capa dichotomy, to which I return in chapter 5,
interferes with a more expansive history of Magnum’s daily operations and the many
theories of the image that circulated within the organization. It also suggests that art and
document continue to form an unresolved binary within the history of photography. It is
true that such boundaries once preoccupied modernist and postmodernist critics. Between
the 1930s and 1960s, the idea of a pure photographic practice – untethered to the market,
emerging from the eye of the artist, and centering on photography’s unique formal

96
Manchester, In Our Time, 419-425.
97
Hall, “Last Happy Band,” 117-125 and Fondiller, “Image and Reality,” 58-102. Fondiller notes, “If Capa
was the Napoleon of Magnum, Henri Cartier-Bresson, like General Richelieu, was its Eminence grice – a
power behind the throne.” Ibid., 73. The Capa-Cartier-Bresson binary is even stronger in Jean Lacouture,
“The Founders” in Manchester, In Our Time, 47-61 and repeated again in Boot, Magnum Stories, 6.
98
Magnum photographers and the critics writing about them have chosen which of these two traditions
Magnumites adhere to. See Barbie Zelizer, “War and Conflict in Magnum’s Eyes” in Hoelscher, Reading
Magnum, 42-47; Boot, Magnum Stories, 6, 362; Manchester, In Our Time, 438-439.

36
qualities – began to dominate discussions of the medium.
99
MOMA figures such as James
Thrall Soby and John Szarkowski cleaved the medium into artistic and commissioned
photography and defined them as irreconcilable, while distancing Henri Cartier-Bresson
in particular from the press photography tradition.
100
Scholars associated with the journal
October soon challenged such distinctions, calling upon photography historians to attend
to photography’s original “discursive spaces,” i.e. the circumstances under which images
were first commissioned and how they were initially collected and displayed.
101
Alan
Sekula and John Tagg among others focused on the ways in which photographs were
ideological tools but as Doug Nickel aptly notes, the subject of their Foucauldian
critiques “was never truly photography at all” but institutions, power, capitalism, and the
government.
102
In the decades following these debates, a number of scholars complicated
such relationships by demonstrating that some photographers worked with multiple
priorities in mind: answering to the needs of employers, taking into account technical and
formal concerns, and paying attention to their images’ marketability.
103
Nevertheless, this
scholarship dealt with select photographers (including Timothy O’Sullivan, Eugene
Atget, and Berenice Abbott) and emphasized such institutions as museums and

99
For an excellent overview of the development of photographic history as a field and its relationship to art
history, see Nickel, “History of Photography,” 548-558. Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography is
often referenced as the origin of a modernist photographic discourse and I briefly analyze this assessment
in chapter 5.
100
Cookman, “Cartier-Bresson Reinterprets Career,” 64-66.
101
These essays are compiled in Bolton, Contest of Meaning.
102
Nickel, “History of Photography,” 555.
103
Scholarship that overturned such modernist and postmodernist debates and which has influenced my
own thinking includes Elizabeth Ann McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris,
1848-1871 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Sarah Burns, Inventing the modern Artist: Art and
Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), albeit not dealing with
photography as such; Robin Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for US Surveys, 1850-
1890 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); and Terri Weissman, The Realisms of Berenice
Abbott: Documentary Photography and Political Action (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2011).

37
governments while excluding other systems integral to photography’s history – especially
the press – altogether.
Understanding how press photography operates is central to this project and it has
long garnered the attention of communication scholars, who have dealt with the subject
from a presentist perspective, for instance demonstrating how the digital turn displaced
traditional practices in analog photography or information-gathering.
104
Also within
communication, scholars invested in the press’ relationship to democracy and civil
society have examined how press images, especially iconic ones, shape collective
memory, model citizenship, and create (or fail to create) blueprints for action.
105
Those
who deal with the historical conditions of photojournalism are often retired practitioners
who instruct budding photographers, inspire lay readers’ respect for the daring and
innovative profession, and address the ethical dimension of news photography as it
affects both viewers and practitioners.
106

Over the past decade, art historians have also turned to studying photojournalistic
images, relying predominantly on modes of formal and literary analysis to “read” the
visual contents of magazines and analyze their design innovations. They have likewise
employed reception studies to think about how illustrated publications addressed readers

104
See for instance Susan Keith, “Horseshoes, stylebooks, wheels, poles, and dummies: Objects of editing
power in 20
th
-century newsrooms” Journalism (August 28, 2014), 1-17, accessed November 12, 2015,
doi:10.1177/1464884914545732, and Christine Larson, “Live Publishing: The Onstage Redeployment of
Journalistic Authority,” Media, Culture, & Society 37:3 (2015), 440-459.
105
Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and
Liberal Democracy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007); Ariella Azouley, The Civil Contract of
Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008); Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011).
106
Claude Cookman, American Photojournalism: Motivations and Meanings (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2009); Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty. The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-
Maker from the Crimea to Iraq (Baltimore: Prion Books, 2004). On the contemporary celebration of
photojournalism at Barnstorm, a workshop for young photojournalists founded by Eddie Adams, see
Gürsel, Image Brokers, 189-222.

38
and thereby shaped collective identity, politics and culture.
107
Such approaches suggest
that the most meaningful elements of photojournalism are the final products that appeared
on the page rather than the transactions and decision-making that happened behind the
scenes. In other instances, art historians have asked how individual photographers
worked to establish their own unique perspective within the collective system of
photojournalism.
108
Some have made straw men and nuisances out of magazine
publishers and photo editors who imposed practical constraints upon the photographer’s
creativity.
109
These tropes correlate to a longer tradition of monographic studies of
photographers including Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, who fought for and contributed
to photography’s status as an autonomous form of artistic expression.
110

In order to situate Magnum’s operations within press history, one also has to look
beyond the history of communication, art and photography, though the picture is still
fragmented. Most notably, Benedict Anderson placed newspaper reading at the center of
his study of the rise of nationalism, demonstrating how print media connected otherwise
isolated readers and turned them into a shared community.
111
More recently, scholars of

107
See in particular Erika Doss, ed. Looking at Life (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2001); Wendy Kozol,
Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1994); Martin A. Berger, Seeing Through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2011); Carol Quirke, Eyes on Labor: News Photography and
America’s Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
108
Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997).
109
David Campany, Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (Göttingen, Steidl, 2014); Galassi, “Old Worlds,
Modern Times.” Photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson and W. Eugene Smith helped perpetuate
this narrative about the photo editor. See Cookman, “Cartier-Bresson Reinterprets his Career,” and
Willumson, Smith and the Photographic Essay.
110
Jonathan Green, Camera Work: A Critical Anthology (New York: Aperture, 1983); William Innes
Homer, Alfred Steiglitz and the Photo-Secession (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983); Sarah Greenough, Paul
Strand: An American Vision (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1990); Therese Thau Heyman, ed., Seeing Straight:
The f.64 Revolution in Photography (Oakland: Oakland Museum, 1992). For a more recent inquiry into the
terms of Stieglitz’ modernism see Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz
Circle (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012).
111
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New
York: Verso, 2006).

39
the press have studied how the rise of newspapers and the very idea of the news affected
popular culture.
112
Yet such work focuses predominantly on verbal journalism rather than
taking into account how news images – which developed in tandem with the popular
press – shaped mass media.
113
In so doing, this literature internalizes the longstanding
dismissal of pictorial reporting, which characterized the journalistic profession until
World War II.
114
This situation has been somewhat rectified with the recent publication
of Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, which places images (and not
only photography) at the center of journalism’s long and complicated history, but far
more historical work on news images remains to be done.
115

Recovering the Decisive Network
To understand Magnum’s postwar operations, I draw on many archives belonging
to Magnum photographers, staff, clients, and partners. When I began this project,
contemporary Magnum photographers, foundation directors, and photographers’ widows
suggested that I would not find a paper trail regarding Magnum’s early activities. Those
who lived through the years under discussion here recalled that sales and assignments
were handled over the phone, at informal meetings, or during martini lunches. Wishing to
prove that Magnum photographers were independent of the editors for whom they
completed stories, relatives said that George Rodger, Erich Hartmann, Henri Cartier-
Bresson and others did not work from shooting scripts or keep notes. Once I began

112
Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of the News. How the World Came to Know About Itself (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2014).
113
Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 3.
114
Barbie Zelizer, “Words Against Images: Positioning Newswork in the Age of Photography” in Hanno
Hardt and Bonnie Brennen, eds. Newsworkers: Toward History of the Rank and File (University of
Minnesota Press, 1995), 135-159.
115
Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture.

40
probing, I found that the opposite was true. Since 2012, I have made digital reproductions
of over ten thousand pages of letters, contracts, scripts, and story research notes while
traveling to archives in New York (the Magnum Foundation, the Inge Morath
Foundation, and the Erich Hartmann Estate), Paris (the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
and John G. Morris’ Magnum papers), Smarden, UK (the estate of George Rodger),
Zurich (the estate of Werner Bischof), New Haven (the Eve Arnold papers), Tucson (the
Magnum papers at the Center for Creative Photography), Austin (Magnum’s picture
library at the Ransom Center), Louisville (the Standard Oil archive), Philadelphia (the
Curtis Publishing Company), Chicago (John Morris’ personal papers), Princeton
(Magnum editor Inge Bondi papers), Los Angeles (Beaumont Newhall papers at the
Getty Research Institute), and Washington DC (National Archives and The Smithsonian
Traveling Exhibition Service).
One key archive – the International Center for Photography (ICP), which holds
the papers of Magnum co-founders Robert Capa and David Seymour as well as those of
Cornell Capa, who founded the ICP – has been difficult to access.
116
Luckily,
photographers copied each other on much of their correspondence and many (though
certainly not all) letters by the Capas and Chim are also filed in the archives of Cartier-
Bresson, Rodger, John Morris, and the Magnum Foundation. This limitation encouraged
me to study lesser-known Magnum photographers and to take seriously the role of staff
members and Magnum’s clients. It also encouraged me to ask questions about the

116
My research began in 2010, coinciding with a tumultuous period of reorganization and moving for the
ICP, which, according to the curator of the Capa and Chim archives Cynthia Young, has made it almost
impossible for me to work in those collections. I hope that I will be able to access the ICP’s holdings when
revising this dissertation into a book. The few instances in which I cite an ICP document in this dissertation
refer to an early visit in which I was able to look at tear sheets in the Capa archive, or letters that were on
display in archival cases in ICP exhibitions, including We Went Back! Photographs from Europe 1933-
1956 by Chim (January 18-May 5, 2013) and Capa in Color (January 31-May 4, 2014) .

41
mythologies surrounding such photographers as Capa and how certain narratives are
perpetuated by photographic institutions, including the ICP.
The preponderance of archival material I found demonstrates that effective
communication between photographers (dispersed throughout the world), clients
(predominantly in New York, London and Paris), and staff (based in New York and
Paris) was central to Magnum’s operations and is itself worth studying in order to
understand how photojournalism was carried out on a global scale in the decades after the
war. Magnum photographers also made hundreds of thousands of exposures that they
never saw or published, and these images are likewise in their archives in the form of
negatives, contact sheets, and 8 x 10” press prints. The pace and scale of their work
suggests that we pay careful attention to overproduction as a fundamental feature of
photography’s medium specificity. By studying the “concrete material activities” of the
photographic agency, I historicize many of the issues that media anthropologist Zeynep
Gürsel recently foregrounded in her groundbreaking study of the circulation of digital
news images.
117
In so doing, I demonstrate how Magnum’s system of analog production
and distribution laid the foundation for today’s digital revolution, which now poses many
of the same opportunities and challenges of access, speed, and overproduction that
Magnum navigated in the late forties to early sixties.
It is impossible to write an exhaustive account of Magnum’s overproduction and
digital humanities scholars including Lev Manovich are currently trying to engage with
the wealth of visual data produced in modernity.
118
Image saturation offers a

117
Gürsel, Image Brokers, 27.
118
Digital platforms do not provide an inherent solution to this problem. While Manovich has shown that
art historians can employ data visualization to analyze the entire oeuvre of one or two artists, such projects
can reinforce traditional approaches to the study of art – including a focus on great masters and attention to

42
methodological challenge, especially to a modernist form of art history invested in
origins and singular works.
119
I therefore model my work on recent media histories that
reconstitute the diverse networks of professionals who shaped the public’s
comprehension of politics and culture by experimenting with media such as television
news and multi-media “surrounds” after World War II.
120
I also attend to the broader
visual economy in which Magnum operated.
121
I consider the multiple sites for
photography that that were vying for readers’ attention (and providing markets for
Magnum) while also taking into account how the visual culture of the news influenced
corporate promotion, advertising, and museum displays.
122
And by recognizing the
printed page as the primary context for photography’s circulation, I ask questions about
collaborative labor and processes such as editing, layout, design and printing that have
traditionally occupied print and book historians but which are methodologically relevant

their iconography or color schemes – instead of embracing art history’s turn towards interdisciplinarity and
the study of networks. See for instance Lev Manovich, “Mondrian vs. Rothko: footprints and evolution in
style and space,” Software Studies, accessed on January 20, 2016,
http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/06/mondrian-vs-rothko-footprints-and.html
119
For a classic critique of such an art history see Krauss, Origins of the Avant-Garde.
120
Such efforts involved philanthropists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, politicians, artists,
photographers, cameramen, journalists, and advertisers among others. See Conway, Origins of Television
News; Anna McCarthy, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America (New York: The
New Press, 2010); Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from
World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Brian Hochman,
Savage Preservation: The Ethnographic Origins of Modern Media Technology (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014); and Charles L. Ponce de Leon, That’s the Way It Is.
121
Scholars now cited as the founders of visual studies, including Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Kracauer, and
Aby Warburg, wrote extensively about the entire visual culture of modernity, which included not only
photography but also film, arcades, window displays, and the nature of seeing and experiencing urban life.
On the reclaiming of Benjamin and others for visual studies see Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M.
Przyblyski, “Visual Culture’s History: Twenty-First Century Interdisciplinarity and its Nineteenth Century
Objects” in Schwartz and Przyblyski, eds., The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 3-14 and Schwartz, “Walter Benjamin for Historians.”
122
An excellent methodological framing about visual economies that has influenced my own is the
introduction in Heide Fehrenback and Davide Rodogno, eds. Humanitarian Photography: A History
(Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1-21.

43
for historians of photography and the illustrated press.
123
In so doing, this project argues
for expanding art historical methods and objects of study in order to better deal with a
multiplicity of “authors” (photographers, editors, art designers), “patrons” (publishers and
advertisers) involved in photojournalism, and an overabundance of images that cannot be
defined by any single label (including journalism, publicity, or art). There is some
precedent for this within art history, considering the field’s growing interest in networks
and artistic exchange, as well as art history’s established tradition of studying the social
context of art and the role of patrons, dealers, and workshops, but such methods have
been applied to the fine arts with more regularity than to photography.
124

My selection of images and photo essays is not intended to create a new or
expanded “canon” of Magnum photography, nor to aestheticize unspectacular
photographs that postwar readers may have glossed over quickly or perhaps ignored
altogether. I have chosen projects whose visual and epistolary record demonstrates how
Magnum responded to specific challenges in innovative ways, whether the challenges
were geographic, temporal, technical, aesthetic, political, or economic. Certain
assignments and clients to stand in for larger trends, as in the case of Capa’s trip the
USSR – one of the few instances in which I deal with the conditions of photography

123
A book historian recently wrote, “It cannot be emphasized too strongly that book production is a
collaborative enterprise, a group effort organized by publishers in association with artists, authors, agents,
editors, printers, binders, booksellers, and many others engaged in allied trades. Some of the larger
publishers employed executive assistants and middle-management personnel such as art directors, book
designers, and production managers.” John Bidwell, Graphic Passion: Matisse and the Book Arts
(Philadelphia: Penn State Press & The Morgan Library, 2015), 45. Also see Richard Benson, The Printed
Picture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008).
124
A notable exception is Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters, and Photographers in
Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Art historical models for studying
networks include Leah Dickerman, ed. Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925 (New York: MOMA, 2013) and
Helen Molesworth, Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933-1957 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2015). Sociologist Howard Becker argued for such a networked approach to the arts in
Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

44
behind the Iron Curtain – or in the case of Holiday magazine, which here demonstrates
larger trends in the visual culture of tourism.
I also employ selectivity via Magnum’s rich archive by dealing with projects that
are linked to a significant paper trail. Since my goal is to elucidate the workings of the
illustrated press and other settings for press agency photography, I substantiate my visual
analysis with related materials including Magnum reports, letters, shooting scripts (which
contain instructions for assignments) and correspondence with editors. Many compelling
and iconic images are not treated here because their production histories remain obscure.
In some instances, I recount collaborative efforts that did not result in published stories or
which failed altogether because these also help to explain Magnum’s operations and the
photojournalistic profession as much as published materials do. Finally, I have dealt with
the problem of plenty by focusing on a few Magnum photographers in depth rather than
dealing with all of its members from the first twenty years. George Rodger and Erich
Hartmann are two lesser-known Magnum photographers who left behind extensive
portfolios of work and archival records and who led me to look closely at Magnum’s
industrial work, which is a pivotal dimension of photojournalism’s postwar history.
This history begins in the immediate aftermath of World War II as the agency’s
soon-to-be founders transitioned out of war reporting and began to survey the postwar
world through photography. I conclude in the early 1960s, when the media critic Daniel
Boorstin proclaimed that an image world of pseudo-events – events created in order to be
covered by the media – had firmly taken root, changing the very nature of the news from
news “gathering” to “news-making.”
125
In reality, modern journalists and publishers have
fabricated news stories and sensationalized reality to generate reader interest and sell

125
Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseduo-Events in America (Random House, 2012 [1962]), 3.

45
copy since the 18
th
century, and this impulse only accelerated once illustrations could
accompany text.
126
Nevertheless, Boorstin recognized that the postwar period heralded
immense transitions for the visual culture of the news and the public’s relationship to the
world, which they sought to understand through the media. Rather than attributing these
shifts solely to television and the media strategies of politicians and celebrities in the
1960s, I examine the role that Magnum’s cosmopolitan, itinerant photojournalists played
in shaping a culture of mediation and image saturation, predominantly in the United
States, immediately after the war. Between the late 1940s and early 1960s, Magnum
focused on covering Europe and “the world” for American publications, businesses, and
readers, and this flow of visual information across the Atlantic is the focus of my study.
There remains another history of the agency’s placement of stories in European
periodicals that was simply beyond the scope of this project.
127

The 1960s offers a fitting end point because the decade gave rise to new
geopolitical realities, shifting Magnum’s photographic attention towards domestic issues
such as the struggle for civil rights, anti-Vietnam protests, and the culture of the Kennedy
administration. Magnum photographers not only ceased to study the uniquely “postwar”
transitions that defined their earlier work, but Magnum itself entered a new era as an

126
In his critique of Boorstin, McLuhan noted that even the printing press once threatened those afraid of
losing language. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 199-212. On the production of news stories in early
newspapers, see Pettegree, The Invention of the News, and Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form
of News: A History (New York: The Guilford Press, 2001), 1-108. On the relationship between reality and
spectacle in the 19
th
century illustrated press, see Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass
Culture in Fin-de-Siecle Paris (Los Angeles: University Of California Press, 1998).
127
Examining Magnum’s relationship to its European client base would facilitate a better understanding of
American influences on European periodicals and advertisements after World War II. It would complicate
our understanding of postwar “Europe” as a single entity by demonstrating the extent to which publications
in such countries as France, Germany, Italy, and England differed (or not) in their reproduction of Magnum
stories about such issues as the war in Algeria or life behind the Iron Curtain. It would also ask us to
grapple with European networks of picture editors who influenced photographic exhibitions, book
publishing, and the commercial sale of photography in the fifties and sixties, including Roger Therond,
picture editor of Paris Match and the publisher Robert Delpire.

46
organization. While the first generation of Magnum’s photographers were predominantly
Europeans and émigrés to the US, in the 1960s its American membership expanded.
Younger photographers such as Elliott Erwitt and Wayne Miller took up positions of
leadership on the Magnum board, displacing the founding generation. Capa had already
died in Indo-China in 1954 and Chim in the Suez in 1956. Rodger scaled back his
activities because of his declining health and Cartier-Bresson, disillusioned by the
younger photographers’ embrace of the advertising market, retired from Magnum
altogether in 1966.
128
Staff members including Magnum’s Executive Editor John G.
Morris, who was pivotal to Magnum’s growth in the 1950s and whose papers form a
significant archival base for my project, resigned in 1962. Magnum’s new leadership no
longer worked “in the shadow of World War II,” to use Tony Judt’s phrase. Finally, the
early 1960s ushered in the first serious wave of Magnum mythologies in the form of
books and exhibitions, which began to reframe the meaning of Magnum’s early
operations.
The following five chapters are organized chronologically and according to the
specific markets with which Magnum worked. The first chapter, “In the Shadow of War,”
establishes the “postwar” as a problem for Magnum’s photographers. I examine a series
of assignments that Magnum photographers including David Seymour prepared between
1945 and 1948 for This Week, UNESCO, and Ladies’ Home Journal. I demonstrate how
Magnum turned to the established genre of the human interest story and gave it new life
by expanding the genre to a global scale and by applying methods of the sociological
survey to their photographic stories for the press and humanitarian organizations alike.

128
I attend to this conflict in chapters 4 and 5 but also recognize that turning this into a book will require a
separate discussion, if not chapter, on Magnum’s advertising photography in the late 1950s and 1960s.

47
These projects embodied the spirit of the one-world movement and generated formally
moving images that would later attest to Magnum’s “humanist” spirit, but they were also
representative of Magnum’s innovative thinking about how to work with like-minded
picture editors and generate news despite the end of WWII and its unprecedented
mediatization.
Chapter two, “Where’s Magnum? Covering the World in 1948” focuses on a
series of groundbreaking photo stories that the Magnum founders produced around the
world – in the Soviet Union, China, India, and Israel – in the critical year of 1948, which
scholars have recently begun to consider as a watershed moment in a more globalized
approach to the postwar period.
129
Rather than examining the now iconic photographs
that resulted from these global travels and brought Magnum international fame, this
chapter foregrounds the contingency that Magnum photographers and the organization as
a whole faced in its first year of operations. I focus on the technical, financial, and
creative challenges that George Rodger, Robert Capa, and Henri Cartier-Bresson faced
on a daily basis as they figured out which geographic locations to cover, how those places
should be photographed, and where those stories should be sold. By asking what it meant
to be “global” and a “photojournalist” in 1948, this chapter considers how the speed of
travel and communication shaped the content and circulation of Magnum’s 1948 photo
essays. It likewise demonstrates how Magnum founders navigated geopolitics while
seeking to establish their individual photographic styles and develop relationships with
clients.

129
Leela Gandhi and Deborah L. Nelson, “Editors’ Introduction,” Around 1948: Interdisciplinary
Approaches to Global Transformation: Critical Inquiry 40:4 (Summer 2014), 285-297.

48
The third chapter, “On Holiday” examines the agency’s fruitful relationship with
the US travel magazine Holiday between 1949 and 1956, focusing on the production of a
series of surveys about youth, women, and children around the world. I trace how
Magnum brought its editorial approach and human interest angle into the tourism
industry, documenting Europe as it transitioned from a site of rubble to an increasingly
glamorous and friendly continent ready for consumption and pleasure. I argue that as new
enterprises founded in the aftermath of the war, Magnum and Holiday helped each other
to define their roles in the changing landscape of postwar photojournalism, and that for
both, the boundary between journalistic and promotional photography was blurry, if not
altogether non-existent. This chapter contributes to the history of magazines more
generally by demonstrating how independent image suppliers could shape the editorial
content of one publication, and like the previous two chapters, it considers what
photojournalists willingly did for their editors and what they learned in the process.
Chapter four, “Their Daily Bread,” charts the entrenchment of the human interest
and news aesthetic in the late 1950s and early 1960s visual culture, when international
corporations turned to Magnum to imbue their public relations campaigns with the feel of
editorial photo reporting. Stories by George Rodger for the Standard Oil Company of
New Jersey and Erich Hartmann’s work for the Pillsbury Company demonstrate how
corporate assignments enabled Magnum photographers to travel the world while carrying
out documentary projects of journalistic and aesthetic value. While previous chapters
demonstrate that all of the agency’s photography was already commercial, this chapter
shows how, in a competitive world of emergent television broadcasting and news
agencies, corporate assignments provided Magnum with better conditions for producing

49
documentary and human interest photography. Refuting the notion that Magnum
photographers “sold out” by taking on corporate work, I demonstrate instead how
photojournalism was a key contributor to the visual culture of corporate capitalism after
World War II.
The final chapter, “Magnum Mythologies,” considers the recodification of
Magnum’s news and public relations photography within the emergent markets for photo
books and exhibitions in the fifties and sixties. Both settings propagated what have
become central narratives associated with Magnum: the “decisive moment,” the art of
clicking the shutter at the right time (and was embodied by the figure of Henri Cartier-
Bresson), and the photographer as concerned witness to history (embodied by Capa,
Bischof and Chim). The chapter demonstrates how Magnum’s own public relations
efforts projected traditional values of artistic autonomy onto a group of photojournalists
for whom collaboration had always been central, thereby obscuring the “decisive
network” while elevating individual photographers and images. The collective, press
histories that such mythologies buried subsequently shaped how histories of postwar
photography and photojournalism would be told.
I conclude this study by tracing Magnum’s relationship to the ICP (the
International Fund for Concerned Photography, now the International Center for
Photography), which Cornell Capa established in 1972. This private institution has
played a fundamental role in shaping contemporary reflection on photojournalism and
documentary photography. I demonstrate that the ICP emerged from a particular late s
context, which saw the rise of television news and the sense that photojournalists lacked
political commitment, as well as the problem of how to manage the large picture archives

50
left behind by Robert Capa, Chim, and Bischof. In the attempt to establish a museum and
archival center devoted exclusively to documentary photography, Cornell Capa also
created a discourse of concerned and engaged photography with the legacy of his brother
at the center. The historian Peter Fritzsche has noted that “for archives to collect the past,
the past has to come to mind as something imperiled and distinctive.”
130
As a breakaway
from Magnum, the ICP allows us to ask not only whether the sixties signaled the end of a
certain kind of photojournalism, but also how photojournalism’s and Magnum’s history
began to be institutionalized, narrated, and mythologized once it began to be collected.

130
Peter Fritzsche, “The Archive,” History and Memory 17:1/2 (Spring-Winter 2005), 18.

51
Chapter 1

In the Shadow of War:
Magnum Photos and the Global Human Interest Story

The end of World War II posed an unprecedented challenge to photographers and
a host of professionals in the industry of photojournalism, all of whom had to deal with
the end of the most spectacular, longest, largest, and most photographed conflict – and
news story – that the world had experienced to date. Unsure of what the postwar world
might demand of Magnum photographers and the organization as a whole, Magnum’s
founders opted for an expansive definition of their aims when they filed their certificate
of incorporation on May 22, 1947. Magnum would “do commercial, industrial, artistic,
and aerial photography, and photography of whatsoever kind, nature, or description…
[and] carry on the business of photography in all its branches, in any part of the
world…”
1
These criteria demonstrated that Magnum photographers wished to make a
living from their photography and that they were thinking broadly about their client base.
Yet the inclusion of “aerial photography” – a technology that had contributed over 80 per
cent of Allied intelligence about the enemy during World War II – also suggested that the
experience of combat was still on the minds of Magnum’s founders.
2
This was the case
for David “Chim” Seymour, who had spent the war interpreting such images for the US
Air Force and who had the hardest time moving on from the war on a personal and
professional level. During his first year as a Magnum photographer, Chim struggled more
than anyone in the cooperative to find magazine customers. American editors did not
know him the way they knew Robert Capa, George Rodger, and Bill Vandivert, whose

1
Quoted in Fondiller, “Image and Reality,” 62.
2
Susan D. Moeller, Shooting War: Photography and the American Experience of Combat (New York:
Basic Books, 1989), 192.

52
work appeared regularly in Life, or Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose photographs had been
exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art. When Chim
suggested photo essays on the reconstruction of Europe or the fate of postwar refugees,
he found that magazines, fatigued with the story of World War II and its aftermath, were
lukewarm. Chim’s struggles were indicative of the broader learning curve at Magnum.
How exactly could the organization crack the editorial market in the United States after
the war? To what extent was there room for the recent past in their photographic
reporting on the present? In other words, how would Magnum deal with the transition
from “war photography” to “postwar” photojournalism?
This chapter examines two of the first and most significant Magnum projects from
the immediate postwar period – the Magnum-wide “People are People the World Over”
for Ladies Home Journal [Figure 1.1] and Chim’s “Children of Europe” story for
UNESCO (the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization) [Figure
1.2] to answer these questions. I consider the media landscape in which Magnum was
created and track the shifting editorial priorities in the United States, and to a lesser
extent Europe, which substantially shaped Magnum’s coverage of postwar Europe and
the world. I argue that the partnerships into which Magnum photographers entered in
order to remain employed as photojournalists are crucial to understanding the content of
the work they produced. Although editors have been largely written out of the history of
photojournalism, which focuses more on the images that appeared in print and the people
behind the camera, in this chapter, the picture editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, John G.
Morris, is a central figure. By understanding Morris’ politics and editorial vision in
particular, we can better see that “People are People the World Over” was a hybrid

53
product of international advocacy and illustrated journalism: echoing the values and
efforts of organizations such as the United Nations, but also building on successful
strategies in the modern press. At the same time, Chim’s “Children of Europe” survey
demonstrates that Magnum’s postwar work was immediately relevant for the
humanitarian photography market, especially at UNESCO, which embraced the tools of
mass communications after the war and turned to the reportorial and visual strategies of
print media to raise money for and build awareness about its activities. Notably and
despite its central position within histories of the illustrated press, Life magazine was not
a significant partner for early Magnum and part of the organization’s learning curve
focused on building relationships with magazines outside of the Time, Inc. empire.
In the absence of the spectacular conflict of World War II, Magnum took
advantage of its international structure and produced large-scaled reports in which life
around the world became the very subject of the agency’s reporting. These surveys were
not about headline news in the conventional sense but responded to magazines’ demand
for human interest stories – an established genre of the illustrated press that Magnum
expanded to global dimensions. Such photographic surveys resonated with editors and
leaders who were thinking in internationalist terms amidst the end of World War II and
the rise of the Cold War. As a result, I argue that Magnum’s early projects are less about
the advent of a humanist style than they are about the close relationship between
photography, advocacy, and news in the late 1940s.

54
Cameras at War
When it ended in 1945, World War II was the most mediated and politically
significant event that the world had ever experienced. For six years, photography, film,
radio and the nascent form of television news sought to keep up with a conflict being
fought on “on five continents, seven seas, and a dozen different fronts.”
3
In the United
States, still and moving images were meant to unite the American public in its perception
of the Second Word War as a necessary battle against evil. Photographs educated and
informed people about the war’s progress, but they also shaped public opinion by
arousing animosity towards US enemies, combated complacency, incited active
participation in the workforce, and increased war bond sales, suggesting that most war
photography functioned as public relations for the war effort.
4

Indeed, the military and media worked together to anticipate and prepare every
key event of World War II for the camera. Every unit of the armed forces had a basic
team that included at least one still and one cinematic photographer.
5
One hundred
combat and fifty civilian photographers covered the D-Day invasion.
6
At least seventeen
photographers and cameramen were called in to document the German surrender to
General Eisenhower.
7
Photographers and film crews accompanied each Allied unit as
they entered prisoner of war and concentration camps and faced the unprecedented

3
Michael Griffin, “The Great War Photographs: Constructing Myths of History and Photojournalism” in
Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt, eds. Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1999), 125. Moeller, Shooting War, 181. On radio during WWII see Stanley
Cloud and Lynne Olson, The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Frontlines of Broadcast Journalism (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1996). On the wartime rise of television news see Mike Conway, The Origins of
Television News in America: The Visualizers of CBS in the 1940s (New York: Peter Lang Publishing,
2009).
4
On the premeditated use of images in the war effort see George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War:
American Visual Experience During World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
5
Griffin, “The Great War Photographs,” 95.
6
Moeler, Shooting War, 197.
7
Loengard, Life Photographers, 136.

55
atrocities committed by the Nazis and their allies.
8
Their images reached the public
though an extensive and highly regimented process. The Still Photographic War Pool –
formed in January 1942 and consisting of the Associated Press, Newspictures,
International News Photo, and Life magazine – supplied photographers to every front of
the war and made its photographs accessible to all publications in the US.
9
Public
Relations Officers embedded with each theater were responsible for ensuring that each
combat operation received press coverage, and this came with ample organizational
challenges, including how to get correspondents to the front and back again; how to
physically deliver their film to London, Washington, New York, or Los Angeles by
plane, ship, or radio signal; and how to pass images through the military censors in time
for the material to still be newsworthy.
10
Many images failed to be made in the first place,
either because it was technically impossible to photograph at night (when most of the
fighting occurred) or because stopping to take a picture of the enemy could have resulted
in the photographer’s death. Even the war photographers who were in the right place at
the right time would note that their images failed to capture what it was actually like to be
there because the scale, action, emotions, and sounds of the war could not be captured
through photographs.
11
The organizational and ideological constraints of war coverage
resulted in images that had, according to some, a “disappointing sameness to it all,” and

8
Ibid., 169-170. For one reconstruction of this history see Sylvie Lindeperg, Tom Mes, trans. Night and
Fog: A Film in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
9
Moeler, Shooting War, 181-183.
10
Shortly after Pearl Harbor FDR established the Office of Censorship and there were multiple censorship
agencies in the Army and Navy who screened each image produced by the hundreds of accredited military
and civilian photographers before allowing them to be distributed to publication editors. The photographer
Margaret Bourke-White recounts one instance in which not only her pictures, but also captions and entire
story layout were censored before appearing in Life. Editors at newspapers and magazines could further
censor photographs that they feared would disturb readers, advertisers, or both. Moeler, Shooting War, 184-
188 and Roeder, The Censored War, 9, 12-17, 92.
11
Roeder, The Censored War, 92-94.

56
which offered a clear and polarized depiction of the world while reducing the conflict to
an obvious battle between “us” and “them.”
12

Nevertheless, the illustrated press benefited from the regular onslaught of
spectacular imagery that the Pool provided. Readers learned of heroic acts by soldiers
through Robert Capa’s grainy close-ups of the D-Day landing at Omaha beach, revered
for their dramatic impact, their proximity to the fighting, and their miraculous salvation
from a darkroom fiasco that nearly “melted” all of Capa’s film.
13
[Figure 1.3] Readers
took stock of the extent of Nazi atrocity when they saw George Rodger’s liberation
photographs of Bergen-Belsen.
14
[Figure 1.4] They even witnessed the destructive force
unleashed by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, published in Life with
captions that betrayed little empathy. [Figure 1.5] Such images circulated widely during
World War II and the reading public increasingly began to expect that every significant
event could and should be documented through photography.
While the European press lay in shambles, magazine subscriptions in America
soared at unprecedented rates. Look’s circulation reached two million during the war

12
Roeder’s central critique of WWII photography is the visual polarization because of censorship. Ibid.,
95-96. While focusing predominantly on textual accounts of war, Phillip Knightley implicates
correspondents as well as military personnel in manipulating war reporting to reflect a nation’s strategic
demands. See Knightley, The First Casualty. Moeler observes that the censorship and bureaucracy of
WWII photography meant that “correspondents and photographers were accomplices in deceit – together
with the rest of America.” Moeler, Shooting War 190.
13
Now that A.D. Coleman debunked the latter mythology through his meticulous reconstruction of what
most certainly happened on D-Day (Capa only stayed in the water long enough to expose ten frames) it is
possible to recognize that war photographers had to take and transport their pictures, and that Capa
succeeded because he guarded his film and sent it to Life in time for publication while countless other rolls
of still and moving footage from that morning sank to the bottom of the ocean. See A.D. Coleman, “Robert
Capa on D-Day,” Photo Critic International Blog, accessed June 27, 2015
http://www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic/major-stories/major-series-2014/robert-capa-on-d-
day/.
14
On the press circulation of atrocity photographs during WWII, see David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish
Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 2011) and Barbie Zelizer,
Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998).

57
while Life claimed as early as 1942 that tens of millions of civilians and two out of three
Americans in the military read the magazine.
15
By 1948, it had 5.45 million subscribers,
in comparison to its 2.86 million subscribers in 1940.
16
As scholars, publishers, and
photographers have noted, “Life’s coverage of World War II appears to have won a
special place in the hearts of Americans,” and that magazine’s postwar success and
influence can be understood as a continuation of its influential wartime coverage. One
staff photographer at Life explained, “the war had made Life into the magazine it was”
and Henry Luce himself echoed that thought: “Life magazine didn’t start out to be a war
magazine, but that’s what it became.”
17
Readership increased not only because of the
urgency of World War II, but also because the illustrated press finally had the
technological capacity to keep up with the pace and scale of the international conflict.
War photographers were able to lighten their loads during combat by relying on the small
hand-held Leica and Contax 35mm cameras, estimating exposure time, and using fast
Kodak film, which had 36 exposures per roll.
18
The advent of electrical transmission
through radio and wire services meant that single images could be transmitted across
oceans and continents in a matter of minutes, while long range airplanes helped to deliver
films and thousands of prints to London or Washington D.C. more quickly than had

15
Moeler, Shooting War, 200 and Roeder, The Censored War, 5.
16
James L. Baughman, “Who Read LIFE? The Circulation of America’s Favorite Magazine” in Erica Doss,
ed. Looking at Life, 44.
17
Baughman, “Who Read LIFE?,” 43-44 and Loengard, Life Photographers, 200 and 219.
18
Moeler, Shooting War, 195. War photographers preferred Kodak film because its emulsion was harder
and more resistant to heat and humidity, which was especially important in the Pacific theater. Many also
used the Rolleiflex camera, which created a square image that allowed for more detail than the Leica, but
these cameras were more cumbersome and better suited to still scenes rather than action shots. For instance
on D-Day, Robert Capa used his Contax while shooting in the water and then photographed with the
Rolleiflex when he was aboard the U.S.S. Chase prior to the invasion. See A.D. Coleman, “Alternate
history: Robert Capa on D-Day (Guest Post 14: Q & A with John Morris),” Photo Critic International
Blog, accessed June 27, 2015 http://www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic/2014/07/29/guest-post-
14-qa-with-john-morris-a/.

58
previously been possible.
19
Photographs from around the world sent over the wire
services were printed in daily American newspapers, from the New York Times to PM,
while Life relied predominantly on hand-delivered films and took a few days to edit and
design extensive photographic features that were printed on a weekly basis.
20
By the end
of the war, news photography had become an accepted subfield of journalism while
photographers occupied a newly respected profession with its own associations. This
included the American Society of Magazine Photographers, founded in 1944, and the
National Press Photographers Association, established in 1946.
21
A number of
photographers, including soon-to-be Magnum founders Robert Capa and George Rodger,
as well as Carl Mydans and Joe Rosenthal, became celebrities for their wartime
accomplishments.
22

Just as importantly, World War II “de-provincialized” Americans.
23
The scale
and urgency of World War II’s photographic coverage made the American public care
about faraway places as never before. Simultaneously, an unprecedented number of
American citizens went abroad for the first time in the 1940s, returning home with an
intimate knowledge of the streets and people of Berlin, Paris, Tokyo. At three key
moments during the war – the invasion of Poland, the assault on Pearl Harbor, and D-Day
invasion of Normandy – Americans bought more maps in a matter of hours than they

19
Moeler, 181. The Associated Press launched the wire photo service in 1935. Barbie Zelizer,
“Journalism’s Last Stand: Wirephoto and the Discourse of Resistance,” Journal of Communication 45:2
(Spring 1995), 78-92
20
Magazines offered more in-depth visual reporting on a story than newspapers and the photographs used
by magazines were considered better and more complex, though not as fast as those of the wire services.
See Gürsel, “A Short History of Wire Service Photography” in Schwartz and Hill, Getting the Picture, 206-
211.
21
Griffin, “The Great War Photographs,” 126.
22
Loengard, Life Photographers, 8.
23
Louis Menand, “Postwar” in Henry Finder, ed., The 40s: The Story of a Decade (New York: Random
House, 2014), 234.

59
would have over the course of a year in peacetime, and they bought maps again to listen
to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chat” of February 27, 1942, when the President
explained America’s wartime strategy. Influenced by the war as well as the advent of
flight, companies such as National Geographic and Rand McNally updated their maps by
eschewing the Mercator projection in favor of the polar view [Figure 1.6], which visually
emphasized the interconnectedness of the world. Such globes and maps appeared
regularly in wartime films and in magazines including Time Inc.’s Fortune and Life,
illustrating events such as battles while also giving visual form to how Americans should
think about international politics.
24

Through mediated and first-hand experience, Americans’ knowledge of the world
in 1945 far surpassed what photographic albums of the nineteenth century or
encyclopedic travel magazines such as National Geographic had given armchair
travelers. When World War II ended, that world was suddenly familiar and personal.
From the perspective of the photographers and magazine editors who helped create that
reality, the world needed to remain urgently visible for a number of reasons: to continue
employing the many reporters and photographers already stationed around the world; to
keep up subscription rates and sales by showing that a given publication could cover
peacetime as well as it covered war; to satiate readers’ newfound interest in faraway
places and events, which they would soon visit for themselves because of their wartime

24
Roeder, The Censored War, 83-84 and Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America,
1880-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 204-238. See also Mark Monmonier, Maps with
the News: The Development of American Journalistic Cartography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989) and Timothy Barney, “Richard Edes Harrison and the Cartographic Perspective of Modern
Internationalism” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 15:3 (Fall 2012), 397-433.

60
savings and the advent of air travel; and to direct Americans’ global curiosity towards
supporting the U.S.’ political, financial, and ideological role in postwar reconstruction.
25

From War to Postwar: Re-learning the Trade
When the European campaign ended in May 1945, American magazine editors
asked photographers, including Capa and Chim, to cover the aftermath. Their work is
representative of the main approaches to representing postwar Europe, including focusing
on the visual traces of war – piles of rubble, bombed out building facades, wearied bodies
and faces – and the role of American servicemen in the recovery efforts abroad. Having
joined Life as a full-time staff photographer during the war, Capa continued executing
stories for the magazine in the summer and fall of 1945, when he was assigned to
photograph a chateau in Northern Germany that housed the illegitimate children of SS
officers (dubbed “Super Babies” by Life); to document the activities of Berlin’s black
market; and to attend the first Rosh Hashannah service held in Berlin since 1938. For the
latter story, which appeared in Life on October 8, 1945 under the title, “Jewish New Year:
American Army Helps Berlin Jews Restore Their Sacred Service,” Life editors contained
the story’s emotional impact by focusing on one American GI, who led the ritual of
undressing, reading, and dressing the scroll of the Hebrew Bible. [Figure 1.7] In the
story’s leading image, the GI stands a head above the faceless attendees, demonstrating
his physical strength and knowledge of ritual as he lifts the open scroll for the
congregation to see. On the subsequent pages, Life printed a series of relatively

25
The end of the war posed an even greater challenge to television news, which was born during the war
itself, and to radio. Mike Conway explains that circa 1945, radio and television professionals were equally
concerned about whether viewers and listeners would continue tuning in, what would take the place of war-
centered programming, and how to balance international news with local stories. Conway, The Origins of
Television News, 177, 180-181.

61
straightforward snapshots of the German Jews in attendance (young, old, policemen)
squeezed in between colorful advertisements for car batteries and Ovaltine – an
arrangement that failed to demonstrate the poignancy of the encounter between American
and German Jews just months after Hitler’s defeat.
26
[Figure 1.8] In fact, this GI was one
of many who arrived in Germany at the end of the war not only to administer Jewish
displaced persons camps but also to lead the way in denazification campaigns. Life
treated the latter topic in the same issue (subtitling one page spread “after four months of
re-education, German boys are dubious about Hitler”) and betrayed its broader goal of
demonstrating that the American presence was central to stabilizing the region.

[Figure
1.9]
The tenor of Capa’s reportage in Life had as much to do with the magazine’s
politics as it did with the magazine’s hierarchical management and mode of production.
Four years earlier, Life publisher Henry Luce published “The American Century,” an
editorial that upheld a notoriously American-centered view of globalization, achieved by
the expansion of American economic and cultural hegemony.
27
Luce wrote of the world’s
familiarity with “American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American
machines and patented products,” delineating what Chris Vials has called a conservative
international agenda that rested on spreading American values of democracy and freedom
through a culture of consumption.
28
Such editorial politics continued to shape Life’s pre-

26
On the complicated relationships between former Nazis, Jewish survivors and American soldiers in
Berlin in the aftermath of World War II, see Atina Grossman’s Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close
Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.)
27
Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life (February 17, 1941), 65.
28
Chris Vials, “The Popular Front in the American Century: Life Magazine, Margaret Bourke-White, and
Consumer Realism, 1936-1941,” American Periodicals, 16:1 (2006), 74-75.

62
meditated and streamlined coverage of postwar Europe, which focused predominantly on
American political and economic interests.
Life photographers played a limited role in conceiving these stories and in shaping
their final presentation on the page. Magazine issues were planned in editorial meetings,
where staff – including editors, writers, and researchers – selected feature stories, and
allotted blank pages for news stories, which would be submitted just before the magazine
was sent to the printer. Once the managing editor finalized the contents, Life’s photo
editor Wilson Hicks assigned photographers to stories, taking into account the skills and
personal interests of the photographers with whom he worked. The photo editor
communicated the magazine’s vision for an article, explained the reasoning behind a
shooting script if there was one, and assisted photographers with making the necessary
connections in the field. Life could request that photographers use specific camera
equipment while photographers needed to overshoot their assignments, making many
more exposures than could ever be used in order to give editors - and writers - an
exhaustive pictorial account of the story, from which a small number of images would be
chosen.
An unpublished photograph by Capa, which was stored for years in the Magnum
New York archive and is now housed at the Ransom Center at the University of Austin,
TX, captures the interaction on a human and historical level outside the narrative of
American hegemony. [Figure 1.10] Capa’s photograph focuses closely on two men
dressing the Torah scroll. The older man on the left, likely a German Jew, stands over the
younger man as he concentrates on crowning the handles of the Torah. As the American
concentrates on balancing the scroll upright, their gazes meet in the center of the frame

63
over the most important ritual object in Judaism. The effect of the image comes in waves.
One first registers that a people and religion threatened with annihilation has survived the
war, and that in the first months after the war’s end Jews celebrated the new year in the
Nazi capital in which the orders for their destruction had been issued. One may also think
of the photographer, a Jewish refugee himself who, as lighthearted accounts in the
contemporary press explained, spent “many years…fleeing dictators” until finally
arriving in the United States in 1939, and whose trip to Germany in 1945 may have
brought up memories of his own family’s persecution.
29
Certainly for many
photographers, documenting postwar life proved to be a personal, sometimes painful
experience, as this intimate portrait may attest (and as biographies of the Magnum
founders insist). Yet it is significant that Life magazine was the source and inspiration of
Capa’s trip and witnessing of this service, and that in the aftermath of war the press
alerted photographers to seek out such events. This photograph was not Capa’s natural
reaction to the end of the war or only a document of personal expression, but a piece of a
commissioned story that opened up the photographer to the narrative potential of
everyday life. In the first years after World War II, such assignments taught soon-to-be
Magnum photographers about the demands of publishers while also demonstrating that
some publications would accommodate Magnum’s editorial initiative more than others.
At the same time that Life upheld American leadership around the world through
its notoriously regimented publishing process (which Magnum would protest by dubbing
itself, in 1947, the “Time-Inc. Stink Club” and selling relatively little to Life in its first
few years of business), magazines such as Look, This Week, Saturday Evening Post, and

29
Robert Capa, “Moscow Celebrates its 800
th
Anniversary,” Illustrated (May 1, 1948), 14.

64
The Ladies’ Home Journal were smaller operations by comparison with more malleable
production schedules and political perspectives.
30
Influenced in part by the human
interest stories circulating in newspapers and the wire services, these American
magazines commissioned reporters and photographers to compare the everyday
experiences of ordinary people living in the aftermath of the war.
31
In early 1947, Chim
worked with a team of journalists to produce “We Went Back!” – an international survey
on postwar life for This Week, a Sunday magazine supplement syndicated to major
newspapers across the United States and with a higher readership than Life. It appeared in
print on August 10, 1947 and aired on CBS four days later.
32
Illustrated with Chim’s
photographs from England, France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, the story consisted
of short reports on the state of “bread,” “shelter,” “the Americans,” “politics,” “morals,”
and “children.” [Figure 1.11] The twenty-page photo essay demonstrated the hardships
ordinary people were facing two years after the end of the war, including food and coal
shortages. The text relied heavily on first-person statements made by the story’s subjects,
including a road builder from Normandy, a dock worker from London, a Tokyo farmer,
and policeman from Paris, while Chim’s photographs gave readers a glimpse into the life
of tired and “calloused” Germans in particular, who lived among ruins and were angered

30
Rudolf Janssens and Gertjan Kalff, “Time Incorporated Stink Club,” 223-242.
31
A similar interdependence existed between the wire services and television networks including CBS,
where apprentices were tasked with rewriting wire copy for the screen and learning to select the best stories
from the news services. Conway, The Origins of Television News, 182-183.
32
Chim covered Europe with the former war correspondent Bill Downs. The report also involved Jim
Hurlbut, a former Marine combat correspondent who worked with a Navy service photographer in the
Pacific islands, and correspondent Bill Costello, who worked with a Signal Corps photographer in
Hiroshima and with Horace Bristol’s East-West Agency in Tokyo. “We Went Back!” This Week (August
10, 1947), E2. On air, audio recordings of the interviews with the story’s subjects replaced the photographs.
Young, We Went Back, 40.

65
by the Russian and American presence alike.
33
In the reports on shelter and children, This
Week’s Associate Editor Jerry Mason printed some of Chim’s photographs in large
format to heighten their emotional impact, as seen in the picture of a German miner’s
daughter, who stares intently at the camera while filling up on soup distributed by the
Red Cross. [Figure 1.12] Concluding with the hopeful observation that the children of
former enemies states are now America’s “best hope,” the story aimed not only to inform
“America’s veterans – and everybody who shared the war with them” about the aftermath
of the war, but also to start building support for the Marshall Plan, which had begun two
months prior.
34

While most of the images that Magnum photographers made in the postwar period
have been described as reflecting a uniquely postwar humanist impulse, a different
narrative emerges when one considers that they worked within established traditions of
photographic reporting and human interest journalism in particular. Human-interest
stories had become a regular feature of written and illustrated journalism in the 19
th

century, when they were invented to appeal to the widest range of newspaper readers
possible. Some human interest stories dealt with incredible things that happened to
ordinary people – such as fires and murders – but more often consisted of gossip and
trifling events that were entertaining, memorable and could boost newspaper sales.

These
kinds of stories were central to making the press both popular and profitable, and their
appeal increased further when new print technologies allowed publishers to include

33
The report explained that “Germans armor themselves with callousness” against the despair of rubble and
rampant prostitution. “We Went Back!,” E12.
34
Young, We Went Back, 42.

66
illustrations, however schematic or far-fetched, to accompany the text.
35
Once
photographic images could be printed alongside the written word, human-interest stories
became a staple of modern photojournalism. Though human interest was not an
inherently political genre, in the interwar period, magazines such as the German Berliner
Illustrirte Zeitung, the Soviet USSR in Construction, the French Vu, the English Picture
Post, and the American Life exploited the “day in the life of” angle to shed light on the
fate of laborers, to promote social change or uphold leftist political platforms.
36

Photographers were asked to seek out stories of personal struggle that reflected national
issues, and editors filled pages with photo essays about poor and disenfranchised
families. Portraits of mothers and children were particularly effective in showing the
plight of everyday people as a result of the economic or political upheavals of the 1930s,
whether in Depression-era America or Civil War-torn Spain.
37
Robert Capa’s
photography from the Spanish Civil War, which brought the photojournalist international
fame by 1938, received acclaim not only because the photographer shot the images from
an uncomfortably close distance, but because getting close to battle allowed readers to
see how the war was affecting common people, from the young soldiers volunteering for
the Republican cause, to the thousands of civilian families whose lives were overturned

35
Helen Hughes, The Human Interest Story (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1940), 12, 67-80. On the
nature of the human interest story as separate from traditional news stories, see Hughes’ chapter on “Big
News and Little News,” in ibid., 55-70 and Robert Park, “News as a Form of Knowledge” American
Journal of Sociology, 45:5 (March 1940), 677-681. On early press images, see Michael Leja, “News
Pictures in the Early Years of Mass Visual Culture in New York: Lithographs and the Penny Press,” in Hill
and Schwartz, Getting the Picture, 146-153.
36
See Erica Wolf “The Context of Soviet Photojournalism, 1923-1932,” The Zimmerli Journal 2 (Fall
2004), 106-117.
37
As William Stott explains in his study of American documentary photography in the 1930s, the
photography produced by members of the Farm Security Administration unit was “human documentary:” it
showed the human condition and the experience of unpreventable events caused by nature. The human
element was central as well for imbuing the image with emotion and for communicating feeling. William
Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford, 1973), 50-58.

67
as a result of the conflict.
38
[Figure 1.13] The caption which accompanied one of Capa’s
best-known reports for Picture Post marveled not only at the explosion in the distance,
but also at the juxtaposition of the bombardment with the ordinariness of soldiers
spending their time in a cave. The daily experiences of anonymous individuals continued
to shape the most acclaimed photographic reports of World War II and its aftermath,
including Ernst Haas’ iconic coverage of prisoners of war returning to Austria and Robert
Capa’s documentation of French collaborators being ridiculed in the streets of Paris after
the fall of Vichy France.
39
In a range of illustrated press contexts, it was the human-
interest element that made stories about World War II and its aftermath so palpable.
Yet learning to apply the human interest angle to stories about everyday life in
postwar Europe proved challenging to Capa and especially Chim, who did not embrace
the genre immediately of their own volition. While Capa was working in Eastern Europe
in 1948 with the writer Theodor White, Maria Eisner contacted him with an assignment
from the American travel magazine Holiday, which was interested in an article “along the
line of Life Behind the I[ron] C[urtain]. And they want pictures from Capa illustrating the
text --- what the people look like, how they live, dress, eat, what they can buy in stores,
etc.” On that trip, Capa would travel to Hungary and Poland, photographing the camps
and taking stock of the destruction of Polish Jewry as part of his report for Holiday
magazine (a story to which I will return in chapter 3). Eisner understood the gravity of

38
The discovery of the Mexican suitcase, which contained hundreds of rolls of film made by Robert Capa,
Gerda Taro, and David Seymour previously thought to be lost, showed that the majority of the images they
made were of the everyday. As Simon Dell explains, “The continuity between everyday life and armed
struggle was a means of representing the popular defense of the Republic as popular; it became the means
to figure legitimacy. Anything that indicated how the Republic was defended by ordinary Spaniards could
be used to this end.” Simon Dell, “Mediation and Immediacy: The Press, The Popular Front in France, and
the Spanish Civil War,” in Young, The Mexican Suitcase, 46.
39
These icons of the postwar period are compiled in Mary Blume, After the War was Over: 168
Masterpieces by Magnum Photographers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), albeit unhinged from their
initial publication contexts.

68
what he would document and was not necessarily trying to make light of the situation, but
as the interlocutor between the photographer and the magazine client, she also needed to
remind him that “this kind of human interest story is easier to sell, not only to Holiday
but generally to all American magazines…. We have to face the fact that in general our
stories are too big, too serious, and even too good…”
40
The latter assessment may have
applied to Magnum’s tremendously-scaled and deeply political “People are People the
World Over,” discussed below, but it also applied to Chim’s story ideas for postwar
Europe, which Magnum staff and American editors alike insisted were too serious.
When he completed the “We Went Back!” tour through Europe, Chim was about
to return to New York when he received a cable from Maria Eisner informing him of
Magnum’s creation and instructing him to stay put.
YOU ARE VICEPRESIDENT OF MAGNUM PHOTOS INC.
DETAILED LETTER SENT TO PARIS MAY TWENTYSECOND WILL
SHORTLY HAVE INTERESTING ASSIGNMENTS FOR YOU
DISADVISE YOUR RETURN NOW AWAIT ME IN PARIS.
41

Magnum assigned Chim to covering Eastern and Western Europe for the organization,
and though he would soon have a paying assignment from Ladies Home Journal to
document two farming families – in Germany and France – for “People are People,” he
also needed to start generating his own ideas and securing his own magazine clients.
42

Like Maria Eisner, Rita Vandivert – who worked out of Magnum’s New York office –
understood that human interest stories were shaping the editorial atmosphere in the
United States and she encouraged Chim to think along these lines as well. “…Lots of

40
Maria Eisner to Robert Capa, October 7, 1948, Robert Capa Archive, ICP. This letter was on display as
part of the Capa in Color exhibition at the ICP (January 31-May 4, 2014).
41
Maria Eisner telegram to DR Seymour, May 29, 1947, MFNY.
42
Rita Vandivert sent Chim the details of the Journal assignment in a letter dated July 2, 1947, MFNY.

69
magazines seem to be thinking in terms of a two page spread on any simple but lively
subject – preferably something where the idea is familiar to American readers but the
setting strange and interesting. By this I mean that any stories showing how people live,
their family life, their work, their recreation, hobbies, etc. are pounced upon by magazine
editors who firmly believe that Americans are only interested in things which have some
familiar ring.”
43
Though she disparaged American editors for their predictable tastes on
behalf of their readers (two-page spreads, surveys of everyday life), Vandivert hoped that
Chim would apply this journalistic template to an international context and generate such
stories in Europe.
But the photographer, committed to covering the aftermath of World War II as
such, did not exactly acquiesce. Chim first proposed a trip to Poland to document the
transfer of Polish refugees to the annexed territory of Silesia, and to follow ethnic
Germans expelled from Poland back into Germany, explaining that “the migration was
apparently one of the biggest in history.”
44
Vandivert and Maria Eisner knew from their
conversations with editors at This Week, Look, Illustrated, and Life that Chim’s ideas –
which also included stories on the physical reconstruction of Europe and the work of the
Inter-Allied Reparations Commission – were not only too somber to be turned into photo
essay features, but that they lacked a concrete human interest angle at a time when those
editors were explicitly looking for stories about individuals rather than ideas or
institutions.
45
Life was less interested in international human interest stories as such and
would only buy Chim’s Poland story, said Vandivert, if “things get sufficiently bad this

43
Rita Vandivert to Chim, November 19, 1947, MFNY.
44
Chim to Rita Vandivert, July 23, 1947, MFNY; Inge Bondi, Chim, 76.
45
Maria Eisner to Rita Vandivert, July 26, 1947; Maria Eisner to Rita Vandivert, September 13, 1947; and
Rita Vandivert to Chim, September 25, 1947, all MFNY.

70
winter over there… they want pictures of starving hordes, and corpses everywhere and
they wouldn’t believe that although things were bad the picture didn’t look like that….”
46

While Life flocked towards sensationalism, The Saturday Evening Post preferred a more
lighthearted approach, and when it finally bought the Poland story in December 1947, its
editor asked Vandivert to tell Chim that “We like pictures that are informal, candid, and
easy-going, and very often such everyday things as housewives marketing, kids playing
in the street, workmen enjoying a drink – make the best pictures. In short, the everyday
things that ordinary people do…”
47
Chim was frustrated not only by prescribed treatment
of the story but also because many of the items on the Post’s shooting script were
impossible to fulfill by the time the magazine agreed to the assignment. He could get
photographs of war damage and rebuilding (“important streets, intersections, citizens
doing everyday chores”) and the building of homes for the arriving Polish peasants, but
he would not be able to photograph university students “chewing the fat with a
background of other university buildings still damaged” because classes had stopped for
the winter holidays, as did the refugee convoys that brought Poles in and took German
residents out.
48
Chim slowly realized that American magazines were not particularly
interested in seeing the visual evidence of population transfers or the suffering of
displaced people in the war’s aftermath. The editorial climate in America around 1947
that he experienced – of looking forward rather than back, embracing future economic
and social developments rather than reflecting on the war that it had just experienced –
was similar to the atmosphere described by Tony Judt, who wrote of postwar Europe as
lacking any closure around World War II because “silence over Europe’s recent past was

46
Rita Vandivert to Chim, September 25, 1947, MFNY.
47
Ben Hibbs, Saturday Evening Post editor, to Rita Vandivert, December 16, 1947, MFNY.
48
Ibid. and Chim to Rita Vandivert, December 23, 1947, MFNY.

71
the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.”
49
Notably, when
Chim’s first big break as a Magnum photographer came in 1948 with “Children of
Europe,” the assignment to finally focus on the “postwar” story came from an
international, non-governmental organization (UNESCO) rather than an American
publication.
In addition to responding to the demand for human interest photography, Magnum
was also learning to embrace the increasingly sociological impulse of American
journalism in the 1940s. By using the contemporary experiences of people around the
world to make predictions about the future – i.e. the possibility of a third World War or
the pace of reconstruction and denazification – such investigations as “We Went Back!”
(and soon enough, “People are People the World Over”) demonstrated that American
publications were in conversation with the burgeoning field of sociology and a growing
preoccupation with surveys.
50
The 1940s entrenchment of what Sarah Igo termed “the
averaged American” did not have reformist aspirations, as it did in the twenties and
thirties, when sociologists gathered data on social deviants, and when photographers
gathered visual evidence of tenement overcrowding, child labor, or the effects of drought
on migrant farmers.
51
As the United States climbed out of the Great Depression, the
information gathered through widespread polling and surveying was spread through
popular culture channels, allowing people to find out who the American public “really

49
Tony Judt, Postwar, 10.
50
According to the sociologist Robert Park, reporters are concerned only with the present while
sociologists are interested in the significance of the current even in determining the future. Park, “News as
a Form of Knowledge,” 675.
51
Sarah Igo, The Averaged American (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 7-8.

72
was.”
52
The data collected by these surveys became an important source of news stories
as radio programs and newspaper articles turned to publicizing and debating the findings
of studies such as Middletown and the Kinsey Reports, while the tools of sociology – bell
curves, graphs, and public opinion findings – shaped the form of the news stories
themselves. During and after World War II, such modes of inquiry were expanded to an
international scale for tactical and informational purposes. Sociologists as well as
anthropologists turned to helping the American government understand its enemies
through national character studies of the Germans and Japanese, and their findings
entered popular consciousness in the form of best selling books and illustrated magazine
features.
53
In the 1950s, some applied their tools to understanding the new Soviet enemy
while most turned their attention back to America, this time focusing on the place of
atomized individuals within society.
54

Though less frequently analyzed, the advent of sociology had a profound impact
on photography and the illustrated press beginning with the better known case of the
American Farm Security Administration’s photographic unit, which was tasked with
documenting the activities of the Resettlement Administration and American rural life
more generally.
55
Under the direction of Roy Stryker, a trained sociologist, FSA
photographers were taught to shoot from carefully crafted shooting scripts that were

52
Igo, Averaged American, 7-12 and Andrew Abbott and James T. Sparrow, “Hot War, Cold War: The
Structures of Sociological Action, 1940-1955” in Craig Calhoun, ed. Sociology in America: A History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 296.
53
Abbott and Sparrow, “Hot War, Cold War,” 281-313 and Peter Mandler, Return from the Natives: How
Margaret Mead Won World War II and Lost the Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 123-
177. One such popular text was Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese
Culture, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1946. Life magazine’s “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,”
Life 11:25 (December 22, 1941), 81-82 is one popular example of how wartime national character studies
used photography to demonstrate allegedly visible differences between enemies and allies.
54
This included the enormously popular books by David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the
Changing American Character (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1953) and William Whyte, The
Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956). Abbott and Sparrow, “Hot War, Cold War,” 285.
55
Beaumont Newhall, History of Photography, 238.

73
based on social and economic research and they were asked to provide extensive reports
from the field on what they documented.
56
Notably, the FSA photographic unit
represented an effort in public relations, fundraising, and historical documentation and
their images appeared in the press in order to support those larger goals. As government
funding declined in the early 1940s, magazines began employing FSA photographers and
methods pioneered by Stryker at the FSA but now for the purpose of informing and
entertaining magazine readers who were increasingly curious about the private, everyday
life of ordinary families. Such was the case with the American women’s magazine
Ladies’ Home Journal, which in 1940 launched a photographic series called “How
America Lives” (HAL) and hired many FSA photographers to spend up to one week
living with an American family, collecting intimate snapshots and gathering data. [Figure
1.14] The installment gave readers a glimpse into every aspect of the family’s lifestyle:
from their home décor, meals, and evening pastimes, to their income, spending patterns,
and even painful disagreements.
57
“How America Lives” quickly became one of the
Journal’s most popular features because of its dual human-interest appeal and quenching
of sociological curiosity, and it was, according to the Journal’s managing editors,
representative of the kind of work that the Journal should publish more often once the
Second World War ended.
58

56
On the operations of the FSA units see Carl Fleischhaue and Beverly W. Brannan, Documenting
America, 1935-1943 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 1-75. Stryker’s deep involvement
with photographers’ research continued in his work at the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. See
Ulrich Keller, The Highway as Habitat: A Roy Stryker Documentation, 1943-1955 (Santa Barbara:
University Art Museum, 1986), 9-55.
57
Nancy Walker, Shaping Our Mothers’ World: American Women’s Magazines (Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 200), 111-129.
58
Memorandum from Bruce and Beatrice Gould to John G. Morris, June 30, 1947, and Memorandum from
Berenice E. Connor to Mr. Richard Zeising, Jr. “Keeping Tabs on HAL,” March 6, 1952, John G. Morris
Papers, University of Chicago (AJGM-UC). See also Walker, Shaping Our Mothers’ World, 117-129.

74
When considered within the longer tradition of the history of the press, we can see
that Magnum responded to the entangled traditions of sociology and human interest
reporting. Yet the question remains as to what ends Magnum’s photography would be put
to use. The Magnum-wide “People are People the World Over” and Chim’s “Children of
Europe” demonstrate how the sociological survey and human interest story both helped to
visually manage such impossibly large notions as “aftermath,” “peace,” and “the world,”
and that the international structure of Magnum Photos enabled the production of such
stories in the first place. Within Ladies’ Home Journal and UNESCO publications,
Magnum’s photography became an inspiration to see, think, and act differently while
from Magnum’s perspective, these projects offered an opportunity to turn the world itself
into a story that could be photographed and sold.

There are No Foreigners Anymore
In the wake of the war, photographers such as Chim were not the only ones trying
to figure out how to represent the world. Photo editors at a variety of publications were
themselves thinking about how to expand the quantity and quality of their photographic
coverage and how to partner with the right photographers in that effort. Owned by the
Curtis Publishing Company of Philadelphia, the Ladies’ Home Journal was not primarily
an illustrated magazine even though it included many illustrations since its founding in
1898. When the Bruce and Beatrice Gould became its managing editors in 1935 –
following almost two decades of floundering leadership and dwindling readers – they
quickly took over the art direction, redesigning the Journal’s page layout and going after
a dramatic, modern look. The growing popularity of illustrated magazines (and especially

75
Life, whose subscriptions had quadrupled during World War II) made the women’s
magazine eager to improve its use of photography and photo essays and in 1945, the
Goulds hired John Morris to serve as their new photo editor. Morris, who trained under
Life’s picture editor Wilson Hicks, had worked in Life’s London bureau during World
War II and published the work of established photojournalists including Robert Capa.
59

Notably, the Journal’s main competitor McCall’s also enticed two Look magazine
editors, Daniel Mich and Henry Ehrlich, to join their editorial board and lead the way in
improving the publication’s editorial content and photographic quality, showing that
magazines that did not rely extensively on photography before World War II now hoped
to do so with the help of experienced editors from the general illustrated weeklies.
60

At the Journal, where the Goulds declared, “ideas are the life blood of a
magazine,” Morris’ responsibilities included thinking up distinctively photographic
stories, and to accept when most of his ideas were rejected.
61
Soon after Morris came on
board, the Goulds encouraged editors to think about building on the success of the
tremendously popular “How America Lives” series and develop illustrated stories that
“are linked up in some way with people’s everyday concerns.” Echoing the editorial
advice that Vandivert received from Look and Saturday Evening Post, the Goulds
explained that it would not be enough to propose a general topic: stories needed to have a
distinctive human element and describe a “method of handling a new approach.”
62
While
they favored the human-interest genre, the Goulds were not simply after feel-good fluff

59
John Morris, Get the Picture, 99.
60
Maria Eisner to “GX photographers,” November 22, 1950, AJGM.
61
Bruce and Beatrice Gould to John G. Morris, June 30, 1947, AJGM-UC. Morris’ files contain outlines
for many stories that were not approved.
62
The Journal’s radicalism was tempered by the Goulds belief in the centrality of domestic life and the
belief that women were best suited for the home, but their strong editorial voice prepared readers for more
serious subjects, including Morris’ survey of life after World War II. Bruce and Beatrice Gould, American
Story (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 165-174.

76
pieces. Under their leadership, Ladies Home Journal had made its way to the top of
newsstand sales and subscription rates, becoming a surprisingly progressive publication
intent on swaying public opinion on issues such as public health, and it took on taboo
subjects including contraception and divorce. During the war, the magazine covered
events overseas and on the home front, publishing editorials by such notable leaders as
Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter Lippman among others. Its postwar content would need to
be equally rigorous.
Within two years of joining their team, Morris pitched a story that appealed
directly to the Goulds’ progressive politics and their request for more stories about
“ordinary life” and the problems of “ordinary people.” He also made a direct reference to
his wartime experiences and the political climate in the aftermath of World War II.

“My
experience abroad during the war and my recent observations of the United Nations …”
Morris wrote to the Goulds in early 1947, “have led me to believe that people will
become world-minded only if they can be made to concentrate on the cultural unity of the
world rather than on its political division.”

In the proposal for the story that would
become “People are People the World Over,” Morris made a direct connection between
the job of a magazine editor and the political situation facing postwar readers: “…if
people will only stop to consider the fundamental natures of those whom they often
consider ‘foreign,’ they will soon realize that there are really no foreigners – any more.
And if there are no foreigners there are no people to fight, for you don’t fight ‘your own
kind.’ So the editorial job is to explain peoples to peoples in intimate, vivid terms, taking
them not country by country but trait by trait, problem by problem.”
63
A story about the
everyday lives of everyday people would have the explicit purpose of contributing to

63
John Morris to Bruce and Beatrice Gould, n.d. AJGM-UC.

77
world understanding and peace in the second half of the twentieth century and it would
build on the magazine’s increasing attention to global affairs, which had been sparked
during World War II.
64
Morris knew that photographs would be more convincing than
words alone and marveled at the scope and scale of his idea, which could “consume the
energies of an entire staff of photographers in itself.”
65
Although he did not mention
Magnum in his proposal, Morris had recently learned about the agency’s creation from
Capa and likely knew that he could orchestrate such a project by making use of his own
contacts with former Life war photographers and Capa’s international team.
66
For
Magnum, such a large-scale project had the potential to employ its photographers who
were already based around the world, and its founders hoped that Morris would provide
the income to boost their nascent organization.
Morris’ story proposal was representative of a number of postwar
internationalisms, resonating not only with the human rights rhetoric of the United
Nations but also the brief and waning one-world movement that took root in America
during World War II and was codified in the book of the same name by Wendell
Wilkie.
67
One World became the best-selling non-fiction book in America in 1945, when

64
A Short History of Ladies Home Journal (Philadelphia: Curtis Publishing Company, 1953), 10-11. The
Journal’s war-related features included Beatrice Gould’s editorial on the beginning of World War II in
July, 1941; “How War Came” by Forrest Davis and E.K. Lindley in 1942; “Can the US Have Peace After
the War?” by Walter Lippman in 1943, and a color photo essay on “How Japan Lives” published in 1946.
As the return of American soldiers from the war sent many women back into domestic settings and
prompted advertising and editorial campaigns that emphasized women’s contribution to consumption rather
than production, magazines such as the Journal continued to take women’s interest in global affairs
seriously and directed them into new campaigns with international resonance. On the relationship between
consumption and good citizenship in postwar America, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The
Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 112-165.
65
John Morris to Bruce and Beatrice Gould, n.d. AJGM-UC.
66
Morris, Get the Picture, 113-116.
67
Wilkie was the Republican candidate for the presidency in the 1940 election. In 1942, Roosevelt sent
Wilkie on a world tour as a gesture of political unity on the American home front, with Wilkie serving as
the self-proclaimed emissary of the “American common man” as he met with many kinds of “common

78
it sold 4.5 million copies and enamored readers with the prospect of a world without
boundaries, made possible by the advent of air travel. But Wilkie’s vision took on a
different tenor after World War II, which ended with the detonation of two atomic bombs
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stunned by the United States’ ability to use such extensive
force, American scientists, intellectuals, political leaders and magazine publishers used
all possible media channels to argue for a one world government to oversee international
policy, and especially control over the newly developed atomic weapons, which were
capable of world annihilation.
68
The Ladies’ Home Journal had already expressed its
support for the movement in previous years, publishing, among other features, an urgent
editorial by the acclaimed journalist Dorothy Thompson in 1946 that advocated for a
world government that would control international policy and war-making powers for
future generations.
69
Notably and quite unlike Henry Luce’s vision for the “American
Century” – which envisioned global familiarity with American culture – the one-world
perspective that Morris upheld did not suggest that the United States needed to be the
global leader. Morris marveled at the world’s knowledge of its own variety in his letter to
the Goulds:
…there is far more cultural unity in the world than we usually suspect.
Consider for example the universal appeal of motion pictures. Consider
for example that you can eat Peking duck or lobster Cantonese in London
and Paris and Toronto. Consider the jeep. Consider the deluxe hotel,
whether it be the Savoy in London, the Metropolis in Moscow, the
Imperial in New Delhi, Sheppard’s in Cairo. Consider air travel. Consider
Paris fashions. Consider the International Philatelic Union. Consider that

men” in over a dozen cities. See Jenifer Van Vleck, Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American
Ascendancy (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2013), 109-113.
68
Dick van Lente, “Introduction: A Transnational History of Popular Images and Narratives of Nuclear
Technologies in the First Two Postwar Decades” in Dick Van Lente, ed. The Nuclear Age in Popular
Media: A Transnational History, 1945-1965 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1-18. See also Fred
Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the
Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013).
69
Dorothy Thompson, “Toward the Big One,” Ladies’ Home Journal (January 1946), 6, 102-103.

79
the vaccine injected into the arm of a Sikh may have been prepared by a
Jewish laboratory technician in a New York hospital.
70

This was a manifesto for a global postwar world of a different sort, and it echoed
internationalist values put forth in the 1946 charter of the United Nations Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization, which began: “Since wars begin in the minds of
men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed….ignorance
of each other’s ways and lives has been a common cause, throughout the history of
mankind of that suspicion and mistrust between the peoples of the world through which
their differences have all to often broken into war.”
71
Both the UNESCO charter and
“People are People the World Over” suggested that international policy was not enough
to ensure peace, and that individuals needed to gain intimate knowledge of, and personal
empathy for, other people and their cultures.
72
Morris realized that as a photo editor he
could use popular mass media channels to dispel readers’ ignorance and ensure that no
more wars would be started “in the minds of men” – or rather, women, who in mid-
century America were seen as responsible for shaping their families’ values and
politics.
73

The Goulds liked Morris’ idea from a political and journalistic perspective, but
they were not immediately convinced how photography would support the series’
message. Before signing up any other photographers to the project, Capa and Morris flew

70
John Morris to Bruce and Beatrice Gould, n.d. AJGM-UC.
71
Preamble to the UNESCO Charter, quoted in Turner, Democratic Surround, 164.
72
Both strategies illustrate a broader movement studied by Fred Turner, in which postwar psychologists
and anthropologists were reimagining international relations in psychological terms. It became common to
see the individual psyche as a breeding ground for war, while interpersonal relations could become a model
for thinking about the international relationships between countries. Some argued that social scientists and
politicians should develop state-based ‘therapy’ for certain nations, ideally under the auspices of the UN
and its cultural agency, UNESCO. Ibid.
73
Nancy Walker, Shaping Our Mothers’ World, vii.

80
together to the Goulds’ native Boise, Idaho in search of the story’s first family, with
Morris there to ensure that Capa’s pictures would suit the Goulds’ tastes and interests.
74

Morris recalls that the photographer and editor drove for hours until they found a
picturesque red barn whose owners, conveniently, “looked like they were picked by
Hollywood central casting” for the part of the American family. The Pratts agreed to let
Capa and Morris stay for a few days and photograph them as they went about their daily
activities. A week later, the Goulds approved Capa’s photographs, twenty of which
became the series’ template and the foundation for a shooting script that Morris
developed for the other photographers.
75
[Figure 1.15]
The twelve countries selected for the series covered six continents and
represented a range of cultures and political systems, purposefully including former
Allies and Axis nations (the United States, France, Germany, England, Japan and Italy
were featured) as well as less familiar places for Journal readers, such as Egypt, Pakistan,
and Equatorial Africa. With the Goulds’ approval in place, Capa recruited George Rodger
and Chim to shoot five of the countries, and between Magnum’s and Morris’
international contacts, they signed up the photographers Larry Burrows, Marie Hansen,
Phil Schultz, and Horace Bristol to work in the remaining locations as Magnum
“stringers.”
76
Each photographer received an extensive questionnaire and like the
photographers who had worked on “How America Lives,” was asked to work as
sociologists, querying everything from how much money families spent on soap to what
careers fathers wanted for their children. Such statistical information and memorable

74
Morris, Get the Picture, 114.
75
John G. Morris quoted in Seona Robertson, Director, The Chosen People, 2000.
76
Stringers were non-Magnum photographers hired for individual assignments when, in the first decade of
Magnum’s operations, there were not enough Magnum members available to cover a story.

81
details would not be gleaned from the images but would be the foundation for Morris’
short essays, which would accompany each installment. Working with John Morris’
secretary, Jinx Witherspoon, Rita Vandivert helped finalize what staple foods each family
should be farming in order to “give variety to the story,” and she instructed
photographers to “cable before shooting” if they have to deviate from the instructions.
77

The series’ requirements were inflexible – every single scene had to be shot in order to
make the thematically organized installments work – and the $15,000 budget limited, so
the team of photographers had to follow Morris’ script exactly and be efficient with their
film and their time.
78
It was well worth the effort from Magnum’s perspective. The
Journal not only paid for the assignment up front but also covered photographers’
expenses and materials in the countries where they worked, and the story promised to
make a name for Magnum’s photographers once it began appearing in May 1948.
79

People are People the World Over
When it appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, “People are People the World Over”
immediately alerted readers to its astounding scale: “Here are 88 of the 2,000,000,000
people who inhabit the planet Earth. They are 12 families who represent 12 countries, 3
races and 5 religious faiths. They speak 11 languages.”
80
[Figure 1.16] Morris, who
authored the text in each installment, also revealed the series’ moralizing goal and took
care to frame it in opposition to what readers were seeing on a daily basis in the press:

77
Rita Vandivert to Chim, July 2, 1947, MFNY.
78
Morris, Get the Picture, 116.
79
Magnum New York to Chim, July 10, 1947; Bill Vandivert to Chim, July 15, 1947 and December 22,
1947, MFNY.
80
John Morris, “People are People the World Over: Woman’s World Revolves Around the Kitchen,”
Ladies Home Journal (May 1948), 43.

82
“The conclusion of our survey will surprise only those who write newspaper headlines. It
is simply that people are pretty much people, no matter where you find them.”
81
To
support this claim, the feature was organized by activity rather than country, so that
readers were immediately confronted with shared aspects of daily life – such as eating,
farming, shopping, playing, learning, and bathing – and then given visual and textual
clues about how these activities varied around the world. Before delving into the first
activity, the introductory installment opened with a series of family portraits. In each
photograph, the family members were lined up neatly, wearing their best-kept clothes and
smiling broadly at the camera. Even while the kimonos and sarapes served as visible
markers of different cultures, the bigger message was, as the text underscored, that “the
family is still the basic building block of society.”
82
These pages made a direct appeal to
the readers’ values – the centrality of family life, emphasized regularly in the Journal and
in American media more broadly – and their shared experience of posing for the camera
and creating memories through photography. The family portraits also established
photography as a recognizable and therefore trustworthy, universal language that Journal
readers could comprehend, while the series’ layout – designed by Dave Stech, Morris’
colleague at the Journal – resembled a family album, an established site for documenting
private life and mediating familial relationships.
83

In a fitting appeal to the magazine’s female readers, the first installment was titled
“Woman’s World Revolves Around the Kitchen,” and it showed twelve black-and-white
photographs of women from as many countries, each matriarch engrossed at her stove.

81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
83
On photo album practices, see Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance
(Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).

83
[Figure 1.1] The pictures of women standing or sitting at their stoves were astonishingly
similar, showing that the photographers had adhered to Morris’ shooting script carefully
and consulted Capa’s template photographs from Idaho when shaping the composition of
their shots. In the first installment, all of the matriarchs appeared in full or partial profile,
and the frames included enough of their surroundings so that readers could see the
particulars of their kitchens, including bits of tables, ovens, pots, and aprons. Morris
noted the visible differences – for instance, that “only three of the twelve wives have
electricity, only four have running water” – but regularly came back to the
commonalities, including man’s “international reluctance to do housework,” a fact
supported by the absence of men in any of the kitchen images.
84

This uniformity was enhanced through the identical size of the three-by-four inch
pictures and their symmetrical layout, where three photographs were spaced evenly
across each of the centerfold’s borders. For later installments, the Journal used the same
formula – identically sized photographs of comparable content, surrounding two
paragraphs of text and two views of the globe on which the same locations were listed –
and selected images with mirror-like compositions. This is visible in “How the World
Gets Around,” [Figure 1.17] where each image focused on a few family members with
just enough of their unique landscape included in the frame: the row of parasols lining a
street in Japan, the arid land of Mexico, the piles of rubble and skeletal remains of
buildings in Germany. In the November 1948 installment, most of the photographs of
families eating were shot slightly from above, capturing the entire family with their
traditional garb and seating arrangements. [Figure 1.18]

84
Morris, “Woman’s World,” 44-45.

84
The organization and goals of “People are People the World Over” were quite
different from the exoticizing and voyeuristic visual tactics used in the same years by
magazines such as National Geographic.
85
While the grid-like arrangement of the
pictures allowed for easy comparisons, there was no prescribed order in which the images
appeared, no visual clues about center or periphery, and no physical distinction between
East, West, or South.
86
Appearing in 1948 – the year of the signing of the declaration of
human rights, two years after creation of UNESCO, and three years after U.N. – “People
are People the World Over” was representative of the idealistic impulse that Jay Winter
has called a “minor utopia”: a vision for the future born out of collective violence but
which lacked the concrete blueprint for action that defined “major utopias” such as
socialism.
87
The series did not offer practical instructions on how to create international
understanding and peace but rather symbolized that vision through its use of photographs
from around the world – emphasizing shared activities that could be seen in just one
glance, as well as shared dreams of education and upward mobility. The October 1948
installment showed children of farmers around the world “united in the pursuit of
knowledge,” learning in standard classrooms with teachers, or makeshift settings,
receiving instruction from relatives or using the sand as their writing surface. [Figure
1.19] Morris’ text emphasized that education would “enable them to live as free men in a
free world,” a statement that echoed the underlying premise of postwar international
organizations including UNESCO, which carried out literacy campaigns in remote

85
The implicit cultural imperialism of National Geographic’s photography has been closely examined in
works such as Tamar R. Rothenberg, Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in National
Geographic Magazine, 1888-1945 (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007) and Catherine A. Lutz
and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
86
On photography’s relationship to place see Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan, Picturing Place:
Photography and the Geographical Imagination (New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2003).
87
Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace Freedom: Utopian Moments in the 20
th
Century (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006).

85
villages and used photography in educational exhibitions so that postwar children would
learn to understand and respect foreign cultures.
88

In February 1949, the installment on “This is How the World Gets Around” used
the topic of movement and transportation to discuss the political and symbolic
implications of people’s mobility. [Figure 1.17] The selected photographs, especially
Bristol’s image of the Okamoto mother and child passing a parasol vendor and Rodger’s
photograph of Kaliko women walking single-file while balancing baskets on their heads,
use dramatic camera angles from above and below to represent movement as a timeless
activity. Yet the disparity between the three families with cars and those without imbued
the installment with an unresolved tension. The tight cropping of each shot and the white
gap that separated the pictures seemed to reinforce the notion that the families were
restricted in how far they could travel and how much of the world and its people they
would see while also suggesting that Magnum photographers were exceptional in the
amount of physical, economic, and cultural mobility that they wielded after the war.
When tracking down the “People are People” families in 2000, film maker Seona
Robertson found the majority of the families still lived in the same homes where they
were found fifty years prior, demonstrating that unlike Magnum’s founders – who
traveled between Paris, New York, and London, among other places, on a regular basis –
the families’ lack of mobility continued to define their daily routines.
89
The families
selected for the series recalled being discovered at home. Horace Bristol apparently found

88
This included the UNESCO Human Rights exhibition of 1948.
89
This is with the exception of the Sudanese family, who in 2000 were living in Northern Uganda as
refugees as a result of the civil war in Sudan, which has killed over two million people, including one of the
Aluma brothers featured in the series. Two other families – from Czechoslovakia and Pakistan – could not
be tracked down, suggesting that with the changing borders and political situations in those countries in the
twentieth century, they also had to move.

86
the patriarch of the Okamoto family working in his field, while the Hiatts of England
remember a day when a black car pulled into their driveway and two men emerged in
dark suits – a startling sight for a family not used to seeing men dressed so formally or
vehicles such as the one that carried them.
90
The photojournalists appeared to the families
as if from another world and left behind traces of their mysterious craft: the Redouin
children picked up David Seymour’s used flashbulbs and kept the collection for years,
while Marie Hansen gave the son of the Guercinis in Italy a small camera, which he wore
when posing for the Journal’s family portrait. The sons of the Stieglitz family in
Germany recall driving in the car with David Seymour, who told them that they would
have a car in ten years and that highways would connect the whole country in their
lifetimes – predictions that caused laughter in 1947 but which soon came true.
91

Such recollections emerged years later and were notably not part of the story that
Morris told between 1948 and 1949, when he aimed to focus Journal readers’ attention
on the photographic content rather than the people behind the cameras. And while the
photographers took ample pictures of their families from different angles, including
looking into the camera and acknowledging the presence of the photographer [Figure
1.20], Morris’ selection of photographers almost never showed the subjects making eye
contact with the viewer – an editorial decision that helped standardize the layout and
diminish visual references to the subjective eye of the photographer. The series’ message
relied not on the individual qualities of the images but rather their standardization and
their arrangement on the page; not on any individual photographer and his relationship to
his subject, but rather the effects achieved by a picture editor during in the post-

90
Robertson, Chosen People.
91
Ibid.

87
production stage. Morris’ aim of convincing readers that “there are no foreigners
anymore” required visual strategies that upheld uniformity rather than variety, and which
did not leave much room for interpretation on the part of the reader.
In this postwar context, Magnum stood apart because it could orchestrate the
project on the level of communicating with photographers about the story’s requirements
and providing Morris with visual data. In subsequent projects – including the 1950s
surveys of young people, women, and children for Holiday, discussed in chapter 3 –
Magnum photographers would take part in the editing and layout process, and they would
supply more intimate portraits that gestured towards their presence and even friendship
with the subjects. In 1948, the possibility of seeing life around the entire world arranged
on one centerfold seemed more plausible than it would five or ten years later, when more
Americans would begin traveling the world for themselves but also when imagining the
world as one became impossible because of the entrenchment of the Cold War. In the
Journal series, Morris was still hopeful, concluding the transportation story with the wish
that “under the large, loose cloak of the United Nations, these, our families, may live as
neighbors.”
92

Morris’ desire to promote a one-world vision among American female readers
cannot be separated from global postwar developments including the founding of the
United Nations, as his own statements attest. But while Morris used the series to
challenge the nationalism and racial hatred that had contributed to the explosion of World
War II and build support for institutions that would battle those impulses, he did not

92
John Morris, “People are People the World Over: This is How the World Gets Around,” Ladies Home
Journal (February 1949), 45.

88
mention the war itself.
93
Traces of the recent conflict could only be found in two
photographs by Chim: one that showed German women queuing for food in light of
postwar rations [Figure 1.21] and another in which Frau Stieglitz and her son walked
amidst bombed out facades of buildings. [Figure 1.22] The remaining 142 photographs
captured timeless activities in a seemingly timeless present, which made the series quite
different from what historians of photography including Barbie Zelizer, Sharon Sliwinski
and Ariella Azoulay have focused on when looking a postwar photojournalism’s
participation in “public lessons in human rights literacy.”
94
In disparate analyses of
atrocity images and their circulation after World War II, these authors shed light on a
brief period when graphic reminders of Nazi violence were highly visible, when
spectators of photojournalism were made into witnesses who would be encouraged to
turn away from the hatred and violence that leads to genocide.
95
But in the Journal
series, the photographs and text emphasized the fundamental facts of life for the
immediate present, as if human nature mattered more in 1948 than recent history. In so
doing, the series purposefully broke with spectacular representations of difficult postwar
conditions in the illustrated press (recall Life’s proclivity for “corpses” and “starving
people everywhere”), and instead employed photography to make the abstract language

93
John Morris, email correspondence with the author, October 27, 2011.
94
Azoulay explains, “In the wake of World War II, photography took on an increasingly crucial role in
what might be called public lessons in human rights literacy. Through the viewing of annotated
photographs – printed in journals and magazines and displayed in different contexts – citizens were invited
to learn to identify human rights and to recognize the violation of them. [...] The objective was to instill in
the public an internalized, personal sense of human rights – a sense that would produce widespread respect
for and a commitment to upholding of human rights generally and that would support institutional
responses to violations of these rights.” Ariella Azoulay, “Palestine as Symptom, Palestine as Hope:
Revising Human Rights Discourse” Critical Inquiry 40:4 (Summer 2014), 334-335.
95
Ibid., 332-364; Zelizer, Remembering to Forget; Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 2011).

89
and values of human rights, internationalism, and United Nations visible and easily
recognizable.
The collaboration between Morris and Magnum therefore placed faith in the
ability of photography to inspire a different way of seeing the world. Magnum’s images
could grab readers’ attention because they were rooted in the contemporary moment and
Morris made sure to introduce the series by telling readers that Ladies’ Home Journal had
sent photographers out into the world “in the past few months.” The reports and
photographs they brought back therefore showed how farming families lived “today” –
what recent movies they have seen, what kitchen appliances they had, and what kind of
subjects the children were learning in school that year. Morris also explained that the
urgency of the project had everything to do with the historical moment in which it was
being published because mounting Cold War tensions meant that everyone could be
affected by the “anxious maneuvers of diplomats.” As Tony Judt notes in his study of the
postwar period, the year 1948, when “People are People” appeared, was an important
turning point when the priorities of the Allies shift from reconciliation and retribution
towards the renewed ideological conflict of the Cold War, when Germany was divided
into administrative sectors overseen by the United States, France, Britain and the USSR.

Germany’s partitioning, the beginning of the Marshall Plan, and the establishment of
Soviet satellites meant that the tenor of everyday life also changed. European citizens
experienced the entrenchment of socialism in the east or the rise of the welfare state in
the west and the accompanying social, economic, and cultural systems that come with
those governments, while Americans observed a mounting crackdown on communist

90
sympathies coupled with a strident promotion of consumer capitalism.
96
From a
geopolitical perspective, what united people around the world in 1948 was their concern
about the new Cold War, initiated well before postwar reconstruction was completed or
the memories of World War II were erased. And so it was in this moment that Morris
concluded the job of a magazine editor was “to explain peoples to peoples in intimate,
vivid terms, taking them not country by country, but trait by trait, problem by problem.”
Morris understood that not all editors and publishers agreed, and that his use of
photography would differ from mainstream publications. In the same month that Ladies’
Home Journal showed its readers a series of idyllic and picturesque photographs of
farming – turning human labor into a timeless narrative but also into a story about what
was happening around the world (seemingly) that month [Figure 1.23] – Life led its July
1948 issue with an article titled, “If We Should Have to Fight Again.” [Figure 1.24]
Written by General Carl Spatz, the commander of the forces that dropped the first atomic
bomb, it offered Life reader a statement “on the principles of air strategy and the meaning
airpower has for his country in the atomic age.” [Figure 1.25] The General was shown in
a large-scale photograph, posing awkwardly but with self-importance in front of a map of
the world at the Pentagon’s Air Force headquarters, which located dozens of countries
just as in the Journal series, but the purpose could not have been more different.
97
Titled
“World Air Order of Battle,” this map compared the military air strength of the world’s
nations - a far message from “People are People the World Over” indeed. In Life articles
such as these, maps and diagrams of the world were used to scare readers about the
possibility of global destruction through nuclear warfare and to show support for the

96
Judt, Postwar, 197.
97
General Carl Spatz, “If We Should Have to Fight Again,” Life (July 5, 1948), 34.

91
development of American atomic and military power. In contrast to Life’s map, the
emblem of “People are People the World Over” consisted of two views of a bright blue
globe and complemented the series’ symmetrical layout and two-page format. [Figure
1.26] Rather than charting precise locations, the Journal globe reminded readers that all
of the families were part of the same world united by shared traits and concerns.
Comparing “People are People the World Over” to contemporaneously published stories
in Life, one sees that Morris’ photo essay was part of a battle being waged over how
Americans should visualize and relate to the postwar world and its people.

Menschen wie du und ich
“People are People the World Over” received mixed responses from Journal
readers and Morris’ colleagues, and the photo-essay started no revolutions in world
understanding, no widespread embrace “that there are really no foreigners – any more.”
Nevertheless, the essay went on to be reprinted in International House Quarterly, the
magazine published by the American organization that established dormitories on college
campuses for international students to live together and thereby promote understanding
among generations of the world’s future leaders. One editor at the Journal derided the
series’ “grade school geography textbook format,” but Morris thought that the series’
didacticism could be a boon for childhood education. He inquired into possible funding
from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations to expand the project’s photographic research
and attempted to have it published as a textbook with Harper & Brothers, McGraw-Hill
and MacMillan.
98
He also considered various ways to have UNESCO adapt it into “film
strips, text books, and exhibits for use in primary and secondary schools throughout the

98
Bruce Gould to John Morris, November 1, 1950, AJGM-UC.

92
world.”
99
As we have seen, “People are People the World Over” informed readers about
the hopeful vision of the United Nations, but Morris also considered the United Nations
agencies a viable market for the kind of photographic reporting that he was overseeing at
the Journal. Nevertheless UNESCO appears to have been wary of over-relying on written
and photographic material from the United States. At a 1946 meeting on the state of the
press, UNESCO committee members considered the notion of a free press alongside the
practicalities - what infrastructure was left after the war, and where should UNESCO
invest its resources to ensure that a variety of views and independent stories circulate,
especially in the “ex-occupied” countries. The Preparatory Commission on the Press
noted that while American newspapers and news agencies were “old structures on solid
foundations” that could provide UNESCO with “readymade” stories at a cheap price, the
group feared that relying on American material would stifle the rebirth of independent
voices in Europe. Especially following the media’s involvement in propaganda efforts
during World War, UNESCO demonstrated grave concern over allowing one country to
dominate “the truth to be revealed to the masses.” Perhaps for this reason, Morris’ vision
for a UNESCO adoption of “People are People” never came to fruition.
100

Yet Morris’ aims to have the series reach a broader audience were also limited by
his own contacts. The editor needed Magnum not only to produce a story of such scale in
the first place, but also to distribute the project abroad. Magnum’s ability to sell stories
internationally became a crucial barometer for the organization’s success and one of the
main tasks of Magnum staff in the New York and Paris offices included developing,

99
John Morris to Ernestine Evans, November 4, 1949, AJGM; John Morris to Herbert Abraham, September
22, 1950; Helene Frye to John G. Morris, February 11, 1952, both AJGM-UC.
100
Minutes from the UNESCO preparatory commission on the press, June 25, 1946, UNESCO Archive,
Paris.

93
packaging, and repackaging photo essays that would appeal to a range of cultural and
political mindsets on both sides of the Atlantic. When Chim’s colleagues in New York
urged him to come up with better story ideas, for instance, they explicitly instructed him
to shoot photo essays “that will stand up in three markets – American, British and
European.”
101
Yet the devastation of World War II ensured that Magnum’s European
sales lagged behind those made in New York until the mid-1950s. With the rise of
fascism in the thirties and the onset of war, many European magazine editors, publishers,
writers, and photographers sought asylum in the United States or take on work for
American publications. The resources required to carry out the war effort, coupled with
the destruction of national infrastructure, put sectors of Europe’s entertainment industry –
including magazine publishing – on a half-decade hiatus. Magazines that had made some
of the most important contributions to the aesthetic and narrative qualities of photo
reportage in the twenties and thirties closed their doors, including Lucien Vogel’s Vu in
1940 and its rival L’Illustration in 1944.
102
In Germany, many avant-garde and leftist
illustrated publications – including the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, Berliner Illustrierte
Zeitung, and Münchner Illustrierte Presse – closed even earlier due to the rise of National
Socialism. Of all of the significant interwar illustrated magazines, only England’s Picture
Post, founded in 1938 by Stefan Lorant, continued to be published during the war, even
after its founding editor had emigrated to the United States.
While the illustrated press began to recover almost immediately after 1945, its
growth was slow and limited by persistent paper and ink shortages, which made printing

101
Bill Vandivert to Chim, July 15, 1947, MFNY.
102
Vogel closed Vu upon the Nazi invasion of France so as not to let the magazine serve Nazi interests.
L’Illustration was edited by a Vichy collaborator, Jacques de Lesdain, and supported France’s collaboration
with Nazi Germany. It was closed following the liberation of France.

94
expensive. The French industrialist Jean Prouvost started Paris Match in 1949 and under
the editorial leadership of Roger Therond, the magazine became the leading weekly
magazine of France and Magnum’s largest European client. In Italy, Alberto Mondadori
debuted Epoca in 1950 and illustrated magazines began to reappear in a divided Germany
as well, including Der Spiegel in 1947 and Der Stern in the following year. All of these
magazines modeled themselves after Life in their commitment to photographic
storytelling, but at least until 1953, they were limited to shorter picture stories and could
print far less color photography than their American counterparts.
103
These publications
also had far smaller budgets than American publications and could rarely pay Magnum
photographers to shoot original and exclusive picture stories that were conceived in-
house at the magazines. For a number of years, the best funded magazine, Paris Match,
served as a standard bearer and image supplier for the smaller publications around
Europe, which often purchased and reprinted material that had first appeared in the
French magazine.
104

In this early climate Magnum had no formal distribution or sales system for its
stories in Europe, and Robert Capa managed many business relationships personally. In
1948, he arranged to sell Magnum photographs to a set of new publications that had been
established through the Marshall Plan. These American funded magazines were in dire
need of photographic material, and they agreed to pay high prices to the cooperative to
reprint their images.
105
Under these conditions, the Magnum office sold “People are
People the World Over” to Heute (Today), a German-language illustrated magazine

103
Robert Capa, Magnum Stockholder Report, February 15, 1952, AJGM.
104
David Seymour, Reports on Italian and French markets, September 19, 1954 and Magnum European
Distribution Report, December 1956, AJGM.
105
Morris Get the Picture, 137 and Whelan, Robert Capa, 271.

95
published by the American occupying authorities in Munich from 1945-1951, which
began printing the story in July 1948.
106
[Figure 1.27] Heute was part of a broad
denazification campaign being carried out by the Allied victors across Germany, and it
relied on the medium of photography, through which fascist myths had been constructed
in the first place, to “counteract the memory of spectacular special effects [of Nazi visual
culture] by ordinary-yet-inspiring imagery of daily life [and] the universal third
person…somehow supplanted by an infinite variety of unpretentious first persons.”
107

The Morris-Magnum collaboration was one of many photographic stories that
participated in promoting the magazine’s distinctively American version of democracy,
equality, and internationalism among Germans recovering from the war. The magazine
titled the series “Menschen wie du und ich” - “People Like You and Me” - turning the
story into a plea that addressed the ideologically fragile German readers whom, the world
feared, could easily turn back to fascism.
Instead of the Journal’s double projection of the earth, in Heute a single map of
the globe was stretched out across the introductory page of the series, a tangle of lines
anchoring family portraits to an emphatically single and unified world. The series
proceeded in the same order as in America, but whereas the Journal allotted two tightly
organized pages for each story, in Heute each installment was a page longer, allowing the
images to be reproduced at a larger scale. [Figure 1.28] To the extent that Heute needed
more photographic material, this allotment made sense. There was also more text in the
German variant, so that while the photographs delivered a straightforward message of

106
On this publication see James Rolleston, “Heute, 1948: Photojournalism Frames the German Present”
South Atlantic Review, 69:2 (2004), 74-97 and “After Zero Hour: The Visual Texts of Post-War Germany”
South Atlantic Review, 64:2 (Spring 1999), 1-19.
107
Rolleston, “Heute, 1948,” 77-78.

96
shared humanity, the text had an increased educational function, elaborating in detail on
the unique circumstances of each family’s life. “Menschen wie du und ich” participated
in Heute’s strategy of bombarding readers with photographs that showed the “sheer
variety of the present” instead of making references to the past, an effective tool for
recalibrating the world views of people who had, under fascism, been told that the present
was a mere stepping stone between Germany’s once powerful past and its ideal future. If
in the United States the story could buried in the middle of a women’s magazine that
preoccupied itself with home making, fashion, and relationships, in Germany, “People
Like You and Me” became a cover story that represented the essence of the publication
itself. [Figure 1.29] The case of Heute shows how the series’ packaging of daily life into
a news story was as idealistic as it was sellable and timely for a variety of press markets.
Magnum was willing to exploit the various channels not so much out of political and
ideological loyalties but because in the aftermath of the war there were few places to
print their work and they could not afford to be picky about their clientele. For Morris,
Heute offered a convenient forum for publicizing the work he had overseen at the Journal
and for bringing the series’ message to a wider audience through the channels that existed
in the war’s aftermath.
In both Heute and Ladies’ Home Journal, Magnum enabled the accumulation of
visual data that editors, tasked with building international understanding or with
denazification, needed. The first Magnum-wide project did not prioritize beautiful or
exceptional photographs but rather focused on mundane daily activities with formal
regularity. As such, “People are People the World Over” can be seen as a metaphor for
early Magnum itself. The agency could represent the giant scale of the world as well as

97
the ordinary people and activities that constituted it, while Morris contained that scale
through the editing process. The project is also representative of early Magnum because
of its latent pragmatism: it employed multiple photographers around the world and then
sold to multiple markets (American and German, journalistic and public relations). The
latter point is significant because Magnum’s photography often appeared in non-press
settings that nevertheless made use of photographic reporting. In the aftermath of the war,
one such setting (and Magnum’s first publicity client) was UNESCO, which turned to the
reportorial and visual strategies of print media to raise money for and build awareness
about its activities when it hired Chim to produce “Children of Europe” in 1948.

UNESCO and the Children of Europe
UNESCO was created in 1946 with the goal of preventing another world war by
creating international understanding through education and culture. Its activities included
art conservation, designing curricula, training teachers, and developing educational
materials on a variety of humanistic and scientific subjects. Most importantly for the
history of photojournalism, UNESCO’s leaders agreed that the organization would only
be effective if it used the tools of mass communication – including the press, cinema,
radio and television – in order to influence public opinion.
108
To aid in these efforts
UNESCO’s first Director General, the British scientist and eugenicist Julian Huxley,
recruited the filmmaker John Grierson to serve as UNESCO’s first Director of Mass
Communications and Public Information in 1947. Grierson, already known
internationally as an advocate of film and other visual media for the purposes of
education and advocacy, was responsible for coining the term “documentary” in the

108
Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (Paris: UNESCO, 1946), 24, 58-62.

98
1930s.
109
Although the bureaucratic operations of UNESCO led to Grierson’s departure
just a year after he arrived, he tried to convince his colleagues that the organization
needed to learn from politicians and use mass communications as a psychological tool in
order to advance democracy and international understanding.
110

Much attention has been paid to the role of cinema for UNESCO and Grierson
alike, but Chim’s work with UNESCO demonstrates that the international organization
was also learning from photojournalism in developing its mass communications strategy
– both in its hiring of a press photographer to cover the fate of Europe’s orphaned and
displaced children, and in its extensive use of print media, including self-published
newsletters, magazines, brochures, and illustrated books. UNESCO followed the media
landscape after 1945 and its publications betrayed a remarkable amount of self-reflexivity
about serving as an alternative market for photographs of the war’s aftermath. In October
1949, UNESCO’s heftily titled “Newsletter on Reconstruction and Rehabilitation,” which
regularly published photo essays on the subject, reappeared as Impetus. [Figure 1.30] The
new issue opened with a letter from the editor, which explained the reasons for the
magazine’s rebranding as well as its continued relevance for the postwar world. The
editor explained that when World War II, “the biggest and longest news story in the
history of journalism,” ended, publications turned to covering the United Nations’ relief
and reconstruction efforts around the world because the story “made good copy: famine
forestalled…bridges rebuilt…refugees repatriated.” The United Nations agencies
benefited from such coverage directly, as “people of good will responded to the needs of

109
Documentary had less to do with the actual medium than with content and the responsibilities of the
documentarian, which included making use of natural or found material, coming into intimacy with the
material, creating an interpretation of what he sees, and having a sense of social responsibility. Cara A.
Finnegan, “Documentary as Art in ‘U.S. Camera,’” Rhetoric Society of America 31:2 (Spring 2001), 60.
110
On the role of psychology and propaganda in WWII see Turner, Democratic Surround, 15-38.

99
the survivors” and relief committees were able to grow their activities. Even though such
headlines had became repetitive and postwar reconstruction “was ‘news’ no longer,”
Impetus declared that it would continue to report on the story of reconstruction.
111
While
openly acknowledging that the magazine aimed to continue raising money and promote
the activities of UNESCO, this letter also exposed its own methods: that continuing to
publish photographs and reports about reconstruction would be a way to keep the story
fresh and make people continue to care about the war’s effects. The UNESCO
publication betrayed an understanding of the same phenomena John Morris noted by in
his introduction to the Journal series, as he scoffed that only the “people who write
newspaper headlines” would be surprised by the humanistic message of “People are
People the World Over.”
In the same moment, the editor of a non-governmental publication and a women’s
magazine both understood the power of global human-interest stories, and photography in
particular, to maintain reader interest in the project of recovery and even prevention of
another war. Their self-reflexivity about how their efforts countered the strategies of
general publications suggests that neither Morris nor the UNESCO editor could be sure
that the public’s interest in the world and its people would persist. For both, photographs
and methods of social research helped make the story of the postwar moment current.
The photographs of orphaned and abandoned children that Chim made between
March and June 1948 in Poland, Hungary, Austria, Italy and Greece initially appeared in
a standalone booklet published by UNESCO titled Children of Europe.
112
[Figure 1.2]

111
“Letter to the Reader,” Impetus: A Monthly Review of Reconstruction in Education, Science, and
Culture III: 8-9 (August –September 1949), inside cover.
112
For details on Chim’s itinerary and the institutions he visited during his trip see Carole Naggar, David
Seymour: Vies de Chim (Paris: Contrejour, 2014), 79-88.

100
The report began with a letter by Chim written from the perspective of an anonymous
child who had survived the war and who was now informing adults – eager to forget the
devastation they had caused and eager to not look at traces of suffering – about the costs
of the war on children. Chim filled the text with statistics (“There are 1,700,000 orphans
in Poland, 100,000 in Warsaw alone”) and described the nature of children’s suffering
(amputated limbs, blindness, and burnt faces as well as their loneliness and feelings of
despair) in an accusatory tone, which also inflected the tone of his captions.
113
Surveying
how they live in abandoned side-streets and piles of wreckage, Chim produced images of
children within desolate landscapes. [Figure 1.31] Shot from below, three photographs
show barefoot and minimally dressed children climbing through ruins in the kind of
scene that was also memorialized in Roberto Rosselini’s 1948 film Germania, anno zero.
In the photograph on the left, the climbing children look like they may lose their footing
at any moment. On the top right, two groups of children have climbed high onto what
used to be buildings, calling to each other from their make-believe towers. “Our
playground: ruins. Our toys: shell-cases and bombs,” the caption informed. From the
everyday lives of abandoned children, Chim’s photographic survey turned to close-up
portraits of teenagers who were recovering from physical and emotional ailments,
photographs of displaced families, and masses of homeless children before demonstrating
the small signs of relief that the victims were receiving. In one photograph, two children
look intently at the photographer, their gaze just higher than the camera, showing them
their empty cups. [Figure 1.32] Resembling the photograph that he made two years prior
for This Week in Germany [Figure 1.12], the petitionary quality of this image is
heightened by the empty cups that both children tilt toward the camera, calling upon

113
David Seymour, Children of Europe (Paris: UNESCO, 1949), 5-12.

101
viewers to support organizations such as UNICEF. “Milk for the children sometimes, but
they need it everyday,” the caption reads and while there were no explicit fundraising
appeals in the publication, Chim’s photographs also re-appeared in the UNESCO Courier
– a UN publication targeting a broad, English-speaking public – with more instructions
on how to help Europe’s children. [Figure 1.33]
Many of Chim’s images were also reproduced in weekly magazines including
Life, Illustrated, Sie Und Er, and France-Illustration, where they became as much about
Chim’s journey through Europe and the quality of the photographs he brought back as
they were about the fate of the war’s young survivors.
114
[Figure 1.34] Although Life
magazine failed to take interest in Chim’s Polish refugee story proposal in 1947, it
devoted seven pages to the children of Europe in December 1948 once the project was
completed, reproducing some of his photographs in very large scale and with minimal
captions in order to focus readers’ attention on the heartbreaking evidence of the war’s
aftermath that Chim had brought back. The magazine was the first in the U.S. to print
Chim’s photograph of Tereska drawing her home – a startling and devastating portrait of
a child’s tumultuous mental state and which was excluded from the Children of Europe,
book, which focused mostly on children receiving aid. [Figure 1.35] Conscious that the
photograph contained little information about the work being done by UNICEF, Life
editors explained that some of Seymour’s photographs “were not necessarily typical but
…dramatize the enormous task” of aiding “the slow progress from sickness to health.”
115

Chim’s major debut in Life therefore began as a public relations and fundraising
campaign, funded by an international agency before it was reprinted in Life as an editorial

114
“Somewhere in Europe: A Photographer Highlights the Drama of Post-War Youngsters,” UNESCO
Courier II:1 (February 1949), 6.
115
“Children of Europe,” Life (December 27, 1948), 13.

102
feature but also as publicity for the photographer himself. Acknowledging the dual nature
of the report between news and advocacy, Life concluded Chim’s story with a short list of
the American organizations to which Life readers could contribute in order to help the
children.
Magnum distributed and sold the images from “Children of Europe” more widely
than they had done with any of Chim’s material prior to the UNESCO assignment, and
the project became his signature portfolio.
116
Throughout the 1950s, Chim used it to
introduce himself to new and potential clients, especially when he sought out public
relations assignments and needed evidence that he had produced such campaigns
successfully before.
117
After Chim’s death in 1956, the “Children of Europe” portfolio
constituted the bulk of his posthumous retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, titled
“Chim’s Children.” [Figure 1.36] In that context and in subsequent biographies of his
life, the poignant scenes he captured of ragged children huddled on the streets, playing in
rubble and recuperating in hospitals became proof of a number of myths: that Chim
received the “Children of Europe” assignment because of his compassionate photographs
of children dating back to the Spanish Civil War; that he jumped at the opportunity to
work for UNESCO and for John Grierson because he recognized the documentary and
humanitarian potential of the photographic survey; and that he made financial sacrifices
in order to execute the project, which became “a labor of the heart.”
118
But looking
forward from January 1948, Chim did not have very many prospects for magazine work
and he also did not seem immediately convinced that working with UNESCO would be a

116
I have found that the story appeared in Illustrated (August 14, 1948 and March 12, 1949), Science
Illustrated (April 1949), Collier’s (July 8, 1950), and Intercom (December 1957).
117
Chim to Pat Hagan, January 9, 1951, MFNY.
118
Bondi, Chim, 90; Carole Naggar, “Lives of Chim,” 21-22; Naggar, Vies de Chim, 79-88.

103
good idea. He had even written to Vandivert and Eisner asking them to weigh in and
clarify, among other things, who exactly Grierson was.
John Grierson (?) wants me to give him the project, well presented and the
amount of money I need. George Voodraf (?) the US secretary said:
sounds interested, he’ll approve it. Now, they are crazy, excited, strange
people. I am not saying it is all in the bag/I say it is possible. But I’ll have
to do some pushing. And I don’t know if I want to – or if I should…if you
believe that a trip over Europe – under the auspices of UNESCO – is
worthwhile, get in touch with Fortune and ask them if they are interested
to do it with UNESCO help – and send a writer with me. I leave this
entirely up to both of you girls.
119

Within a few months Chim had established contact with Grierson and took on the
assignment, with Magnum relieved that he finally had a large-scale project that would
employ him for some time and allow him to travel throughout Eastern Europe which had
been his plan since 1947.
120
“Children of Europe” was therefore one answer to what a
freelance photojournalist committed to documenting the story of the war’s aftermath
could do when he was not particularly well known, and when he worked in a political and
media climate in which the war was no longer a story worth dwelling upon.
Chim’s experiences with UNESCO also contribute to a larger history of
international organizations and the photographic profession after 1945. As Silvia
Salvatici has shown, the short-lived United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA) relied extensively on the work of professional American
photographers including Arthur Rothstein and John Vachon, who had been employed by
the FSA in the thirties and the Office of War Information (OWI) in the forties.
121
On the

119
Chim to Magnum New York, January 29, 1948, MFNY.
120
Robert Capa to Maria Eisner copy to Henri Cartier-Bresson, November 3, 1947, FHCB.
121
Silvia Salvatici, “Sights of Benevolence: UNRRA’s Recipients Portrayed,” in Fehrenbach and Rodogno,
Humanitarian Photography, 200-222. For background on the UNRRA see William Hitchcok, The Bitter
Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (New York: Free Press, 2008), 215-248.

104
one hand, their career trajectories allow us to reconstruct the evolution of social
documentary reporting into war photography and then into humanitarian photography,
and to see how such organizations as UNESCO and the UNRRA offered important
stepping stones to long professional careers in photojournalism. These connections can
also help us to understand the nature of such agencies’ internationalisms. Salvatici
observes that the UNRRA can be seen as an American effort to internationalize the New
Deal when one considers the shared photographic foundations of the FSA, OWI, and
UNRRA.
122
By contrast, Chim’s work with UNESCO publications in Paris, arranged via
Grierson with help from the Magnum Paris office, opens up onto a larger story that
remains to be told about the British, French, and Jewish émigré figures who developed
UNESCO’s photographic campaigns and who saw themselves as providing a
counterpoint to American mass media and its increasing preoccupation with the Cold
War.
123

Conclusion
Like Chim’s “Children of Europe,” the Magnum-wide “People are People the
World Over” story took on more significance as time went on. By the time Morris started
thinking about writing his memoirs (if not earlier), he began to see “People are People” as
a foundational moment in his postwar career, not because of what the series
accomplished on its own terms but because of whom it allegedly influenced. In a 1982

122
Salvatici, “Sights of Benevolence,” 202-203.
123
On the intellectual origins of UNESCO see H. H. Krill De Capello, “The Creation of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,” International Organization 24:1 (Winter 1970), 1-30. I
aim to revise this chapter for the book by foregrounding Magnum’s humanitarian photography – including
George Rodger’s work for the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) – and looking more closely at
its relationship to the political and visual tropes in U.S. magazines in the late forties.

105
special issue of Exposure magazine, published by the Society for Photographic
Education, Morris shared a series of stories about the well-known figures with whom he
crossed paths during his career as a photo editor, including Robert Capa and Edward
Steichen.
124
Regarding the latter, Morris explained:
Everyone in photography knew Steichen by reputation, but it was
not until he came to the Museum of Modern Art, and I came to Ladies’
Home Journal, that our paths really crossed. We had both seen too much
war…We both dreamed of using photography to promote world
understanding.
At the Journal, in the spring of 1947, I obtained backing for a
worldwide photographic series intended to compare the daily lives of farm
families…The published series, “People are People the World Over,” ran
for a year in the Journal and caught Steichen’s eye. It was right along the
lines of a project he had, to show the worldwide “Family of Man,” and he
used to share his dreams with me, and his concerns about getting it
funded. I was pleased that many of my “People are People” became
members of his “Family.”
125

In this this remembrance, as in his 2002 autobiography and multiple interviews, including
with me, Morris the Journal photo editor became the precursor to Steichen, the MOMA
curator who is best known for the blockbuster Family of Man exhibition of 1955.
126

Certainly there were formal similarities between the photo essay and exhibition: the
organization of images by theme (praying, eating, studying); the juxtapositions of the
same activity across culture; and an emphasis on the combined meaning of the
photographs rather than interest in individual images and their authors. The Czech and
Equatorial African families featured in the Journal reappeared in the exhibit. But aside

124
Founded in 1963 by such figures as Nathan Lyons, Beaumont Newhall and John Szarkowski, the
Society for Photographic Education became an important professional association that led the way in
courses and conferences on photography as the medium began to be taught within art departments. On this
transitional period in photographic education in the U.S., see Jason Francisco, “Teaching Photography as
Art,” American Art 21:3 (Fall 2007), 19-24.
125
John G. Morris, “A Photographic Memoir,” Exposure 20:2 (Summer 1982), 20.
126
John Morris, Get the Picture, 121; John Morris, Photo Diary (Paris: Ceros, 2011), n.p.; Morris wrote to
me, “I don’t regard the series as very successful; maybe it was the dull layout. Best thing was Steichen’s
interest….” John G. Morris, email correspondence with the author, December 2, 2011.

106
from Morris’ own story, there is little evidence that one led to the other. There is also no
proof so far that before The Family of Man, Steichen enlarged the “People are People”
photographs for a window display on New York’s Fifth Avenue, where they were
exhibited in honor of the founding of the United Nations, which is a story that Morris told
as well.
127
Such connection appear even more tenuous when one considers, as the photo
critic A.D. Coleman noted, that “this ‘people are people/family of man’ notion ran
rampant as an article of faith in liberal-left circles during the post-World War II years.”
128

In addition to claiming that “People are People” was exceptional rather than a product of
its time, Morris suggested that the significance of his work had everything to do with his
supposed influence on the blockbuster exhibition and its famous curator. And if photo
histories focus mostly on individual photographers, Morris’ story put the editor at the
center, thereby swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction while again
deemphasizing the networked nature of photojournalism.
Such mythical tropes, repeated by established photo historians in subsequent
decades, prevent us from understanding the content and production of Magnum’s work
on its own terms – before the agency became successful, before it learned how to cover
the world and distribute its images to many clients rather than just one ardent supporter
such as Morris, and before its photojournalistic images entered the museum.
129
This

127
Morris, Get the Picture, 121.
128
A.D. Coleman, “Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (Post 22)” Photocritic International Blog
accessed April 27, 2015 http://www.nearbycafe.com/artandphoto/photocritic/2015/04/27/.
129
See Phillips, “Judgment Seat,” 44n45 and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “The Family of Man: Refurbishing
Humanism for a Postmodern Age” in Jean Back and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, eds., The Family of Man
1955-2001: Humanism and Postmodernism: A Reappraisal of the Photo Exhibition by Edward Steichen
(Marburg Jonas Verlag, 2005), 41; Abbott, Engaged Observers,13. Because some of these scholars were
also some of Steichen’s fiercest critics, their acceptance of Morris’ story suggests that they were not
interested in the Journal series itself but rather used the tenuous link between “People are People” and
family of Man to support their critiques of Steichen as “MOMA’s glorified picture editor” who (heretically)
brought the photo essay into the museum setting and whose Family of Man exhibit was no more than “an

107
chapter has taken a different approach by asking, who needed Magnum’s photography
and its international network of free-lance photographers in the wake of World War II?
The Journal and UNESCO projects demonstrate that Magnum was needed by cultural
leaders who were looking to influence readers in the aftermath of the war by showing
them the scale of the world, its destruction, and its humanity. Both projects employed
Magnum’s photography as a form of advocacy, whether to raise money to help the war’s
victims or to argue for preventing a new and atomic conflict. Both projects also show that
American magazine editors and publishers were tired of reporting on the aftermath of
World War II because they were more interested in the advent of the Cold War, in
lighthearted human interest stories, or a combination of both. Magnum helped keep the
story of World War II alive through its photography by partnering with certain idealists
invested in minor utopias, and they found ways to make use of their network to fulfill
these editorial initiatives. They also learned from their experiences, going on to produce
three more global surveys for Holiday magazine in the 1950s, and deciding to hire John
Morris in 1953 to serve as Magnum’s first Executive Director, charged with managing
Magnum’s clients and finances.
While Magnum’s photographs helped Morris claim that “People are People the
World Over,” it would be reductive to equate the series’ message with Magnum’s
mission as an organization, or to single it out as uniquely representative of the agency’s
postwar work. Magnum operated at a frenetic pace. The money from the Journal
assignment gave Magnum photographers secure backing as they learned to cover places

oversized magazine layout.” Philips, “Judgment Seat,” 31. Such interpretations did not grapple with the
immersive media environment that The Family of Man created, while positioning photojournalism as a
straightforward process of arranging images on the page in order to please the public’s middle-brow tastes.
For a review of the critiques of The Family of Man and an insightful revision of the exhibit’s meaning, see
Turner, The Democratic Surround, 181-212.

108
and events on their own, much farther away than Europe, and where the story was about
cultural and historical specificities rather than internationalism.
130
In the USSR, the
Middle East, and Asia, Magnum’s founders faced different challenges and learning
curves in branding themselves as a global photographic cooperative. Their ability to work
around the world in 1948 while dealing with political, market-driven, and technical
constraints is the subject of the next chapter.

130
Inge Bondi to Stuart Alexander, Corrections to Magnum Chronology, 1989, Magnum Photos Collection,
Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ (CCP).

109
Chapter 2

The “Quiet Middle” Won’t Do: Covering the World in 1948

What we know and remember about the postwar world and early Magnum rests
on a few iconic and high circulating photographs, pulled out of the dozens of photo
essays that Magnum published and the thousands of exposures its photographers made.
Jewish survivors crowd onto the deck of a ship, eager for a glimpse of the Holy Land
where they would rebuild their lives. [Figure 2.1] A man looks on with anguish and grief
as smoke rises and flames spread through Gandhi’s funeral pyre. [Figure 2.2] A frantic
queue lines up outside of a bank in Shanghai. [Figure 2.3] Each of these photographs
seem to represent a greater historical moment: the creation of the state of Israel in the
aftermath of World War II; the violence between Hindus and Pakistanis following India’s
independence from British rule; the eve of the Communist revolution of China.
Examining them in this decontextualized way, we can register the indicators of distant
cultures they record. With the benefit of hindsight, we can cite them as evidence of
international migration and worldwide political and cultural shifts in the wake of World
War II. We may also claim, as others have done, that such images stand as proof of
Magnum’s successful global enterprise, which helped make such events knowable in the
first place. But surely the photographs attest to more than just this.
In 1948, the future of the world, like the future of Magnum Photos, was far from
secure. The Allied nations were shifting their priorities from reconciliation and
retribution towards the renewed ideological conflict of the Cold War, exemplified by the

110
division of Germany and Berlin.
1
At the same time, the one-world movement,
popularized in the book of the same name by Wendell Willkie in 1942, gained new
urgency after the atomic bombs were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki as cultural
and political leaders argued for new controls over atomic weapons.
2
The world in 1948
was divided ideologically but it was also united by new technologies and new systems of
communication and transportation, which reached farther more quickly than ever before.
3

1948 was a year of political consolidation as well as geographic partition in countries
such as India, China, Korea, Israel, Germany, Ireland and South Africa. Internationalist
logic was strong, embodied by organizations such as the United Nations, but so was the
drive for political independence as Europe’s imperial dominance declined, and which the
U.N. initially tried to slow down.
4
In 1948, political and cultural leaders sensed that
“history” was moving out of Europe and into the rest of the world, and the media
landscape was shifting to keep up with all of these changes.
5
Like the aftermath of World
War II in Europe, such changes did not immediately translate into photographic
opportunities for Magnum’s founders. The world in all of its complexity needed to be
managed and narrativized through photography and then sold to the press in 1948.

1
Tony Judt, “The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe” in Istvan Deak, Tomasz
Gross, and Tony Judt, eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 298-302.
2
See van Lente, “Transnational History of Popular Images,” and Turner, Democratic Surround.
3
For a recent overview of the extent and pace of interconnectedness in the post-1945 world, see Leela
Gandhi and Deborah L. Nelson, “Editor’s Introduction to the Special Issue on Around 1948:
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Transformation” Critical Inquiry 40:4 (Summer 2014), 285-297.
Jonathan Harris has made an important observation with regard to our contemporary moment that applies
equally to the postwar context: That globalization and our knowledge of globalization are bound up
together, i.e. that what we know about a global phenomena such as war comes from a media source linked
to global communications. Jonathan Harris, “Global and Contemporary Art: A Convergence of People and
Ideas” in Harris, ed. Globalization and Contemporary Art (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 6.
4
On the United Nations’ attempts to maintain a balance of power among the big three (Great Britain, the
USSR, and the US) circa 1948, followed by its change of course to support anticolonial movements
between the 1950s and 1970s, see Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the
Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
5
Mark Mazower, “The End of Eurocentrism,” Critical Inquiry 40:4 (Summer 2014), 298-313.

111
In this moment, the cooperative’s founding photographers traveled far beyond
Europe to put into practice their founding tenet of “carry[ing] on the business of
photography in all its branches, in any part of the world.”
6
The groundbreaking
photographic reports that Magnum’s founders made in 1948 sealed Magnum’s reputation
as a global cooperative, while the challenges its photographers faced in the process of
getting those pictures were eclipsed by the financial success and wide distribution they
created. While some scholars have studied Magnum’s photojournalism during this period,
making it the subject of formal and historical analysis, as well as postcolonial and
capitalist critique, few have attempted to uncover the mechanics of what it meant to
photograph the world in 1948 on a daily basis in order to provide American magazines
with international news features.
7

This chapter focuses on the experiences of three Magnum founders (Robert Capa,
Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger) working in three regions (the Soviet Union,
the Middle East, and Asia) in order to foreground the key issues and challenges Magnum
faced in 1948 when its photographers worked on their own rather than in a coordinated
fashion (as they did for “People are People the World Over”).
8
I demonstrate that the
formal, political, and material aspects of photography represented an interrelated set of
concerns for the agency seeking to brand itself as a global postwar enterprise. Instead of

6
Fondiller, “Image and Reality,” 62.
7
For instance, Douglas Smith, “From One China to Another: Cartier-Bresson, Sartre, and Photography in
the Age of Decolonization” Photographies (March 2009), 59-71 examines Cartier-Bresson’s photography
as an instrument of “(neo-)colonialist Western ideology” while Andrew L. Mendelson and C. Zoe Smith,
“Vision of a New State: Israel as Mythologized by Robert Capa” Journalism Studies 7:2 (2006), 187-211
examine the visual tropes in Capa’s images that naturalize the existence of Israel while avoiding Palestinian
suffering.
8
Ample research exists on the individual founders and by putting their experiences into conversation with
each other, I am not repeating many of the biographical details that one can find in Richard Whelan,
Robert Capa; Claude Cookman, “Margaret Bourke-White and Henri Cartier-Bresson: Gandhi’s Funeral”
History of Photography 22:2 (Summer 1998), 199-209; Carole Naggar, George Rodger; Peter Galassi,
“Old Worlds, Modern Times;” and Lebrun and Lefebvre, Robert Capa.

112
seeking out spectacular and singular images, Magnum’s founders worked on the level of
the photo essay, debating and defining what would make for “good” photojournalism and
articulating certain theories of the news image that would become the standard in
magazine reporting for decades to come. Photographers worked under conditions of
censorship that were political and market-driven, external and self-imposed. In analyzing
how their reports were produced, we can see Magnum creating an aesthetics of the
postwar world that deemed certain issues visible and others invisible by virtue of the
photographers’ own citizenship, nationality, political views, and ideas about
photography.
Via Magnum staff, Capa, Cartier-Bresson, and Rodger negotiated with magazine
clients sides to figure out the middle ground between the pictures that could sell and the
photographers’ own preferences for what, where, and how to shoot. Magnum’s staff as
well as other collaborators – spouses, writer-friends, and editors – played as important a
role as the photographers in the field. This chapter therefore demonstrates that their
involvement was crucial to what would later be seen as the photographers’ individual
successes.
9

Magnum Sets Up a Global Operation
By articulating that Magnum’s purpose included “carry[ing] on the business of
photography in all its branches, in any part of the world,” Magnum’s certificate of
incorporation underscored that the organization needed capital to continue operating, and
that its ability to generate income depended on the content, quality and marketability of

9
Inge Bondi, who joined Magnum as a secretary in 1948, described the early atmosphere: “All this travel
to far-off places would not have been possible without partners in the offices at the home base, where, in
the photographers’ absence, stories were processed and delivered to editors, bills were sent out, and the
photographers’ client base was extended as needed.” Bondi, Chim, 76.

113
the photographs that its members made around the world.
10
To satisfy clients, Magnum
photographers and staff had to be avid consumers of the news to begin with, staying
abreast of what was happening around the world. According to Cartier-Bresson, “People
often say that I have been in the right place at the right time. What they really mean is
that I follow the newspapers in order to get a sense of what is happening in the world.”
11

The Magnum founders decided where to go based on current political events, journalistic
values, their skill sets, and their unique personal and professional networks. As we saw in
chapter 1, David Seymour would not have been able to travel throughout Eastern and
Central Europe were it not for a first assignment from This Week in 1947, and an
invitation from John Grierson to produce a promotional campaign for UNESCO the
following year. Henri Cartier-Bresson decided to go to Asia in large part because his
Javanese wife was involved in the movement for Indonesian independence from the
Netherlands and generally knew that part of the world; it also helped that the couple
traveled in circles of well-connected politicians and activists.
12
In the last years of his life,
Rodger continually repeated that he fled to Africa after seeing the horrors of Bergen-
Belsen, eager to immerse himself in “cleaner” and more “primitive” ways of life.
13
But
Rodger had also documented fifteen major campaigns with the British army between
1941 and 1946, traveling through 61 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. After

10
The founders estimated that the Paris office needed to gross just over $40,000, and New York over
$81,000 in order to pay staff in Paris and New York and cover the costs of office rent, telephone bills,
postage fees and darkroom charges. Rita Vandivert to George and Cicely Rodger, May 19, 1947, SA.
11
Dorothy Norman, “Stieglitz and Cartier-Bresson,” Saturday Review (September 22, 1962), 54.
12
Galassi, “Old Worlds, Modern Times,” 12 and 68n12. The revolution for Indonesian independence,
which ended when the territories were conceded at the Hague in December 1949, influenced other
independence movements throughout Dutch holdings in the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America,
thereby setting off the end of the Dutch empire. Judt, Postwar, 280-281.
13
Rodger quoted in Robertson, The Chosen People.

114
the war, he was intimately familiar with the history, politics, and physical infrastructure
of the soon to be former British empire.
In his first letter as a Magnum member, which he penned in response to
Vandivert’s news about the creation of Magnum in New York, Rodger understood that
Vandivert would have to sell each Magnum photographer to clients. He therefore told her
to “bill me as an authority on Africa, India and the Middle East” by playing up his work
there during the war. “As you know, travel is my strong point and I intend to do lots more
of it,” he continued, but the trouble with his upcoming trip was that it would “be
expensive and will need backing.” Immediately pushing the cooperative to think beyond
magazine and newspaper work, Rodger asked if Vandivert happened to know any
representatives at Willys Jeep – a company that was looking to enter the consumer
market by building on the Jeep’s popularity as a military vehicle. “They might be
interested in having a couple of their vehicles shown through Africa, to end up perhaps in
Capetown, and if so, Rodger was willing to change his itinerary, produce some car
publicity and also shoot a news story about British refugees moving to South Africa.
14

Although it did not work out with Jeep in 1947, Rodger’s willingness to develop
story ideas at a moment’s notice shows how communication itself was an extensive and
time-consuming aspect of Magnum’s collective labor. The voluminous correspondence
between photographers, on-location around the world, and Magnum staff in the New
York and Paris offices now offers the best evidence for reconstructing Magnum’s
activities at this time, but it is also a testament to how important it was for both sides to
produce clear and detailed correspondence. In letters often numbering between three and
four single-spaced pages, Magnum staff kept photographers up to date about their

14
George Rodger to Rita Vandivert, June 6, 1947, SA.

115
negotiations with editors and sale prospects while photographers told them about
mechanical issues, planned itineraries, and story possibilities. When a photographer
prepared for a work trip in 1948, he packed not only cameras, films, and flash bulbs, but
also a typewriter and supply of regular and carbon copy paper – evidence that the process
of staying in touch was part of the photojournalist’s profession, and that it required
money, time, and physical energy. George Rodger captured that reality when he asked his
wife to photograph him in the surroundings of “Magnum Photos Inc. Equatorial Section”
– a picture that became his 1948 Christmas card, allowing family and colleagues to see
his new professional surroundings in Magnum’s farthest outpost. [Figure 2.4] The image
is now held in the Ransom Center’s Magnum picture collection and is rarely reproduced
for its troubling representation of the photographer’s jovial dominance over a small
workforce of Africans, mostly children. While Rodger dons safari gear and holds a
cigarette between his lips, his entourage of assistants pose as if engrossed in office tasks:
typing, delivering mail or waiting for a dispatch, and receiving cabled telegrams. Rodger
subsequently explained that the people in the photograph are members of the Zamba
Aluma family, whom Rodger photographed in Equatorial Africa for “People are People
the World Over” and with whom he had developed a close relationship while
documenting their daily life.
15
For today’s viewers it is difficult not to see this as a
performance of the racial politics and power dynamics that accompanied white
exploration and rule of the African continent. These dynamics were part of the story of
Rodger’s career – explored here and again in chapter 4 – and so are the props employed
in the orchestration. The makeshift signs, the two typewriters, the briefcase, the folding

15
George Rodger, “Magnum: Random Thoughts of a Founder Member,” Creative Camera (March 1969),
96-97.

116
table and chair – these were a few of the many items that Rodger packed, and hired locals
to carry, on his global assignments.
With the knowledge of what photographers were working on in the field,
Magnum staff could go about selling photographers’ work to an extensive client base.
The New York office sold Magnum work to and secured assignments primarily from
American clients, which in 1948 included the Time-Life publications (Life and Fortune),
the Curtis Publishing Company (which produced the Ladies’ Home Journal and Holiday)
as well as This Week, Look, the New York Times Magazine.
16
The Paris office sold
Magnum work to French publications such as France Illustration, Regards, Réalités, Le
Soir illustré, Epoca and Paris Match, and worked on sales with Len Spooner of London
Illustrated, which had first-look rights to all Magnum work in England and helped to sell
rejected materials to other publications in the country, such as Camera Press. Through a
network of international sales agents who worked on commission and kept between 35-
40% of the sale price, the Paris office also coordinated picture sales to publications in
Switzerland, Scandinavia, Holland, Germany, and Belgium.
17

In addition to selling stories and trying to get assignments from the client pool
above, early Magnum was willing to make a wide range of additional sales to make ends
meet. Sometimes this meant encouraging its members to work in media other than
photography, and in the first years of Magnum’s existence, there was serious talk of
having photographers simultaneously produce 16mm black and white movie coverage to
be used on television. Although the initiative never took off, George Rodger traveled

16
From January 1, 1948 toApril 30, 1949, Magnum made approximately three times more money from
American sales than from European sales. Magnum Photos Accountants Report as of April 30, 1949, SA.
17
Following the foreign agent fee, the remainder of the profits were divided between the photographer
(60%) and the Magnum office (40%). Maria Eisner to Robert Capa, Chim, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George
Rodger and the Vandiverts, February 14, 1948, FHCB.

117
through Africa with a movie camera, and his wife shot movies while he made still
images.
18
Magnum was also willing to sell images to public and private interest groups,
from the Religious News Service – a press and picture service supplying Protestant,
Catholic, and Jewish publications – to Americans for Haganah and the American Jewish
Committee. In the hands of these clients, Magnum’s photographs could serve as publicity
for missionary work or help raise funds for the new state of Israel.
19

Magnum’s work in 1948 was produced against this backdrop of financial
considerations and the very real question of which clients would pay which photographer
to go where. It also reflected that there were competing postwar realities for Magnum’s
American and European editorial clients. As Tony Judt explained, “In the United Sates,
the Cold War was what mattered and foreign and domestic priorities and rhetoric
reflected this. But in The Hague, in London or in Paris, these same years were much
taken up with costly guerilla wars in far-flung and increasingly ungovernable colonies.
National independence movements were the strategic headache for much of the 1950s,
not Moscow and its ambitions – though in some cases the two overlapped.”
20
Magnum
became a global photographic agency in 1948 not only because its photographers went to
far away places, but because they addressed the interests of its American and European
clients when choosing where to go. Capa’s work in the USSR and Israel was as much
about taking advantage of American markets as it was about Capa’s interest in those
countries, while his own newly-won American citizenship (he received his passport in
1946) structured the kinds of stories he could document there in the first place.

18
Rita Vandivert to Henri Cartier-Bresson, November 20, 1947, FHCB and Naggar, George Rodger, 168-
182.
19
Rosemary Redlich to George Rodger and Henri Cartier-Bresson, November 11, 1948, FHCB; Magnum
Accountants’ Report as of April 30, 1949, SA.
20
Judt, Postwar, 281-282.

118
The Mundaneness of Being Global: Capa in the USSR
Weeks after Magnum’s inaugural meeting, Robert Capa left for the Soviet Union
on a six week tour of Moscow, Kiev, Stalingrad and Tbilisi with the writer John
Steinbeck. The “Cold War team,” as Capa called them, wanted to learn about real life in
the USSR just as Winston Churchill announced that an Iron Curtain had been drawn
across Eastern Europe.
21
Steinbeck would look back on this moment of Cold War
escalation when explaining the goals of their trip.
Together we decided on several things: We should not go in with chips on
our shoulders and we should try to be neither critical nor favorable. We
would try to do honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard
without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we
didn’t know sufficiently, and without becoming angry at the delays of
bureaucracy. We knew there would be many things we couldn’t
understand, many things we wouldn’t like…But we determined that if
there should be criticism, it would be criticism of the thing after seeing it,
not before.
22

The author explained the team’s motivations in humanistic rather than political terms,
underscoring that he and Capa would try to set aside any pre-conceived notions about the
USSR – including, one is led to understand, the rhetoric propagated in anti-Communist
and anti-Soviet publications. Likely anticipating critiques of his and Capa’s sympathies
with the USSR (which could be substantiated by the fact that they traveled there in the
first place), Steinbeck also affirmed the team’s commitment to documentary reporting
when he promised that they would not offer “editorial comment” or critique what they
did not understand. Neither Steinbeck nor Capa made reference to their earlier leftist
sympathies and antifascist activism in the 1930s in the context of the USSR trip, but these
offered an important backdrop to the pragmatically principled expedition, which would

21
Quoted in John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000 [1948]), xvii.
22
Ibid., 4.

119
surely spark the interest of American publications amidst the escalation of the Cold War
while also allowing Capa to photograph the nation that had allied with the Spanish
Republic and the United States in the fight against fascism.
23

Capa had actually tried to visit the USSR in the mid-1930s but failed to get a visa
when the Saturday Evening Post refused to assign him the story. The magazine already
had free access to images of the USSR supplied by the Soviet information agency and did
not think that his trip was necessary.
24
But in 1947, editors in two publications pledged
their interest in having an eyewitness account from Russia. Steinbeck arranged for the
New York Herald Tribune to publish a series of syndicated articles in January 1948 while
Capa enlisted Ladies’ Home Journal picture editor John Morris to publish a feature on
“Women and Children in the USSR” the following month. Steinbeck’s relationship with
Viking Press, which published The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, led to a book deal for A
Russian Journal, released in May of 1948.
Although American publishers were interested in the material, Capa’s ability to
gain a Soviet visa was not inevitable. In the interwar period, Stalinist Russia welcomed
foreigners with enthusiasm and the belief that “showcasing the great experiment” would
bolster support for Soviet ideology and hasten socialist revolutions around the world.
25

23
I use the term “antifascism” here to identify Capa’s reporting on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil
War and his coverage of World War II campaigns against the Axis powers as a form of political activism.
Yet “antifascism” itself is not a straightforward category, especially when applied to the short-lived alliance
between Hitler and Stalin between 1939 and 1941 or the first postwar decade. For an overview of such
terms as “antifascism” and “progressive” politics before and after 1945, see Alan Wald, American Night:
The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 1-21. For Wald,
writers who had Communist sympathies before World War II transformed these into “a more serviceable
form for the postwar era – into a politico-cultural posture that I designate ‘late antifascism,’ politically
murkier than the earlier opposition to Franco and to what had happened at Munich.” Ibid., 7. I intend to
analyze Capa’s work in relation to this period of “late antifascism” more closely in revising this project.
24
Whelan, Robert Capa, 178.
25
Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the
Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Visitors included artists, writers,
intellectuals who were fellow-travelers and friends of the USSR. On individual cases of tourism to the

120
The USSR created a host of institutions including the All Union Society for Cultural
Relations with Abroad (VOKS) to organize foreign visits that typically included meetings
with intellectuals who were designated as emissaries of Soviet culture, and visits to
exceptional communes, institutions, and cultural performances.
26
But while some
100,000 visitors traveled to the USSR in the 1920s and the 1930s, the postwar Soviet
Union closed itself off to foreigners amidst Stalin’s efforts to reinstate strict discipline
and secrecy. “Never since the Revolution has the Soviet Union been so cut off from the
outside world as today,” noted British intelligence after the war.
27

In light of these circumstances, Steinbeck’s publishing record and leftist
sympathies helped the writer and photographer to gain access to the USSR. Steinbeck
began writing about the rural poor for the left-leaning San Francisco News in the 1920s,
which ultimately provided material The Grapes of Wrath. That novel was initially banned
in the US but received enthusiastically in the Soviet Union for Steinbeck’s attention to
the plight of agricultural laborers and migrants, and for his celebration of pre-industrial
farming culture.
28
True to the political realities of foreigners’ travel through the USSR,

USSR see Maria Gough, “Back in the USSR: John Heartfield, Gustavs Klucis, and the Medium of Soviet
Propaganda,” New German Critique 107 (Summer 2009), 133-183; Richard Meyer, What Was
Contemporary Art? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 37-114 on Alfred Barr in the USSR; Leah Dickerman
and Anna Idych-Lopez, Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art. (New York: MOMA, 2011),
15-23.
26
At the same time, evaluating foreign visitors became an important element of Soviet domestic
surveillance and information gathering on the outside world. On VOKS and foreign delegations to the
USSR, see David-Fox, Great Experiment and A. V. Golubeva and V. A. Nevezhina, “VOKS v 1930-1940-
e gody” in Minuvshee, Istoricheskii almanakh (Moscow-St. Petersburg: Atheneum-Feniks, 1993), 313-367.
Other important institutions that contributed to Soviet cultural diplomacy included the Trade Unions’
Commission on External Relations, the Agitprop Department of the Comintern, the tourist agency Intourist,
and the Foreign Commission of the Union of Writers. On Soviet emissaries to the west as an integral
component of Soviet cultural diplomacy, see Katerina Clark, Moscow, The Fourth Rome: Stalinism,
Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
27
David-Fox, Great Experiment, 1, 319.
28
Cyrys Zirakzadeh, “John Steinbeck on the Political Capacities of Everyday Folk: Moms, Reds, and Ma
Joad’s Revolt,” Polity 36:4 (July 2004), 600-604. 1939 was also the year that the FBI opened a file on
Steinbeck. It remained open until 1964 but the US government did not bring a case against the writer. His

121
the Soviet Union hoped to use Steinbeck’s visit to generate positive publicity for the
country; according to one source, Soviet officials calculated that his writing would reach
over sixty million readers through the Tribune and his book with Viking.
29
Capa saw the
opportunity and won his visa on Steinbeck’s merit and perception as a fellow-traveler,
and they became two of just fifty-seven Americans permitted into the USSR between
1947 and 1951.
30

Once inside the USSR, however, Robert Capa faced two sets of challenges that
could have compromised his success as a photographer and Magnum’s aspiration to
become a photo agency that distributed first-rate images from around the world. The
extensive Soviet surveillance, to which all foreign visitors were subjected in the USSR,
posed a problem for creating a photographic record with any amount of exhaustiveness or
transparency. Not unlike other political regimes that monitored foreign journalists’ and
photographers’ itineraries, Soviet authorities predetermined the routes along which
Steinbeck and Capa would travel, chose whom they would meet with, and set up entire
scenes for Capa’s camera.
31
Such conditions of censorship sometimes resulted in
strikingly misleading documents of the Soviet Union, including one photograph that
appeared as part of Capa’s Ladies’ Home Journal feature, depicting a Ukrainian kolkhoz
(collective farm) family at dinner. [Figure 2.5]

trip to the USSR was documented extensively and the FBI took note of the socialist newspapers that
reviewed A Russian Journal. FBI File on John Steinbeck, numbers 9-4583 and 100-106224.
29
My archival base for this section of the chapter is relatively incomplete, and I am currently relying on a
series of state reports compiled and published in "John Steinbeck in the Ukraine: What the Secret Soviet
Archives Reveal," The Ukrainian Quarterly 51 (1995), 62-76. Such documents and their site of publication
are necessarily selective and offer an implicit critique of both Steinbeck and the Soviet apparatus –
including state escorts – that accompanied all foreign visitors. Upon revising this section, I will need
additional documentation from both the USSR and ideally, the ICP.
30
David-Fox, Great Experiment, 319.
31
The same was true in such countries as Japan and the Congo.

122
Elaborate lace and white textiles crowded the table, windows and walls.
Embroidered runners were draped over the elaborately framed, Byzantine icons at the top
right – a rare practice in Russian Orthodox homes and churches marking a major holiday
such as Easter or Christmas, and which was out of place in mid-summer. Considering that
the textiles were embroidered with traditional Ukrainian cross-stitching, often made with
bright red thread, [Figure 2.6] we can appreciate how festive the scene must have looked
to Capa and Steinbeck. Both women in the scene have put on crisp white handkerchiefs
while the men wear neat, traditional collar-less Ukrainian tunics rather than everyday
clothing. Capa took the photograph just as the woman on the left stopped mid-bite to say
something to the child, allowing her hand to guide the viewer’s eyes in the direction of
the icons of Mary and Jesus. Although the surroundings are highly elaborate, the food on
the table suggests that the same bounty does not apply to this family’s diet: there are a
handful of large tomatoes and a large loaf of bread, but only one plate per couple – a sign
of scarcity rather than communal habits.
The Ukrainian countryside had been ravaged by war just two years prior; the
industrial sector of the Soviet Union was recently destroyed; and after years of starvation
in Ukraine, famine was still a threat.
32
Stalin’s complicated wartime alliance with the
Orthodox Church does not explain the persistence of religious imagery in this family’s
home after the war. Instead, the photograph is evidence that the Soviet Union wanted to
show Steinbeck and Capa a recovered and abundant country, while the icons may have
been hung up to underline that religious freedom existed in the USSR and not only in the
United States. In the context of Ladies’ Home Journal, the Soviets look innocuous and

32
On the waves of famine in Ukraine see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization
and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

123
their values of family, sit-down dinners and Christianity reflect those of the magazine’s
American readers. The ethnographic details make the scene particularly Slavic while their
activity is recognizably human. The combination of particular and universal elements
made the picture an excellent addition to Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibit –
where it was displayed in the “Eating” gallery, as seen in Figure 2.7 – but on its own
terms, it underscores the extent to which Capa had to make do with what was put in front
of him, recording and publishing selective vistas of the USSR. These also included the
rebuilding of churches in Kiev [Figure 2.8]; the Red Square, shopping centers, and parks
of Moscow [Figure 2.9]; the iconic Volga river in Stalingrad; and the striking cliffs in
Tbilisi [Figure 2.10].
On August 9, 1947, Capa and Steinbeck visited the Shevchenko collective farm
where the photographer made a remarkable series of portraits of farm workers. He
photographed “the village wit,” a sturdy middle-aged woman, by coming up close and
shooting slightly from below to emphasize the broad smile across her face, exposing her
teeth and laughing lines. [Figure 2.11] He used a similar camera angle to photograph an
elderly beekeeper holding up his prized hive [Figure 2.12], and made multiple snapshots,
in black and white and in color, of a photogenic little boy in a striking, cone-shaped hat
made of marsh grass. [Figure 2.10, bottom right, and Figure 2.13] Surrounded by farmers
in their traditional blouses amidst stacks of hay and clear skies, Capa – we can imagine –
ran from one spot to the next, hungry for the next portrait. Finally, he found a woman
working in a field and crouched down with the sun behind him to make the Ektachrome
shot that Ladies’ Home Journal picture editor John Morris used on the cover of the
February1948 issue. [Figure 2.14] Capa’s enthusiasm did not escape his Soviet escorts,

124
who noted how long he spent photographing the farmers and who underscored his good
intentions to their superiors. “Capa emphasized that he was taking these pictures in order
to disprove slanderous statements by the American press that family life has been
destroyed in the USSR,” wrote Oleksandr Poltarsky, the Soviet writer who accompanied
Steinbeck and Capa through Ukraine and reported to the Ministry of Internal Affairs on
their travels.
33

This was only partly true. Before Capa left for the Soviet Union, he promised
John Morris a set of pictures for Magnum’s “People are People the World Over” feature,
in which photographs of shopping, playing, learning, and eating were supposed to
demonstrate the similarities between twelve farming families around the world. [Figure
2.15] As we saw in the previous chapter, the Journal-Magnum collaboration was
supposed to offer an alternative to the acceleration of the Cold War and the nuclear arms
race. Like other Magnum photographers, Capa needed to take twenty basic pictures of
one family so that the USSR could be included in the global story. Steinbeck and Capa
asked VOKS to include a farming village on their itinerary for this reason, and Capa
needed time to make all the necessary shots. Recognizing the need to speak his hosts’
ideological language to buy some time and get the pictures he needed, Capa claimed he
could reverse the anti-Soviet propaganda in the American press with his photographs. He
convinced his hosts that he was on their side and although the Soviets predicted that the
two would produce a sympathetic report on the USSR, but they still cut the farm trip
short even though Capa had more work to do.
34
The black and white portraits Capa made

33
“John Steinbeck in the Ukraine,” 68.
34
Oleksandr Poltarsky praised Capa for approaching “picture-taking without reporter imprudence” while
criticizing Steinbeck for being bored in certain meetings and encouraging Capa to take photographs of

125
appeared as a series in A Russian Journal but the photographer failed to get all the shots
for “People are People,” and he stopped in a Czech village on his way back from the
USSR so that Morris could have one Eastern European family.
In addition to these cases of censorship and intervention, Capa also had to deal
with a second problem: what he perceived as the dullness of life in the USSR. Halfway
through A Russian Journal a short chapter titled “A Legitimate Complaint by Robert
Capa” begins as follows:
The hundred and ninety million Russians are against me. They are not
holding wild meetings on street corners, do not practice spectacular free
love, do not have any kind of new look, they are very righteous, moral,
hard-working people, for a photographer as dull as apple pie. Also they
seem to like the Russian way of living, and dislike being photographed.
My four cameras, used to wars and revolutions, are disgusted, and every
time I click them something goes wrong.
35

Serving as comic relief and more likely authored by Steinbeck himself, the “complaint”
draws attention to a crucial problem of postwar photography in general, and Capa’s
Russia experience in particular.
36
When confronted with everyday, peaceful life, the
famed war photographer was bored to his wits’ end. If Steinbeck could embellish his
narrative to make the story more interesting, Capa was bound to photographing what he
described as the dreary, camera-shy Soviets and he feared that he would have nothing to
show for his travels. “Capa” also suggested that the Soviet Union had come between him
and the tools of his craft. His cameras were “disgusted” at having to take pictures so
inferior to the dramatic photographs he produced during the Spanish Civil War and

poverty. He also predicted that “by the character of the photos taken by Capa, we can assume that our
conclusions regarding the faithfulness of upcoming articles by Steinbeck are well-grounded.” Ibid., 68-69.
35
Steinbeck, Russian Journal, 141.
36
John Ditsky offers a convincing analysis of the chapter to demonstrate that Steinbeck often includes such
authorial playfulness and that he uses the figure of Robert Capa similarly to how he used other sidekicks in
his collaborative work. John Ditsky, “Between Acrobats and Seals: Steinbeck in the U.S.S.R.,” Steinbeck
Quarterly 15 (1982), 23-29.

126
World War II and which had brought him international fame. How would Capa satisfy
the eager clients he had lined up? How would he live up to his reputation and help
Steinbeck produce a syndicated, daily story for the New York Herald Tribune, which
promised readers a report on “The Private Lives of the Russian People with remarkable
photographs by Robert Capa?”
The fact that Capa succeeded in getting into the USSR in the first place
constituted much of the story’s cachet in the American press, and in a sense, the promise
of seeing everyday life behind Iron Curtain itself helped to sell the photographs.
Steinbeck introduced their story in the Tribune as distinctively not interested in “what
Stalin is thinking, the plans of the Russian General staff, the disposition of troops,
experiments with atomic weapons and guided missiles,” which, to make matters worse,
were written by “people who had not been there.”
37
Instead of a political profile, readers
were promised a social portrait of the USSR. Editors featured the series prominently on
the second or third page of the paper, offsetting it with a dark border to show that it was a
special report and likely to clarify that it had been produced the previous year. But
despite Steinbeck’s caveats, they chose photos by Capa that often supported American
stereotypes of the USSR and its official views. On January 18, 1948, Steinbeck’s story on
Soviet authors was illustrated by Capa’s photographs of Moscow on the eve of the city’s
800
th
anniversary. [Figure 2.16] Scenes of building facades adorned with large portraits
of Stalin and Soviet flags, and long queues of citizens waiting to glimpse Lenin’s tomb,
suggested the pervasiveness of politics in Soviet literary culture. To make matters worse,
Steinbeck’s lyrical stories were often jarringly out of sync with nearby news bylines.
Letters from readers railed against Russia’s oppressive and backwards society, and the

37
John Steinbeck, “Why We Went To Russia,” New York Herald Tribune, (January 14, 1948), 3.

127
Tribune regularly published headlines about America’s disagreements with the USSR.

When the paper broke a story revealing the details of the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact
on January 23, Steinbeck’s upbeat and seemingly innocuous “A Farm Dinner in Russia”
seven pages earlier likely fell flat on readers by recasting the author – pictured in the
center of the top photograph, surrounded by Ukrainian embroidery and toasting villagers
– as fraternizing with America’s Cold War enemy and one-time Nazi ally. [Figure 2.17]
Some magazine editors – including John Morris and the Ladies Home Journal’s
managing editors Bruce and Beatrice Gould – agreed with Steinbeck and Capa’s interest
in Soviet society rather than politics and were willing to represent the USSR in more
human terms than the Tribune, but they were still confined by the publishing formulas of
their publications. To make the feature appeal to the Journal’s American female readers,
Morris’ asked Steinbeck to emphasize the similarities between Russia and America in his
captions and story text, but the tone often felt forced. The elaborate dinner scene in
Figure 2.5 was captioned, a bit too spontaneously given its precise composition, “We
found this Ukrainian family at their noon meal of borsch, tomatoes, black bread, and
milk. As always, there are icons and portrait of son lost in war.”
38
A few pages earlier,
Morris arranged fourteen photographs of everyday life in the USSR. [Figure 2.9] Large
photographs printed in rich, saturated color take up the top half of each page, showing a
woman shopping in a Tbilisi market and a Muscovite family in a park outside the
Kremlin. The plump, red and yellow tomatoes at the foreground of the image dominate
readers’ attention and suggest agricultural plenty, while on the right, the chubby toddler
symbolizes all children’s innocence, irrespective of the political regimes in which they

38
John Steinbeck, “Women and Children in the USSR,” Ladies’ Home Journal (February 1948), 53.

128
live.
39
The checkerboard of black and white photographs below lead the viewer through
snapshots of life in Russia, identifying a range of activities with which American women
could identify – grocery shopping, picking out fabric or a toy for a child – as well as
particularistic scenes of ballet masters, piano teachers, chess games, and lectures about
Lenin.
40
A short vignette by Steinbeck describes Russian housewives as “the great
shoppers” like all the women in the world: “Women wear head scarves, tied under the
chin, and it takes a Russian woman just as long and just as many looks in the mirror, to
get the right color and cut in a head scarf as it does an American woman to find just the
hat she thinks she wants.”
41
But in the black and white layout, readers could see that the
grocery shelves were mostly empty and that the customers were standing around
clumsily, inspecting but not actually buying anything. The article encouraged American
women’s happiness at being American, where they were free from the drab scenes of
merely looking, of huddling to gaze at “delicacies ranging from caviar to wines” but not
being able to buy them because “prices are very high.”
42
Plainness became part of this
early Cold War story about the USSR, and when one takes a close look, even the color
photographs do not overturn Capa’s claims of Soviet dullness.
Capa’s coverage of the Soviet Union became Magnum’s first internationally
distributed story and a primary source of Magnum’s income in its first year of

39
On the symbolism and tropes of child photography, see Anne Higonnet, Pictures of Innocence: The
History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998).
40
Further research is necessary to substantiate whether these images would have registered as recognizably
“Russian” in 1948. For instance, the association of Russians with piano or chess accelerated in the late
1950s and 1960s when Soviets and Americans began to play one another. By contrast, American
photographers including Margaret Bourke-White had already photographed Soviet peasants in the 1930s. I
aim to investigate the extent to which Capa’s photographs helped to create the visual terms of the Cold War
and the image of the Cold War Russian in the next iteration of this project.
41
John Steinbeck, “Women and Children in the USSR,” Ladies’ Home Journal (February 1949), 49.
42
Ibid., 50.

129
operations.
43
Despite the signs of dreariness, Ladies Home Journal was exceedingly
pleased with the Russia photographs, offering Capa $12,500 for the second serial rights
while paying Steinbeck just $3,000 for his brief text and captions.
44
Beyond the Journal,
Magnum sold Capa’s photographs widely to magazines and newspapers in America (Life,
which ran a small feature on Moscow’s anniversary celebrations, and Collier’s) as well as
England (Illustrated), France (Réalités), and Italy (Epoca).
45
In all of these settings, the
story operated on two levels simultaneously: offering an alternative to Cold War rhetoric
by showing the lived experience of real people behind the Iron Curtain, but also taking
advantage of the global media’s interest in the USSR, fueled by the Cold War itself.
Existing reviews of A Russia Journal demonstrate that the American public was
unwilling to see this project outside of the political environment in 1948. Reviewers
criticized Steinbeck for avoiding controversial topics, for not probing beneath the surface
of what he was told, and for allowing uncritical observations to propel his narrative,
including this frequently cited passage: “The people of Russia in our little experience
want the same things our people do – food, shelter, security, and the ability to raise and
feed and educate their children in peace.” The illustrations did not seem to help. An
article in the Communist Daily Worker called Capa’s photographs “striking and
excellently reproduced,” while a New York Times reviewer was more reserved but still
positive: “A Russian Journal is illustrated with seventy photographs selected from the

43
Rita Vandivert to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Eli, November 14, 1947, FHCB; Magnum Photos
Accountants’ Report From Inception May 27, 1947 to October 31, 1947 and Magnum Photos Accountants
Report as of January 31, 1948, SA. The USSR material made Capa the largest earner at Magnum in 1947-
1948.
44
Whelan, Robert Capa, 257-258.
45
Robert Capa’s tear sheets at the ICP include “Wheat For Sale” Illustrated (December 22, 1947), n.p., and
Illustrated (May 1, 1948); “Scenes de la Vie Quotidienne en Russie Sovietique” Realites (n.d.), 49-68;
“Russia’s Children from Cradle to College” Collier’s (January 1, 1949), 36-52; and “URSS 1950: Niente
Guerra per I russi” Epoca (October 1950), n.p. There is also an article in German but no date or publication
title is recorded.

130
4,000 Mr. Capa took. They are good.”
46
Another observed, “As for Mr. Capa’s part in
the collaboration, he took ‘thousands of flash bulbs, hundreds of rolls of film, masses of
cameras and a tangle of flashlight wires’ with him from America. It would seem that
these supplies, plus the virgin territory of Soviet Russia, plus Mr. Capa, would produce
more distinguished pictures. However, since all the film had to be developed in Moscow
by unloving hands before being granted clearance, no doubt Mr. Capa thinks so, too.”
47

While editors and reviewers interpreted the images from their own pre-conceived notions
of the USSR, they appreciated that Capa’s photographs allowed them to see behind the
Iron Curtain and attested to that fact by buying, publishing, and reviewing his work.
48

Capa’s USSR experience demonstrates that becoming a global news photographer in
1948 meant figuring out how to make everyday life – however dull – into a picture story,
supplementing human interest with color and using prestigious collaborators to gain
access and then sell the material to the press. Another important theme running through
Capa’s experience is that Magnum’s photographers were not immune from government
bureaucracies, neither the ones shaping their work abroad nor publishing their work in the
United States. Many of these issues would follow Capa into Israel in May 1948.

The Place of Being Global: Capa in Israel
Robert Capa set out for Israel days after the British left Palestine in order to cover
the second phase of the Arab-Israeli war and to document the establishment of the Jewish

46
Orville Prescott, “Books of the Times.” New York Time, (April 16, 1948), 21; “Found Soviets Eager for
Peace, Capa, Steinbeck Tell Trib Forum,” The Daily Worker (October 24, 1947), 2; Robert Friedman,
“Book Parade: John Steinbeck’s A Russian Journal,” The Daily Worker (April 16, 1948), 12.
47
Oriana Atkinson, “John Steinbeck, and Robert Capa, Record a Russian Journey,” New York Times Book
Review (May 9, 1948), 3.
48
On how photographs reaffirm our previously-held biases see Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York:
Picador, 1977).

131
state. The story promised to be dangerous and in fact, a bullet brushed his leg in 1948,
causing him to end his first trip earlier than planned. On the one hand, Capa took the risk
of going because he genuinely cared about what was happening in Israel. In the thirties,
the photographer had changed his name to Capa to sound less Jewish and sell more
pictures, and he left Europe for America during the rise of fascism. Upon returning to his
native Budapest in 1947, learned that his own relatives and friends had perished in forced
labor camps during the war.
49
Between these biographical circumstances as well as his
connections to Jewish circles of photographers and picture editors in interwar Europe and
postwar New York, his nascent Zionism after WWII was not unique for someone of his
generation or life trajectory.
50
But Capa’s interest in Israel was not impractical, since the
events in the Middle East made the headlines of newspapers and magazines on both sides
of the Atlantic on a regular basis. In his lifetime, however, the war photographs that Capa
made there in 1948 received relatively little attention and space in the press, especially in
the US, which was Magnum’s more lucrative market.
51

Though the photographer asked Life to send him on his first trip to Tel Aviv in
1948, the magazine already had three of its own photographers assigned to the story. In
this instance, he received support from just one client – London’s Illustrated magazine,
where the editor, Len Spooner, was Capa’s friend and a close colleague of Magnum’s,
and who published an extensive report by Capa titled “Palestine War: First Frontline

49
Whelan, Robert Capa, 256, 269.
50
Capa’s Jewish identity has been mostly ignored or downplayed with the exception of Nick Underwood,
“Glimpses of a Puzzling Phenomenon: Robert Capa and Jewish History” IMAGES 5 (2011), 132-135.
51
The Israel war images became better known after the publication of Images of War, the first retrospective
of Capa’s work released on the ten-year anniversary of his death (in 1964). Obscuring the fact that most of
Capa’s images from Israel were in color and focused on peaceful themes, the monograph included only
black and white photography from the major conflicts that he covered. Robert Capa, Images of War (New
York: Grossman Publishers, 1964). See also Young, Capa in Color, 9-10.

132
Pictures” on June 19, 1948.
52
[Figure 2.18] The images he managed to publish shared two
qualities. First, they were shot from a relatively safe distance and did not feature much
action as such. Many of Capa’s “First Frontline Pictures” for Illustrated showed young
Israeli soldiers at rest, on the lookout, or preparing for battle when the enemy was
nowhere in sight. [Figure 2.19] The only war story that Capa managed publish in Life in
1948 – by making an unassigned sale – recorded the Altalena affair, which erupted when
Israeli Defense Forces opened fire on a ship carrying five hundred troops and thousands
of weapons belonging to Israel’s right-wing Irgun Faction.
53
[Figure 2.20] All of the
photographs were shot from approximately the same vantage point that the United
Nations observers, shown at top left, had of the ship from the safe distance of the UN
headquarters deck, where Capa also found himself at that moment. Titled “Jew Fights
Jew in Israel,” Capa’s story offered insight into the internal conflicts among the Jewish
political factions in the new state, and gestured towards the second feature of Capa’s
Israel work: all of it was shot from an insider, Jewish perspective and demonstrated only
those areas and issues that a Jewish photographer holding an American passport could
safely access. While Capa’s story in Illustrated showed only Israeli army recruits
preparing to march towards Jerusalem, where they would battle the Arab Legion for
control of the Old City, Life’s staff photographer John Phillips, by contrast, was able to
show Life readers scenes from inside the siege. [Figure 2.21] Philips, who had spent part
of his childhood in Algeria, held British citizenship, and established powerful

52
Whelan, Robert Capa, 258-266.
53
The Irgun planned to unload the ship and use the forces and weapons in their private militia but this
would have violated the terms of the temporary cease-fire between Israelis and Arabs. Because the Irgun
was confident that the Israeli government would not attack fellow Jews, it purposefully anchored its ship in
front of the Public Information Office and the UN headquarters making it easier for the reporters stationed
there to see and record the action, once the IDF opened fire, from a safe distance. Benny Morris, 1948: The
First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 271-272.

133
connections in the Arab world in the early 1940s while working for Life, succeeded in
receiving press accreditation and a uniform from the Arab Legion. Wearing his kouffieh,
Phillips crossed into the Old City and photographed King Abdullah entering Jerusalem to
join in the fight against Israel, and he became the only photographer to capture the fleeing
refugees and destruction of the Jewish Quarter. Phillips’ images appeared in Life a month
after he smuggled them out of the Middle East, while Capa had nothing to show from the
same events, since he could not physically enter those areas.
54

The work that Capa produced on his subsequent trips to Israel from 1949 to 1951,
circulated more widely in the press – in part because he learned that he needed to line up
more definite clients than he had done in 1948 – but it was equally selective. As a Jews,
Capa could not work in the Arab-held Old City nor in such countries as Jordan, Syria, or
Egypt. He therefore photographed the arrival centers around Tel Aviv and Haifa, where
Jewish immigrants and refugees arrived via boat, and in areas such as the Negev, where
Israel was building settlements to house the new arrivals. These stories appeared in Look
in 1949 and Life in 1951, showing American readers what it looked like to restart life in
the Jewish state. Look’s “Israel Reborn” led with a full-page photograph of a young
couple arriving at a relocation camp. [Figure 2.22] Despite their tattered clothes and
heavy suitcases, they smile as they stride across the frame, ready for their new lives. Capa
shot the couple slightly from below just as he did on the communal farm in the USSR,
and he used the same camera angle for Life, this time with a color camera and from an
even closer distance to his subjects. [Figure 2.23] The Hungarian and Yemenite Jews that
Capa photographed for the story that became “Israel Faces the Facts of Life” express

54
John Phillips, Free Spirit in a Troubled World (New York: Scalo, 1996), 10-18, 433-473. See also
Michelle L. Woodward, “Photographic Style and the Depiction of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict since 1948,”
Jerusalem Quarterly 31 (n.d.), 6.

134
hope despite their improvised means, their makeshift surroundings, and the physical
danger they would soon face when fighting with their neighbors resumed. Because the
portraits focus on the new immigrants’ diversity, the series also reads as positive public
relations for the Israeli government, which (like the USSR) needed to give him
permission to be there in the first place. The people’s facial features, head dresses, and
clothing suggests that the new state represented an international project that welcomed
Jews from around the world. Such images also suggest that Capa became involved in the
process of welcoming new arrivals himself – photographing people as they stepped off of
boats and climbed out of trucks, perhaps shouting “Hello” or “Welcome” in one of the
many languages he navigated to elicit a quick smile for the camera.
Capa’s Look and Life stories also explained the logistical aspects of relocation:
how new settlers were put to work on public projects such as building roads, and how the
Shar Aliyah relocation camp or the philanthropic organization United Jewish Appeal
(UJA) were providing housing, medical care and education for new arrivals. And in fact
his interest in and understanding of the resettlement process led Capa to work with UJA
on a short fundraising film about Shar Aliyah in 1951, which UJA would screen in the
U.S. to raise money for Israel from American donors. A photograph of Capa at work on
the film captures him in the same surroundings that he photographed for his magazine
features and which would also appear in his photo book of 1950, A Report on Israel.
[Figure 2.24]. We see the same tents and structures pictured in the Life story; the men
wear the same sleeveless t-shirts, hats and shorts, and the women don the same house
dresses and hairstyles that Capa photographed regularly. This image takes us behind the
scenes of the creation of the state of Israel and shows that it was a highly mediated affair:

135
new immigrants adjusted to the new country at the same time that they learned to live in
front of the camera, wielded by representatives of organizations looking to encourage
Jews to settle the land, support the development of its physical infrastructure by donating
money, or both. Capa took part in that mediation. Confined to and interested in
photographing the Jewish side (given his own Jewishness and sympathies for the new
state), Capa developed expertise in documenting the particular story of new Jewish
arrivals while Magnum sold those images to the press and non-profit organizations alike.
Although the UJA was not impressed by Capa’s performance on the documentary
film project and did not hire him again as a director, it was one of many organizations
that used Capa’s photographs from Israel to help their fundraising efforts. In one UJA
campaign advertised in Life the same year that Simon & Schuster released A Report on
Israel, Capa’s recent arrivals became literal poster children for the new state. In the photo
book, his photograph of the contemplative, bespectacled toy vendor from Ramleh was
printed next to a picture of a plump toddler (bare bum exposed for the camera), and the
caption playfully connected the two scenes: “Newly opened toy shop in Ramleh. The
potential market on the right arrived in good shape from Shanghai two weeks before.”
[Figure 2.25] In the UJA advertisement, by contrast, the toy seller’s portrait represented a
more urgent, and tragic, narrative. [Figure 2.26] Capa’s photograph has been cropped at
the bottom of the frame and the brick building behind the vendor has been erased in order
to focus all of the visual attention on the man and his wares. Using a standard technique
for 1950s advertisements described by the ad executive David Ogilvy, the photograph
and its title (“The Miracle of the Toy Seller”) aim to pique readers’ curiosity so that they

136
would ask, who is this and what is so miraculous about him?
55
Reading the copy to find
out, readers learn that this merchant is from Eastern Europe, that he survived being
“starved” and “shot at,” and that he has now found “sanctuary in Israel.” They are
beckoned to give to the UJA not only to help more people like the toy seller but also to
build new cities to accommodate more refugees. In both the photo book and the
advertisement, Capa’s photograph opens onto the bigger the story of Jewish persecution,
survival, and a future in Israel by focusing on one person. The UJA campaign relies on
the documentary image and the close resemblance between its own advertisement and the
editorial pages of Life – which likewise printed large-scale documentary photographs
with detailed texts below – to turn the real-life story of Capa’s toy seller into an urgent
call for action.
56
Ironically, even though Capa did not succeed in placing his photo essays
from Israel in Life until 1951 with “Israel Faces the Facts of Life,” the UJA ad
demonstrates that Capa’s photographs still appeared in the magazine, albeit to enhance
the editorial quality of the fundraising campaign.
Like Chim, who was committed to documenting the aftermath of World War II in
Europe and willingly took on a public relations client (UNESCO) in order to finance that
project, Capa took financial responsibility for his Israel trips by seeking out a range of
clients who would support his work there. The appropriation of his images in advertising
contexts demonstrates that Capa’s photographs sold to multiple markets (editorial and
advertising) from the beginning. It also helps us to understand that there was an

55
David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man (Harpenden: Southbank Publishing, 2013 [1963]),
131-133. On Ogilvy’s rules for advertising, which make Ogilvy & Mather advertisements so recognizable,
see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip
Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 45-46.
56
Ogilvy elaborated on these parallels: “a layout must relate to the graphic climate of the newspaper or
magazine which is to carry it… There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you
make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 per cent more readers.” Ogilvy, Confessions,
137.

137
intrinsically promotional quality to his early Israel photographs that had as much to do
with his personal enthusiasm for the new state (confirmed by relatives and biographers)
as it did with what he could practically record on film and whom he could interest in
those images. And if Chim developed key visual tropes that would become associated
with both postwar Europe and his career – i.e. the images of crumbling ruins and the
impoverished, orphaned children within them – Capa employed a socialist realist
aesthetic to document the project of Zionism, with his portraits of new immigrants
helping to sell Israel visually to the press and publicity contexts.
To improve the chances of being published after 1948 within an editorial context,
Capa also recruited his friend, the Jewish writer Irwin Shaw, to produce collaborative
projects in Israel. Shaw was already due to travel to Israel for The New Yorker and since
that magazine did not publish photographs, Capa arranged for an assignment from
Holiday and made plans with another friend, the publisher Richard Leo Simon of Simon
& Schuster, to publish a book.
57
This allowed for A Report on Israel to appear in 1950,
combining Shaw’s text with four extensive photo essays by Capa.
58
Whereas the latter
project again focused on the Jewish story of Israel, Capa and Shaw’s Holiday article was
striking for its exhaustive visual report on Jerusalem. [unclear:] Many of the page layouts
were evidently made by a Jewish photographer on Jewish land. [Figure 2.27] The bonfire
that opens the feature was likely built in an Orthodox neighborhood such as Mea Shearim
for the holiday of Purim, and the adjacent image of the Jaffa Gate is shot from a Jewish
held area outside the Old City. A page spread towards the end of the feature shows color

57
Maria Eisner to Henri Cartier-Bresson, June 13, 1949, FHCB.
58
All of these later projects included photographs that Capa made in 1948. They allowed Magnum to make
use of photographs that would have otherwise been lying dormant in Capa’s Israel files. Shaw’s text in A
Report on Israel was reprinted from his New Yorker and Holiday stories.

138
photographs of land cultivation and agricultural festivals in Ein Kerem, an Arab village
southwest of Jerusalem that was depopulated during the war in 1948 and subsequently
occupied by Jewish settlers. But in the center of the article, readers would have found
four photographs from inside the Old City. [Figure 2.28] On the left was a full-page
scene of the Western Wall, deserted save for a few Arab children, and to the right were
three smaller photographs of Christian and Muslim sites – the Holy Sepulchre, the
Garden Tomb, and the Mosque of Omar.
To get these images, Capa first asked for permission from an Israeli General who
refused him on the grounds that it would be too dangerous for a Jewish photographer to
go into the Arab-held Old City. The photographer then tried to smuggle himself in as a
Bedouin camel driver, but that plan failed as well. In the end, Capa and Shaw recruited an
Arab photographer to take images of the Old City, and this is the film they sold to
Holiday.
59
With its emphasis on tourism, Holiday needed to publish a well-rounded
photo essay that showed its readers – soon-to-be-global travelers from the United States –
the most famous places in Jerusalem. Giving editors a story without the Western Wall –
an iconic symbol of Jerusalem – would have been as ludicrous as trying to sell a feature
on Paris without showing the Eifel Tower. This incident demonstrates that being a global
photojournalist meant knowing what kinds of shots were necessary to editors, and doing
what was necessary to get them – even if that meant lending your camera to a colleague
who could take the pictures you could not. Capa was not alone in doing this. When
Cartier-Bresson was in India in 1948, he could not actually get the birds-eye view of
Gandhi’s funeral pyre that he needed. He asked his friend Max Desfor – an Associated
Press photographer who had positioned himself on a small, makeshift platform at the

59
Shaw cited in Whelan, Robert Capa, 266.

139
scene and which could not physically hold any more photographers, including Cartier-
Bresson – to take a few pictures with his camera. Desfor obliged, capturing the vastness
of the crowd that surrounded and watched Gandhi’s body as it went up in flames. [Figure
2.29] Desfor’s photograph was published in Life across a full two pages as part of
Cartier-Bresson’s story, albeit without a credit to its true maker.
60

The Politics of Being Global: Rodger in Palestine
Capa’s work dominated Magnum’s early distribution of Israel stories in the US,
and this caused another Magnum founder, George Rodger, a fair amount of consternation
about the way that Magnum and the American media were representing Middle Eastern
affairs in the wake of 1948 – i.e. from the Jewish rather than Palestinian perspective. The
photographer and his assistant Jinx – formerly of Ladies’ Home Journal and who would
become Rodger’s wife in 1953 – undertook their own six-month journey to the Middle
East between November 1951 and April 1952, photographing events in Kuwait, Syria,
Jordan, and Lebanon. Jinx supported Rodger professionally and personally on all of his
global expeditions for decades, corresponding with editors, conducting research, writing
stories, and dealing with logistics but also taking care of Rodger when he suffered from
the headaches and panic attacks he developed after the war.
61
In the early 1950s, their
stories about oil in Kuwait, the Arab League, and Christmas in Jordanian-held Bethlehem
sold to Britain’s Illustrated and Picture Post and select German magazines, but they
failed to publish the same material in the United States. Rodger’s Illustrated article “The
Holy Land, A.D. 1951,” shows that the British photographer explored similar visual

60
Cookman, “Bourke-White and Cartier-Bresson,” 203-204.
61
Naggar, George Rodger, 143, 258-259, 262.

140
tropes as Capa in Israel, including the rubble blocking the gates of the Old City and
scenes of religious festivals. [Figure 2.30] Yet because of Rodger’s British citizenship,
Christian religion, and personal connections in the Arab world, the photographer made
these images quite literally from the other side of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
62
The
leading image in Illustrated encapsulates this reversal of perspective. We can make out
the silhouette of soldier in the foreground and therefore quite close to Rodger himself.
According to Illustrated he is a member of the Arab Legion, while the Zionist guard is far
away from the viewer and cameraman, perched atop the gate that he is guarding. These
compositional decisions signal to readers that they are seeing the conflict from the
Jordanian side.
Subsequent photographs are also taken from places that Capa could not have
visited, including Bethlehem’s Church of Nativity, where Rodger photographed a
morning mass on Christmas. [Figure 2.31] The image, which spills into two pages and is
reproduced beneath a panoramic view of Jerusalem, shows crowds of worshippers and
glimmering candelabras, yet the scene is rather unremarkable except for the dramatic rays
of light coming in from the windows at the top left. The final page spread alternates
photographs of Christian worship in the Old City with the Arab experience. [Figure 2.32]
As in Capa’s Holiday story, Illustrated included an image of the deserted Western Wall,
but in Rodger’s photograph, it is the background against which two small, possibly
orphaned, Arab children pose. In the last image of the series, Rodger photographed two
policeman standing in front of a sign showing a fork in the road ahead, one direction

62
Jinx bragged that a leader in the Arab League, Glubb Pasha, was a personal friend of George’s. Jinx
Witherspoon to John Morris, November 17, 1951, AJGM-UC.

141
open to Arabs and the other – because it leads to Jewish territories – marked with a large
“X.”
Through these images, Rodger showed his interest in two themes: Christian ritual
and Israel’s disruption of peaceful life for Palestinians. If Capa’s pictures in Life and
Look participated in an optimistic account of the renewal of Jewish life in Israel,
Rodger’s photographs were embedded within a story that was equally one-sided. The text
that accompanied his images pontificated with confidence that Jews and Arabs would
learn to live side by side if only they accepted Christ’s teachings. The author sprinkled
his account with statements such as, “the Jews with their vitality believe the desert can
blossom like the rose,” which editors felt compelled to pull out as a banner for the first
page spread. [Figure 2.31] Although Rodger documented the liberation of Bergen-Belsen
when he accompanied the British army into the camp in 1945 and spoke frequently of the
trauma he experienced as a result of that experience, his postwar reports on Israel-
Palestine were quick to villainize the Jews.
In letters to colleagues and friends around 1950, George and Jinx despaired of the
inability to see “the truth” or “anything decent published” in America – especially when
they tried to place an expose on the plight of Palestinian refugees living in Jordan.
63
Jinx
wrote to Morris of their experiences from Amman, explaining what they had seen and the
resistance they anticipated: “It is a very sad city, bombed, and crowded, piled with
rubble… Never in my life have I known such bitterness against a race as the Arabs feel
now towards the Jews… But there seems no solution to the problem of what will happen
to those million homeless people … What we are trying to do is to get an article

63
George Rodger to Jinx Witherspoon, December n.d. 1952, SA; Jinx Witherspoon to John and Dele
Morris, December 16, 1951, AJGM-UC; George Rodger to Allan Michie, April 12, 1951, SA.

142
published in the States – but we shall have the Jews against us tooth and nail.”
64
After
Life rejected the story, Rodger did not mince his words with Morris either: “Am I right or
wrong in believing that there must be a conspiracy of silence in America designed to
suppress all information from this part of the world that could in any way be taken as
anti-Jewish?”
65
In the context of Magnum, the question could have been put another way:
why does Life only want to publish Capa’s celebratory accounts of Israel?
66

Although Rodger’s complaint did not likely take the same form with Capa, it did
reach him. The letters that remain from this incident show that Capa mostly avoided the
politics of the story as such and responded instead from his position as Magnum’s
President, whose job was to help his colleagues improve their work and increase sales.
Instead of delving into the details of Rodger’s observations, Capa addressed Rodger’s
coverage from the perspective of placing and selling material. He wrote to Rodger, in
fact, after a series of meetings with editors in New York, during which he tried to secure
assignments for Rodger in the Middle East. One of the problems was that Life already
had someone in the area and it would make selling a Magnum story nearly impossible;
the magazine’s managing editor, Ed Thompson, almost always preferred to use staff
photographers over freelancers. Capa’s letter to Rodger is worth citing extensively for
what it reveals about the requirements of the photojournalistic profession in 1948 – the

64
Jinx Witherspoon to John and Dele Morris, November 18, 1951, SA. Jinx expressed similar sentiments
when writing from Jerusalem. See Jinx Witherspoon to John Morris, December 16, 1951, AJGM-UC.
65
George Rodger to John Morris, December 5, 1951, AJGM-UC.
66
That question was the first of sixteen addressed to Morris, all of which tried to expose the situation on the
ground and understand why the U.S. in particular seemed to care more and give more financial aid to Jews
than Palestinians. Morris’ reply tried to set him straight, citing recent articles about the refugees in The New
York Times, informing him of the aid sent to Palestinians by the American Friends Service Committee, and
explaining that the American press regularly reports on statements made by Arab leaders and UN delegates
from the Middle East. John Morris to George Rodger, January 18, 1952, AJGM-UC. His response seemed
to cheer up Rodger, who insisted, “I’m not anti-Jewish myself. But I don’t like bullies and I’ll join ranks
with their victims every time and stretch out my neck to help them…” George Rodger to John Morris,
January 26, 1952, AJGM-UC.

143
careful balance a photographer needed to create between image and text, how to get the
timing right on any story, and how to present one’s own political views on topics as
contested as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I tried to get you assignments but assignments will come only if
you stay there long enough and if your stuff is provoking enough so that
even if the editors are not taking the story you do, they will give you an
assignment on another one.…
Any story without newsworthiness or drama or exceptional
photographic quality is half dead on arrival. I was present when your
Christmas story [in Bethlehem] arrived. The subject was too late for most
US magazines and too literary. The photography was good but again, not
exceptional enough to bowl anyone over who did not plan on the subject
himself. It certainly will be sold, probably for Easter and probably not
exceptionally well. This same story sold very well in Europe where editors
are not only hungry but they can quickly realize how to lay out and how to
use a subject…
In New York I received your [Palestinian] refugee text but only
saw the pictures here [Capa is writing from Paris]. Against my better
judgment I talked, as you asked, to [Ed] Thompson about it, but he has
had a piece from Jim Bell on the same subject not long ago so he was not
especially interested. The text piece, not because I am not in agreement
with it, is the best example of what you should not do. No magazine will
print editorial conclusions instead of reporting. Eighty per cent of your
piece was ponderous, general and editorial, in the sense that columnists
are editorial. I know that you felt very deeply about the subject and if you
wanted to put your point over, it should have been far more disguised – in
facts, conversations, colorful bits and pieces, etc. But the worst part of it is
that where your text was full of misery and drama, your pictures showed a
fairly peaceful and nearly contented camp, certainly far more orderly and
clean than the camps on the other side [and which Capa had already
photographed for Life]. So the two of them did not go together at all.
Indeed the opposite, a relaxed text with very measured understatements
and more dramatic pictures would have done the job.
67

In this letter, Capa instructed Rodger on a number of practical industry issues while also
articulating his own theory or manifesto for magazine photojournalism. To sell their
work, photographers first had to know how potential clients approach unsolicited (i.e.
unassigned) picture stories. While European editors were less saturated with unsolicited

67
Robert Capa to George Rodger, January 16, 1952, SA.

144
material, had smaller staff, and could lay out and integrate an unplanned photo essay on
relatively short notice, American magazines had larger teams of editors and many rounds
of decision-making, which meant that their contents were less flexible. Unsolicited photo
stories could not replicate other material recently published in a given magazine, and they
needed to American grab editors’ attention through their visual drama and timeliness. In
other words, such work needed to balance speed and novelty with photographic quality,
and Capa underscored that the urgency and argument of the story needed to be contained
within the images themselves. Story text and captions could supplement, but not make up
for, the argument in the pictures. By juxtaposing “editorial conclusions” with “reporting,”
Capa implied that the work of a Magnum photographer should read as personally
disinterested though not necessarily uncritical: there was an art to making one’s research
and visual evidence support one’s perspective, and the proof needed look and sound like
it was coming from the outside world. And while an editor could quickly see through and
be turned off by a photographer’s personal and passionate text, the same was not true of
pictures, in Capa’s perspective. By saying that Rodger needed to trust his images to do
the argumentative work and not over-rely on text, Capa repeated a general rule that
guided photo editors to select those photographs for publication that did not require
extensive explanations but could be understood, on some level, in one glimpse. Later,
when Magnum would take on public relations assignments, similar terms would guide
photographers, because promotional photography placed in magazines still needed to
function like journalistic reporting – disguising the client’s interests in the visual and
verbal tone of the news.

145
Capa told Rodger that he had made similar mistakes when he was “far away,
isolated, and impressed, more than often,” and he wanted Rodger to hear the feedback
now so that he would not make the same mistakes in the future.
68
Rodger needed to learn
to go after the news, because “when Suez and Teheran are burning, the quiet middle
between the two is not going to excite editors very much…The part of the world where
you are is in the headlines, except for the part where you are moving yourself.”
69
Capa
insisted that being successful in photojournalism was not just about choosing an
interesting location but also about figuring out the right way to cover a story. Staying
competitive on the photographic market success meant required pursuing certain angles
and topics while avoiding – or self-censoring – others. Capa then offered Rodger some
very concrete timelines and ideas for future stories, but Rodger never fully internalized
Capa’s advice.
70
In part this is because of the ways Rodger preferred to work – writing
long, lyrical, first-person accounts to accompany his photographs – and because of the
pace and location of his travels. Rodger’s proclivity towards long road trips through
Africa and the Middle East set a different tempo and even frame of mind for his stories,
and his exchange with Capa points to the tensions between a photographer’s creative
vision and pragmatic necessity. Yet as Chim’s experience with UNESCO showed in the
previous chapter, such tensions could be resolved when photographers found the right
market and editor with whom to partner. For Rodger, the editors and magazines were not

68
But sensing that Rodger’s politics might drift even more against Israel and the Jews, he quickly added:
“Also I shiver to think how opposite your ideas may become as soon as you move a few hundred miles
away, in another, or any, of the neighboring countries.” Ibid.
69
Ibid.
70
Capa told him that Len Spooner was looking for new material for the spring issues of Illustrated, and
Magnum had recently made inroads with Look, which agreed to reserve up to seven pages for Magnum
stories. Ibid.

146
Ed Thompson at Life but Ed Sammis at Standard Oil’s The Lamp and Melville Grosvenor
at National Geographic, as chapter 4 will explore in greater detail.
But Capa’s correspondence with Rodger also casts light on Capa’s own work in
Israel. With the suggestion that Rodger should disguise his own feelings about the
world’s treatment of Palestinian refugees “in facts, conversations, colorful bits and
pieces, etc.,” Capa suggested that he had used such tactics in his own coverage of Jewish
refugees building the new state because these were necessary tools to help sell his
pictures as well as the content therein. Much has been written already about the
inherently subjective nature of photography and journalism, regardless of their claims to
objectivity, and this exchange demonstrates that Magnum photographers actively
grappled with how to communicate a truth that interested them and that would appeal to
their clients. Capa reveals, in other words, that the “truth” needed to be constructed
consciously and meticulously in every place that the agency sought to cover, and that it
needed to be done through the story in its entirety – through the text and captions as well
as the images, all of which needed to cohere before they reached a magazine client.
Magnum photographers and staff across the board were learning that magazine editors
would rarely purchase a collection of images without a concrete story tying them
together, and that they were increasingly looking to Magnum to provide not just pictures,
but story ideas.
71
The dispute between Rodger and Capa could have become entirely
about politics, but at least from the perspective Magnum’s global operation, it needed to
be addressed on the level of business practices and story production. Magnum

71
Rita Vandivert to Chim, November 19, 1947, MFNY and Pat Hagan to All Magnum Shareholders, May
29, 1952, AJGM.

147
photographers could argue different points with their stories from the same places, but
only if their photo essays sold in the first place.

The Skill of Being Global: Cartier-Bresson in Asia
Although Cartier-Bresson’s photography had appeared in illustrated magazines in
Europe in the 1930s, the French photographer was known predominantly in artistic
circles and he had yet to establish himself as a photojournalist in the American press
when Magnum was founded.
72
His first major postwar project was not a magazine
assignment but a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, for which he made
selections and prints in France and which brought him to the United States in late 1946 to
oversee its installation.
73
The well-received exhibition opened in February of 1947 and
consisted mostly of Cartier-Bresson’s street photography from 1930s Mexico, Spain, and
France.
74
His reputation at the time hinged not on his skill as a documentarian or
journalist but rather on his intuitive vision and ability to record spontaneous and
accidental moments with his camera.
75
During his first summer as a Magnum
photographer, Cartier-Bresson traveled across the United States photographing American
intellectuals for a Harper’s Bazaar assignment, but he and his wife were already making

72
He worked for the Communist daily Ce Soir between 1937 and 1939. [cite Cookman, Galassi on not
having American publications before Magnum, see in his bibliography in Modern Century catalog]
73
Nancy Newhall’s correspondence with Henri Cartier-Bresson in which they planned the exhibit in the
summer of 1945 is held in the Museum of Modern Art archives in New York, MOMA Exh. 343, The
Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Feb 4 – April 6, 1947. Before the MOMA exhibit, Cartier-Bresson’s
work was shown twice at Julien Levy Gallery in 1933 and 1935.
74
“Speaking of Pictures,” Life (March 3, 1947), 14-16.
75
On the early reception of Cartier-Bresson’s work see James Thrall Soby, “The Art of Poetic Accident:
The Photographs of Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt,” Minicam 6 (March 1943), 28-31, 95; James Thrall
Soby, “A New Vision in Photography” The Saturday Review (April 5, 1947), 32-34; and Cookman,
“Cartier-Bresson Reinterprets Career.”

148
plans to travel to the South Asia, which Magnum had delegated to Cartier-Bresson in his
area of coverage. [draw out intersection of personal life story]
Cartier-Bresson and his wife left New York in late 1947 and were on the road
full-time between 1947 and 1950, when Cartier-Bresson photographed countries in Asia
that were casting off colonial rule and transforming themselves into independent nations.
He arrived in India a few months after the country had gained independence from Great
Britain in August 1947, and spent most of 1948 photographing Hindu and Muslim
refugees between the newly partitioned lands of India and Pakistan, as well as notable
political leaders such as Prime Minister Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. From India Cartier-
Bresson went to Burma, which had achieved its independence on January 4, 1948;
followed by Malaya, which became independent Malaysia on January 31, 1948; then Java
and Sumatra, which gained independence and became Indonesia in December 1949. He
also traveled to China between late 1948 and 1949 to document the Communist takeover
of cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.
76
Cartier-Bresson’s successes in Asia were not
simply the result of photographic talent (already affirmed by his supporters in the art
world, including Beaumont Newhall, Lincoln Kirstein, and others) but had much to do
with the help he received from others – his wife, his editors, and the staff at Magnum.
Moreover, the archival record demonstrates that Cartier-Bresson struggled with the many
aspects of photojournalism beyond taking the pictures while in Asia around 1948.
In January 1948, Cartier-Bresson’s coverage of Gandhi’s fast followed by the
leader’s assassination and funeral brought the French photographer to the attention of Life

76
Under the Nationalists, present-day Beijing was called Peiping. Life used “Peiping” in print and in its
correspondence with Cartier-Bresson circa 1949. Following the Communist revolution, the city was
reinstated as the capital of China and its name was changed to Peking. When Cartier-Bresson published The
Decisive Moment in 1952 and included the images first printed in Life, he referred to the city as Peking.

149
magazine for the first time.
77
[Figure 2.33] Although Life had sent its own staff
photographer Margaret Bourke-White to cover the same events, Cartier-Bresson
succeeded in taking many more photographs of Gandhi’s last days than Bourke-White.
His images had more emotional immediacy and spontaneity, were better framed, and he
established better relationships with people on the ground. Bourke-White had to be
escorted out of Gandhi’s home when she used flash bulbs against the family’s wishes,
and a few days later she lost most of her film from Gandhi’s funeral when her bag was
trampled by crowds of mourners.
78
When Life published “Gandhi Joins the Hindu
Immortals” on February 16, 1948, they selected nine photographs by Cartier-Bresson and
only five by Bourke-White, and the magazine subsequently assigned Cartier-Bresson
rather than its own staff photographer to follow the journey of Gandhi’s ashes for their
March 15, 1948 issue.
The conditions under which Cartier-Bresson’s photographs sold to Life were a
break-through as well. Since 1945, Cartier-Bresson had an arrangement with Harper’s
Bazaar to give its editor Alexey Brodovitch “first look rights” to any photo stories
Cartier-Bresson produced. In any other circumstances, Brodovitch would have his pick of
the best images but after the events in India – made worse by Bourke-White’s failures –
Life editors pressured Magnum to give them the first look instead, going so far as to
threaten the organization that it would never buy work from Magnum if Cartier-Bresson
did not oblige. Though it had prided itself on being the “Time-Inc. Stink Club,” i.e. a
group of freelance photographers who could work outside of the editorial constraints that
Life placed on its staff photographers, Magnum could not afford to lose Life as a potential

77
Gandhi was fasting to encourage the end to violence between Muslims and Hindus.
78
For an excellent account of these events see Cookman, “Bourke-White and Cartier-Bresson” and Galassi,
Modern Century, 12-16.

150
client within months of the agency’s creation. In consultation with Cartier-Bresson,
Maria Eisner sold the first-look round to Life, negotiated and sold an alternate set of
images of the Gandhi story to Harper’s Bazaar without ruining Magnum’s relationship
with Brodovitch, and succeeded in having Cartier-Bresson retain all of his Gandhi
negatives against Life editorial policy. The press photography historian Claude Cookman
aptly explains the significance of the Gandhi incident for the agency: “Less than a year
old, Magnum Photos had survived the first test of its principle that its photographers
retained their negatives and the right to market them to as many clients as possible.”
79

After these events Cartier-Bresson’s work began to appear regularly in news
magazines including Life (both the American and international version), Illustrated,
France Illustration, Regards, Aktuell, Le Soir illustre, Sie und Er and Paris Match, and
they brought Cartier-Bresson higher earnings than he had previously seen.
80
Whereas
between May 1947 and January 1948, Magnum’s New York office sold just a handful of
Cartier-Bresson’s photographs for the nominal sum of $652, making him the lowest
earner in the cooperative, by the spring of 1949, his New York sales amounted to over
$10,000 and he had become the second-highest earner in Magnum, outranked only by
Robert Capa.
81

In early 1950, the New York Times magazine published a feature on his recent
work in Asia and in it, the photographer hinted that his success depended on more than
taking good pictures. “Our secret was to go slowly and live with the people,” he

79
Cookman “Bourke-White and Cartier-Bresson,” 201.
80
Galassi, Modern Century, 332-334.
81
Magnum Photos Accountants Report From Inception May 27, 1947 to October 31, 1947, SA; Magnum
Photos Accountants Report As of January 31, 1948, SA; and Magnum Photos Accountants Report As of
April 30, 1949, SA. These figures do not include Paris sales to European publications since the Magnum
offices reported on finances separately.

151
explained. “I had a tremendous advantage: the help of my wife.”
82
Cartier-Bresson relied
heavily on Ratna Cartier-Bresson as she led him through a part of the world which he had
never seen. Originally Ratna Mohini, Cartier-Bresson’s wife was born in Java, Sumatra
and trained as a dancer. She arrived in Paris in 1936 and married Cartier-Bresson the
following year.
83
In the 1940s, Ratna became an activist for Indonesian independence and
while they were in New York in 1947, the couple befriended United Nations delegates
involved in the Lake Success talks on Indonesian independence.
84
When Henri and Ratna
arrived in India to document decolonization, they had first-hand knowledge of the
process and the members of the Indonesian delegation became their hosts. A close friend
of Ratna’s helped the photographer gain access to Mahatma Ghandi and secure a private
interview on the day after his fast. Ratna made introductions, served as Cartier-Bresson’s
translator when English did not suffice, conducted research for the stories he was
shooting, handled numerous logistical details related to their travels and generally served
as his cultural advisor and liaison.
85
Magnum staff understood this as well, and when they
wrote to Cartier-Bresson in Asia about assignments and other agency business, they
addressed the letters, “Cher Henri and Eli” – mixing French and English and using
Ratna’s American nickname.
86

82
“The East in Ferment: A Camera Record” New York Times Magazine (March 5, 1950); Galassi, Modern
Century, 66n13.
83
See Kunang Helmi, “Ratna Cartier-Bresson: A Fragmented Portrait” Archipel 54:1 (1997), 266-268 and
Michael Kimmelman, “Cartier-Bresson, Artist Who Used Lens, Dies at 95” The New York Times (August
5, 2004), A21.
84
The UN was based in Lake Success, on Long Island, from 1946 to 1951.
85
In one account, Ratna reminded Cartier-Bresson to pack his copy of the Bhagavad Gita even though she
herself was Muslim. Whether this is true or not, the anecdote itself, which lodged itself into Cartier-
Bresson’s memory, demonstrates his reliance on his spouse to ensure that he had the right manners and
frame of reference for understanding the people and places he encountered. Galassi 66n12.
86
Multiple letters at the FHCB from 1947-1949 are addressed in this way.

152
When Cartier-Bresson was not in India, working with the help of his wife, he was
in China documenting the Communist revolution, and he relied heavily on the Life editors
who sent him there in the first place. Most of the stories that Cartier-Bresson produced in
China between 1948 and 1950 were in response to very specific requests that Life’s
managing editor Edward K. Thompson sent to Magnum, and whose staff passed these on
to Cartier-Bresson in telegrams and letters. In November of 1948, Cartier-Bresson was
working in Burma when he received one such urgent assignment. “Life magazine asks
you to leave by earliest plane … for China to do a story quote the last time we saw
Peiping unquote asking for extensive coverage black and white for essay type story…”
Within weeks, the Communists would take over China – much to the chagrin of United
States foreign policy and Henry Luce, whose Life magazine supported the Nationalist
Party led by Chiang Kai-shek. Cartier-Bresson’s directions came from Life managing
editor Ed Thompson and they reflected the control Life wished to have over the story
angle and content. But they also offered Cartier-Bresson a helpful roadmap of where to
go and how to make choices about what to photograph on this sudden and unexpected
journey. The range and depth of detail in this one telegram is itself noteworthy for the
numerous kinds of images that it anticipated for the photographer:
…want to show human angle of city also of china’s finest scholars
merchants opera lovers bankers bird fanciers jade carvers rug weavers
gourmets artists furniture makers cloisonné craftsmen restauranteurs
students rickshaw boys servants camel train drivers temple guides and
their emotions and actions on momentous eve of China history STOP
important capture human feeling in pix STOP You should look into little
side streets visit shop keepers and investigate what problems crisis has
brought to bird fanciers and whether little factories off hatamenstreet still
produce cloisonné and whether there still metal for makers of lamps and
shiny dishes on brass street STOP you should visit rug factories and
operahouse or opera customers shop and show their present activity STOP
also winter palace lake and see whether students skating STOP go to tea

153
houses get faces of quiet old men whose hands are clasped around covered
cups of jasmine tea STOP go into forbidden city and photograph
sightseers who probably still wander through museums gazing at relics
and treasures of other dynasties STOP try to document this historical
moment also show police and soldiers if they belong in story but
concentrate on character of Peiping and expressions of a people who made
not the dark and violent present but the bright and enduring and
heartwarming history unquote…
87

In the images that Life published on January 3, 1949 from Peiping, we see that
Cartier-Bresson adhered closely to the editors’ instructions and captured more than a
dozen types of people, scenarios and moods that Life requested. The story led with a
photograph of a solitary figure of a man walking past the Imperial Palace, its grounds
deserted and the atmosphere eerily tense, suggesting a last moment of quiet before the
storm of revolution. [Figure 2.34] Subsequent page spreads were filled with many more
images, showing that Cartier-Bresson had preserved the quiet air and sense of peeping in
that Life had requested. [Figure 2.35] In the largest photograph on the second page of the
story, Cartier-Bresson captured in intense detail the facial features and expressions of old
men and bird fanciers. In the magazine, the image occupied two-thirds of page 14 and
bled across the gutter, inviting closer looking by virtue of its larger scale. In conjunction
with the snapshots of other men – young boxers and newspaper peddlers, older medicine
men and bird merchants – it anchored a visual narrative about Peiping’s traditional way
of life, which Life insisted the Communist revolution would soon destroy. Each
photograph on the page spread had specific qualities that enabled Life editors to create an
effective layout. Cartier-Bresson consciously focused on people rather than places;
alternated between individual and group portraits; and used some images to suggest
movement while capturing stillness in others. This variety of photographs is what

87
Magnum telegram to Henri Cartier-Bresson, November 25, 1948, FHCB.

154
allowed editors to devote an entire page spread to the tranquility of the city under the
subtitle, “City Finds Serenity in Birds and Boxing.”
Yet the editors revealed very few of the production details when they explained to
readers that “as complete isolation drew near, LIFE asked the famous French
photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to fly from Burma to Peiping for a last look at a city
which is known the world over for its gracious way of life.”
88
The editors helped to
mystify Cartier-Bresson’s process by leaving their own role out of the story, and they
went so far as to draw a parallel between the temperament of the “famous French
photographer’s” and Peiping’s “gracious way of life.” In actuality, Life’s telegram to
Cartier-Bresson had listed over a dozen types of people, scenarios, and moods to capture
and the photographer succeeded in fulfilling almost all of the magazine’s requests. In this
journey from telegram to photograph to magazine photo essay, we can see that translating
journalistic values, communicated via abridged text, into images was central to
succeeding as a photojournalist working in distant and unfamiliar parts of the world. We
can also see that Life promoted Cartier-Bresson as an artist rather than a journalist even
though he – like other Magnum photographers – was always both and, putting into place
foundational mythologies that would continue to shape Cartier-Bresson’s legacy and
reception well into the twenty-first century.
89
The editors obscured not only their own
involvement in the assignment but also the practical reasons for assigning Cartier-
Bresson. When they sent him to China, they did so because he was already close by and
because of his successes with the Gandhi coverage. But on the eve of the Communist
revolution, Life editors also understood that a French photographer would have better

88
“A Last Look at Peiping” Life 26:1 (January 3, 1949), 13.
89
I return to this subject in chapter 5.

155
luck gaining access to the Communists than American photographers, especially since the
US had publicly supported the Nationalists. Life’s American staff writer and
photographer took the last plane out of China, while Cartier-Bresson was able to work
there for another six months.
90

If Life’s editors created an aura of refinement and accomplishment around
Cartier-Bresson in print, relying on his photographs as proof, Magnum staff members
were far more direct with the photographer about the ways that he was making their work
of editing and distributing his stories more difficult, and they filled multiple letters to him
in Asia with instructions on how to improve his work habits. Some of their suggestions
were, invariably, along the lines of Life’s telegram: make some pictures “of various
mountain types” in India to accompany a Holiday article, or focus your camera on
“action, action, action,” to help sell stories to Paris-Match.
91
Early on during his stay in
India, the New York office also suggested contacts in New Delhi who would help him
with story ideas and help him find facilities for developing film.
92
But other suggestions
became more insistent and showed the photographer resisting Magnum’s advice – or at
least choosing which aspects of the photojournalistic profession were more important to
him than others while he remained committed to asserting his individual photographic
vision.
As important as it was for Cartier-Bresson to produce beautiful and dramatic
images, the photographs that Magnum sold to magazines needed to be labeled with

90
Moreover, Cartier-Bresson’s own political sympathies with the Left as well as France’s commitment to
providing an alternative model to both capitalism and communism, allowed him to navigate both sides of
the conflict in China. Catherine Clark, who is working on Sinophilia in twentieth century French visual
culture, delves into these geopolitical factors in the case of Cartier-Bresson and another Magnum
photographer, Marc Riboud.
91
Maria Eisner to Henri Cartier-Bresson, January 20, 1948 and Joan Bush to Henri Cartier-Bresson, June
29, 1949, FHCB.
92
Rita Vandivert to Henri Cartier-Bresson, November 20, 1947, FHCB.

156
“readable text and full captions.” Soon after Cartier-Bresson started working in India,
Capa – who often helped sell Magnum stories in New York, as we saw in the case of
Rodger’s Middle East work – wrote him an urgent memo instructing him to hire a typist
and immediately dictate as much information as possible after shooting a story. “Also if it
is shown in the Indian newspapers cut it out and put it in the envelope,” he suggested,
because all of this would help Magnum’s staff in pitching stories to magazine clients, and
helping magazine editors with their own fact-checking and captioning.
93
After a few
more such letters, chastising Cartier-Bresson for his messy handwriting and shorthand –
“Didn’t you promise to PRINT names – of people, towns, temples, etc.,” Maria Eisner
complained – the photographer seemed to get better.
94
He increasingly typed his captions
and also wrote more of them in English, whereas his earlier tendency had been to
compose witticisms in French.
95
But thinking like a reporter who would need to write a
fact-filled report to go with the photographs still did not always come easily to Cartier-
Bresson. As late as 1951, Capa insisted that Cartier-Bresson’s captions were “absolutely
unsufficient [sic],” and he went on to explain his position in a firm and didactic tone that
he would likewise use with Rodger.
Never in a picture story can you write captions saying “Prime Minister” –
“Policeman” – “Club contrasting luxury” etc.… The Prime Minister has a
name; the club contrasting luxury must be situated somewhere, the people
going there could be somehow described; the policeman represents
authority and a symbol of something, etc.… Altogether, very mediocral
job. I know that both of you are busy with too many things, but the
difference by having done the main job and doing it just fifteen per cent
better would have made a hundred per cent difference in the story.
96

93
Robert Capa to Henri Cartier-Bresson, January 23, 1948, FHCB.
94
Maria Eisner to Henri Cartier-Bresson, January 23, 1948, FHCB.
95
Elizabeth Reeve to Henri Cartier-Bresson, October 5, 1948, FHCB.
96
Robert Capa to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Gail, April 21, 1951, FHCB.

157
By “both of you” Capa meant Cartier-Bresson and his researcher Gail, who worked
alongside the photographer when his wife did not, demonstrating that like Rodger, the
French photographer depended on a close collaborator and assistant during his travels.
Yet having extra help did not always mean that the team was asking the right questions or
recording the necessary details on the scene. The photographer often had to correspond
with magazine editors who likewise found the “unsufficiency” of his texts a nuisance,
especially because it slowed down their timelines. “Could you not, sir, in the interest of
good reportage,” pleaded the Holiday editor arranging Magnum’s survey of children
around the world, “not supply a few more specific details about this subject?”
97
Such
quibbles and exchanges help show that Cartier-Bresson had a different relationship to the
photographic image than Capa, who paid special attention to the image-text relationship
and worked to make magazine editors’ jobs easier by sending complete stories. From his
initial days at Magnum and a number of years before he canonized his philosophy of
photography in The Decisive Moment in 1952, Cartier-Bresson operated according to
different principles. Though he worked on the level of picture series rather than singular
photographs, he was interested in making images that functioned more or less self-
sufficiently. If Rodger put too much information and emotion into his texts, for Cartier-
Bresson, the opposite was true, and both approaches clashed with the one advocated by
Capa.
Beginning with “People are People the World Over,” Magnum produced four
global surveys that included strict shooting scripts and required photographers to
interview their subjects. Cartier-Bresson was notoriously resistant to working on
regimented projects and was excluded from the “People” series in 1948 for that reason.

97
Roger Angell to Henri Cartier-Bresson, July 21, 1955, FHCB.

158
For the children series a few years later, Magnum assigned him to document a young
French ballerina, but he left dozens of questions unanswered and sent back Holiday
irritable notes to others. [Figure 2.36] How much money does your father make, Magnum
needed him to ask, to which he snapped back: “Indecent question in France. Any how
she’ll know if only from the family notary after the loss of her father.”
98
It took a few
letters between Cartier-Bresson and Holiday before the magazine had the information it
needed. Cartier-Bresson likewise preferred to shoot horizontal photographs and had a
strict policy of not allowing editors to crop any of his images.
99
Magazines, however,
needed as many vertical shots as possible to create variety in layouts while photographs
suitable for a magazine cover needed to be vertical and in color.
100
The latter proved to
be the biggest uphill battle that Magnum fought with Cartier-Bresson at this time.
Most publications that Magnum wanted and needed to sell to in the late 1940s –
including Life, Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, and Holiday – demanded a
combination of black and white and color, and used predominantly color photographs on
their covers. Meeting these demands was integral to Magnum finances, since color
photographs sold for 50-100% more than black and white, and because giving a magazine
what it needed would help gain new assignments. Within Magnum, Capa pushed hardest
for working in color, which he employed himself on all of his assignments, including the
USSR and Israel, and as “Africa’s Land of the Red People” and many other series from
Africa demonstrate, Rodger worked simultaneously in color and black and white.
101

Magnum photographers experienced steep learning curves in learning how to work with

98
Henri Cartier-Bresson, World of Children questionnaire, n.d., FHCB.
99
Rita Vandivert to Douglas Borgstedt, n.d. (after December 15, 1947), FHCB.
100
Maria Eisner to Henri Cartier-Bresson, January 20, 1949, FHCB.
101
Much of Chim’s work from Europe is in color as well. See Young, We Went Back! Young, Capa in
Color offers helpful background on Magnum’s market conditions and Capa’s work in color from the 1950s.

159
color film, including Kodachrome and Ektachrome, but while Capa, Rodger and others
mastered the medium, Cartier-Bresson continued to struggle. At his request, Magnum
photographers and staff sent him ample feedback on his color work, which he could not
see while in Asia because the film had to be processed in New York, Paris, or London.
102

Capa advised him on how to use the Makina, reminding him that the medium format
press camera “has a long focus and very little depth so you should expose at a slower
speed …move real close on your subject or shoot from afar but take care of your depth.”
Capa also encouraged him to keep working on it, because “Sat Eve Post and Holiday
need it badly.”
103

In other instances Cartier-Bresson needed to change how he approached a color
story. “Do not duplicate black and white shots in color,” Eisner and Capa advised Cartier-
Bresson in Indonesia, urging him to make self-contained, two-page spreads that could be
published as small standalone stories in Life or Holiday.
104
That photographers gave each
other feedback on each others’ technique also suggests that an integral part of Magnum’s
photojournalism included collective editing. A photographer’s contact sheets could be
seen by any other Magnum member when he was visiting the Magnum offices in between
travels. George Rodger likewise weighed in on Cartier-Bresson’s color work from
Singapore and Indonesia, suggesting that he should “check on [his] cameras and make
sure they are aligned correctly” because “when you come in close, you are liable to chop
off the tops of heads and suchlike.”
105
One of Magnum’s New York-based editors, Inge
Bondi, wrote again the next year with the same message: “If you shoot 35mm, in many of

102
Henri Cartier-Bresson to Maria Eisner, October 4, 1949, FHCB.
103
Robert Capa to Henri Cartier-Bresson, January 23, 1948, FHCB.
104
Eisner and Capa to Henri Cartier-Bresson, October 27, 1949, FHCB.
105
George Rodger to Henri Cartier-Bresson, March 16, 1950, FHCB.

160
your beautiful Far East color, you chop off the heads of your women…. please be careful
with your poor females.”
106
Bondi’s note was witty and playful but it also reflected the
staff’s frustration with Cartier-Bresson, who continued to make the same errors and
hindered color sales. The photographer told staff that he appreciated such feedback and
acknowledged that he needed to do a better job of switching out of the “black and white
gear in your head,” and he did publish some color in subsequent years in magazines such
as Holiday.
107
But he continued to prefer black and white work, occasionally going so far
as to sabotage sales to ensure that few or none of his color photographs entered the press.
Following his trip to the Soviet Union in 1954, Cartier-Bresson was cautious about
showing his color material to American publications. He delayed sending his color film
to New York, claiming that he had “misplaced” it in his Paris flat, but then finally mailed
a selection to John Morris with apologies to Ed Thompson. “…If he does not keep any
[for Life] we might show them to Holiday,” Cartier-Bresson typed hesitantly, but then
added by hand: “and not further.”
108
[Figure 2.37] In instances such as this, Cartier-
Bresson guarded and actively shaped the oeuvre that entered the public realm,
demonstrating that he valued his photographic ideals as much as the financial interests of
the photographic cooperative.

Conclusion
The 1948 photographs by Capa, Rodger, and Cartier-Bresson show the origins of
the Cold War, the beginnings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the end of global

106
Inge Bondi to Henri Cartier-Bresson, March 30, 1951, FHCB.
107
Cartier-Bresson to Maria Eisner, November 17, 1949, FHCB. Cartier-Bresson’s color photography
appeared in “Youth and the World” and the Paris and Europe issues in Holiday between 1953 and 1955.
108
Cartier-Bresson to John Morris, April 15, 1955, AJGM.

161
empires. But to end the discussion there, as many histories of photography and publicity
materials on the agency often do, encourages a tautological understanding of the
cooperative’s origins. They suggest that one can appreciate Magnum’s photography apart
from the magazine contexts in which they were printed, because individual images still
demonstrate Magnum’s international operations and the photographers’ concern with
humanity. By focusing on the press contexts that assigned, published, and circulated
Magnum’s photojournalism as well as the daily challenges Magnum founders faced on
the ground, this chapter has foregrounded the experimental practices relating to press
photography after the war. As in subsequent years, Magnum photographers had to
employ skills beyond photography itself, including befriending the right people,
conducting research and interviews to supplement their images, and writing captions and
stories (or working with an author who would do it even better and help the chances of
publication). The founders’ desire to travel the world did not always translate seamlessly
into photographs that clients would want to buy, and each photographer had a different
relationship to how he wanted to work and what would make for “good”
photojournalism: at times defining “good” as “marketable” (in the case of Capa), in other
cases as revelatory (Rodger), and in other cases as somewhat self-sufficient (Cartier-
Bresson). Photographers depended on spouses, secretaries, and editors, and they even
passed off other photographers’ work as their own, because the business of
photojournalism demanded it. And as they learned about what it took to remain employed
freelancers, they also began to think about secondary and tertiary markets, selling their
work to organizations such as UJA and magazines such as Holiday.

162
The founders’ commitment to travel as an integral component of the photographic
profession would remain central to Magnum’s operations. But if in 1948 Magnum
photographers were debating what “good” and marketable photojournalism entailed, and
figuring out how to balance their own political and creative ideals with the demands of
the magazine market, in subsequent years Magnum began to figure out how to make
global travel into the story itself. The next chapter therefore turns to Magnum’s
partnership with Holiday magazine, which provided the space and financial support for
that shift.

163
Chapter 3

On Holiday:
Magnum’s Photojournalism Enters the Travel Market

“The most professional American tourists call themselves foreign
correspondents,” began Robert Capa in his photo essay on Norway, which appeared in
Holiday magazine in 1952. “For years I have been talking with and taking pictures of
kings, peasants, and commissars, and I have ended up believing that curiosity, plus
freedom to travel and low fares, is the closest thing to democracy in our time – so maybe
democracy is tourism.”
1
Almost immediately after the end of World War II, American
tourism abroad began to grow. The trend was enabled by increasingly affordable and
efficient air travel, a surplus of disposable income, and an interest in the world that was
fueled by, among other things, the direct experiences of Americans overseas and the
onslaught of stories and images about faraway places that filled American newspapers
and magazines during wartime. When Capa made the observation above, the American
media landscape was filled with advertisements for boats, airlines and tour packages to
Europe; photographic coverage of the latest French fashions and flight attendant
uniforms; and dozens of films about Americans living and vacationing in Europe,
especially in Paris.
2

An elaborate media environment sprung up around and encouraged American
tourism in the 1950s and beyond, but it began to be built in the aftermath of World War
II, when the prospect of international tourism looked dire. In the late 1940s, Europe still
lay in ruins. The onset of the Marshall Plan in 1948 created a fair amount of anti-

1
Robert Capa, “No-Nights in Norway,” Holiday (September 1952), 90.
2
On the role of film and photography in this era see Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris
and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

164
American sentiment in countries such as France, and Americans would need to be
convinced that they were welcome there on their vacations. Basic infrastructure and
amenities were in the process of being rebuilt but lagged far behind American standards,
and food rations prevailed.
3
Finally, the consolidation of Soviet power over Poland,
Czechoslovakia and Hungary put a damper on the possibility of true global access by
sealing off Eastern Europe to American travelers for decades.

If traveling was the
democratic right of Americans, then the American media landscape would also make
inaccessibility of communist countries visible, using that to fuel the already escalating
tensions of the Cold War.
At the same time that Magnum Photos committed itself to covering the aftermath
of the war and to documenting life around the globe, its photographers and staff were also
looking to the future. The agency recognized that postwar tourism would be created with
the help of advertising as well as photographic stories published in the illustrated press.
As Capa’s quote indicates, photographers were some of the first people to experience
what would become the world of tourism because their profession required them to race
from point to point to take pictures for their editors and readers. A range of scholars has
examined the rise of travel by studying the interconnected advancements in technology,
communications, politics and economics after the war.
4
This chapter returns to the
postwar decade to demonstrate how the rise of postwar tourism was created, documented
and experienced at Magnum by studying the agency’s collaboration with the editors of

3
Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (University of North Carolina Press,
2004), 105-132.
4
See Endy, Cold War Holidays; Orvar Lofgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999); Harvey Levenstein, We’ll Always Have Paris: American Tourists in
France Since 1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Van Vleck, Empire of the Air; Annabel
Jane Wharton, Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001).

165
Holiday magazine, the premier American travel publication founded in 1946 – just one
year before Magnum itself was incorporated.
Both the magazine and the photo agency were new enterprises founded in the
aftermath of the war, and their collaborative projects worked to their mutual advantage as
both sought to define their roles in postwar photojournalism. Relying predominantly on
free-lance labor, Holiday wanted to instill wanderlust in its educated, upper middle class
readers through top-quality travel writing and photography. Its content functioned on the
level of information and entertainment, but it also aimed to translate into tangible
behaviors, including consumption and tourism within the United States and across the
Atlantic. Magnum’s internationally-based network of photographers took the lead in
supplying the magazine with photographic stories from outside of the United States.
Although the agency produced a wide range of features for Holiday, including a special
issue on Paris in April of 1953 and a special issue on Europe in April of 1954, this
chapter focuses on the stories that did not, at first, perfectly fit the mold of Holiday’s
optimistic and increasingly glamorous travel features. This included the stories in which
Chim and Capa showed Europe emerging from the rubble of war in the late 1940s, and
three global surveys of everyday people around the world (“Youth and the World,” “The
World of Women” and “The World of Children”) which involved dozens of Magnum
photographers and which appeared in Holiday between 1953 and 1956. Their
exceptionalism within Holiday makes them useful limit cases for understanding broader
shifts within illustrated journalism and the photo agency. By studying the production
history and content of these photo essays, we can see that Magnum photographers
worked with Holiday’s editors to show the world – and especially Europe – to American

166
readers not as a product ready for their immediate consumption, but as a series of
complicated places evolving from sites of ruin to sites of leisure and fun. Rather than
transparently selling the world, Magnum’s projects were analytical, inspired by the
journalistic work that its photographers were producing for editorial markets at the same
time. In these projects, therefore, we can see how the photo agency brought its editorial
aesthetic and penchant for human-interest photojournalism into the tourism industry.
Holiday’s demands for more glamor and color, in turn, led Magnum to create stories that
functioned both as international news and as promotional campaigns for global travel.
Blurring the editorial-advertising divide was central to Holiday’s dual mode of address
and Magnum photographers and staff actively participated in this editorial strategy.

Postwar Enterprises: Holiday and Magnum
The Philadelphia-based Curtis Publishing Company, which produced a number of
successful magazines in America including The Saturday Evening Post (founded in 1821)
and Ladies’ Home Journal (1898), founded Holiday magazine in 1946.
5
[Figure 3.1] On
its inaugural cover, the magazine’s imagined readers stand enraptured by the vast globe
and the airplane flying overhead. They are equipped with the accouterments of their
hobbies and professions – the businessman with his briefcase, a husband and wife
holding golf clubs and tennis rackets – and while we see them from above (as if we are
looking down from an airplane window) we also take in the airplane and the sky from
below (as if we are standing among these people). The airplane ties the multi-perspectival

5
On these magazines’ early history, see Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and
Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post, 1880-1910 (Albany: State University
of New York, 1994). See also James Playstead Wood, The Curtis Magazines (New York: Ronald Press,
1971.)

167
composition together, suggesting that the new mode of transportation will make the
dream of seeing the world possible for us and this somewhat heterogeneous group. But
above all it is the magazine, whose title is superimposed over the globe, that will act as
the gateway to both air travel and international sight-seeing.
Created in order to take advantage of the imminent rise of domestic and
international travel after World War II, Holiday was given a generous operating budget
that allowed the magazine, under the leadership of managing editor Ted Patrick (who
previously worked as an advertising executive on Madison Avenue) to hire well-known
writers and photographers to provide high quality and entertaining content.
6
The graphics
editor Frank Zachary and the picture editor Louis Mercier worked alongside Patrick, and
their efforts were crucial to shaping the appearance and content of Holiday’s features.
Whereas the widely read National Geographic popularized geography at the turn of the
century and targeted armchair travelers through its excellently reproduced maps and
photographs, Holiday aimed to reach a new class and demographic of “social moderns”
after World War II who would experience the cities and countries the magazine featured
for themselves. They would do so not only because of their wealth, but also because of
their commitment to a quality of life that included fun and travel. Holiday hoped this
would be the case but they also encouraged potential readers to self-identify with these
impulses. As one advertisement for Holiday differentiated, “Many would spend it if they
had it, and some who have it hate to spend it…Holiday readers not only have it, they’re
in the mood to spend it!” [Figure 3.2] Editors defined the “Holiday mood” as the way you

6
Patrick worked at Young & Rubicam in the 1930s and had a short stint at Compton Advertising before he
joined the Curtis Publishing Company in 1945. During World War II, Patrick was the chief of graphics of
printed matter at the Office of War Information, overseeing Yank, U.S.A, and Victory magazines. Richard
K. Popp, The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 49.

168
feel when you plan for or actually experience the pleasure of travel, recreation, sports or a
hobby, and this expansive category is what enabled the magazine to publish a wide
variety of content. In a given issue, one found advertisements for everything from
luggage and clothing to whiskey and golf clubs, while editorial content could span the
Grand Canyon, Kachina dolls, profiles of American universities, Octoberfest in Munich,
and home decorating tips in the magazine’s “Holiday house” column.
The Curtis Publishing Company was one of the first to establish an extensive
marketing and research department to gather statistics on its readers and it employed a
psychographic approach to market research, which defined people by their relationship to
consumption.
7
This research shaped nearly all editorial decisions at Holiday and ensured
that the magazine’s content – advertisements as well as editorial features – worked in
tandem to stir up “infinite longings not contained by specific goods or industries.”
8

Research on the typical Holiday subscriber family conducted in the late 1940s indicated
that the magazine’s readers were mostly in their thirties, had above average incomes, and
high education levels: 70% of the families had one or more members who attended
college and over 70% of male subscribers and 20% of female subscribers were in
“professional and executive groups.” Over half of the subscribers had already visited a
foreign country on a “pleasure trip;” nearly all subscribers (97%) reported participating in
outdoor sports and other activities; and 92% of the families were planning at least one
vacation in the coming year. While the vast majority would travel domestically, 23%

7
As Popp explains, this strategy came out of the Curtis Publishing Company’s combination of market
research, readership studies and sociocultural analysis, and it preceded better known efforts at targeting
markets with a specific lifestyle and attitude towards life, such as the Pepsi Generation campaign of the
1950s and 1960s. Popp, Holiday Makers, 31.
8
Donald M. Hobart, “Planning a Holiday” Journal of Marketing 12:1 (July 1947), 48-49. See also the
following brochures in Box 119, Curtis Publishing Company Records, University of Pennsylvania (CP-
UP): The Impact of a Magazine (1947), The Holiday Newsstand Buyer Family (1947), and Multiple
Readership of Holiday and Extent to which copies of Holiday are saved (April 1949).

169
were planning to leave the United States.
9
The latter statistic reflected the fact that
postwar tourism expanded most rapidly within North America, facilitated not only by
improved infrastructure (including highways and motels) and the rise of consumer goods
(including cars) but also the popularization of the notion that America was a land of
leisure and fun.
10
Holiday, by extension, focused predominantly on the United States in
its travel writing and photography, covering national parks (Yellowstone, Yosemite);
outdoor destinations (the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls); famous neighborhoods
(Greenwich Village, Hollywood); regional activities (lobster fishing in Maine, the
Pasadena Rose Bowl); and much more to help readers plan their itineraries and to see
America as land of vacation possibilities.
11

The data about Holiday’s readers told editors what subscribers were already
doing, but it was also the starting point from which to imbue the magazine’s content with
an aspirational quality. As Richard Popp observes, the magazine used a strong
middlebrow flavor to introduce affluent and moderately educated Americans to “a world
of Culture” that had previously belonged to the elite.
12
Such an assessment was
confirmed by the editors’ own address to its readers: “Holiday is not an organ of the
intellectuals,” they wrote on the occasion of the magazine’s ten-year anniversary.
“Holiday is a magazine of civilized entertainment. It aims at satisfying and spurring the
leisure-time interests of a sizable number of moderately well-heeled Americans. It is
wedded to no doctrine except that of making propaganda for the politer pleasures of our

9
Holiday Subscriber Family, CP-UP.
10
Popp, Holiday Makers, 1-29, 59-81.
11
On Americans vacationing in America see Cindy Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the
United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Marguerote Shaffer, See America First:
Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); and
Susan Session Rugh, Are We There Yet? The Golden Age of American Family Vacations (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2008).
12
Popp, Holiday Makers, 47-50.

170
time.”
13
One of the most important ways in which the magazine introduced readers to
“Culture” and “civilized entertainment” was through publishing the best writers of the
day. Holiday became one of the foremost places to read Hemingway on Cuba or Kerouac
on San Francisco, and classic works of literature, such as E.B. White’s “This is New
York” and John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie,” were first commissioned by and
printed in Holiday.
14
Such features not only contributed to the magazine’s prestige, but
also gave readers something to aspire to: to be well read and informed about the world in
which they lived, having acquired such knowledge from authentic and respectable
sources.
The magazine’s stories on international locations is another way that Holiday
provided aspirational content, drawing implicit connections between seeing Europe and
attaining both upward mobility and cultural refinement.
15
As Mary Panzer has argued in
one of the only essays on the magazine’s visual legacy, photography played an essential
role in making “the cosmopolitan world of travel” visible and attractive and in promoting
the Holiday “mood.”
16
Yet in the first years of Holiday’s existence and before
international tourism took off in a substantial way, that “cosmopolitan world of travel”
was not a given but had to be created. Photography played a primary and heretofore
unexamined role creating that world in Holiday and so did the photographers and staff at
Magnum – both when they supplied the magazine with photographic content and when
they helped shape its editorial process.

13
Clifton Fadiman, Ten Years of Holiday: An Anniversary Collection of 40 Memorable Pieces (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1956), viii.
14
E. B. White, “Here is New York,” Holiday (April 1949), 41; John Steinbeck, “In Quest of America,”
Holiday (July 1961), 27; John Steinbeck, “In Quest of America,” Holiday (December 1961), 60.
15
Popp, Holiday Makers, 124.
16
Mary Panzer, “On Holiday,” Aperture 198 (Spring 2010), 50-53. While Popp deals with the visual
culture of Holiday he focuses predominantly on advertising rather than editorial content, even while
suggesting that the two were equally important in creating the Holiday mood.

171
Magnum’s cosmopolitan and mobile network of photographers were the perfect
fit for the internationally minded magazine in need of images from around the world.
17

The magazine began requesting images from Magnum in late 1947, first to serve as
illustrations to stories written by authors, and then to be undertaken entirely by the
photographers. Most Magnum photographers were happy to take on Holiday’s well-paid
assignments, which in the early years came with relatively little direction save for
capturing the expected tourist sites and which encouraged photographers to experiment
with and become better at shooting color film.
18
As Magnum’s New York editor for
special projects Inge Bondi instructed the Dutch photographer Kryn Taconis, “On
Holiday: They do not usually give directions: but by now you know the kind of thing they
always want: especially colorful color – some shot of a good restaurant – people happily
eating the local specialty – some aristocracy if at all possible – some pretty girl, those are
the most important ingredients.”
19
Through such instructions Bondi attuned the
photographer to be on the lookout for key activities that defined the tourist experience,
including eating local food and glimpsing traditional costumes (academic and religious
regalia, including unusual robes and hats, often appeared in Holiday photos). She also
asked him to focus on scenes that lent themselves especially well to color photography,
which could mean florist shops filled with bright bouquets, a “pretty girl” dressed in red,

17
As defined by the New York-based society columnist Igor Cassini, the jet-set was a “technologically
enhanced brand of cosmopolitanism” and the people who took part in it “live fast, move fast, know the
latest thing, and do the unusual and the unorthodox.” Quoted in Van Vleck, Empire of the Air, 263-264.
18
Color photography was increasingly in demand at magazines and especially appealed to Holiday’s
glamorous travel focus, but the cost of color film and processing was prohibitive after WWII. Magnum
photographers shot far more black and white than color, and the ability of Holiday to cover travel expenses
and film meant that photographers could take greater risks with their color film and get a better handle on
the medium. Holiday could rely on color also because it had a very long production schedule, with some
issues being planned months if not years in advance. See Young, Capa in Color and Lisa Hoestler and
Katherine Bussard, Color Rush: American Color Photography from Stieglitz to Sherman (New York:
Aperture, 2013).
19
Magnum Weekly Report, April 12, 1957, AJGM.

172
or a particularly bright blue sky or pool of water – visual details that would pop out at
readers and which punctuated many Holiday photo spreads. Bondi’s description of
Holiday’s preferences was also shaped by Frank Zachary’s insistence that the
photographs in Holiday needed to have a subjective quality in order to “create illusion
rather than transcribe mere fact. In the words of a famous art dictum, it is not the tiger we
wish to portray; it is his tigerishness.”
20
The graphics editor suggested that some images
could transport readers into the scene and give them a sense of being there better than
others, and that photographs needed to focus on the unusual and memorable details that
define a place and culture. Florist shop and bright blue skies were not meant to describe
the economy or the weather in, say, Amsterdam, but rather to uplift the reader’s mood
and entice her to imagine how she would feel walking and shopping there.
Holiday editors were deliberate in whom they chose to portray any given
“tigerishness” – asking the Hungarian Capa to show postwar Hungary in 1949 or
assigning the French Cartier-Bresson to undertake a ten-day “grand tour” of Europe for
the magazine’s Western Europe feature in 1954.
21
From Magnum’s perspective, the
leisurely pace of the assignments for the travel magazine – which could take weeks or
months to prepare, compared to the quick turnarounds mandated by magazines such as
Life and other news magazine outlets – meant that photographers had more time than
usual time to shoot stories on the side while working for Holiday. Those side stories

20
Popp, Holiday Makers, 100.
21
See Robert Capa, “Conversation in Budapest,” Holiday (November 1949), 65-66, 68-70, 120, 122-125
and The Editors, “Who & Where,” Holiday (January 1954), 32.

173
could be packaged as separate photo essays and then sold to other publications for full
profit.
22

By 1954, Magnum’s recently hired Executive Editor John G. Morris (who left
Ladies’ Home Journal in January 1953 to join Magnum) would declare that Holiday, “in
proportion to its resources, makes better use of Magnum’s services than any other
American magazine.”
23
While Holiday employed a number of non-Magnum
photographers on a free-lance basis and retained two photographers on staff, Magnum’s
work for Holiday was unique in a number of ways. First and most importantly,
Magnum’s New York and Paris offices had the staff and infrastructure to communicate
with and edit the film of its international networks of photographers, which enabled it to
organize the global surveys on young adults, women, and children to which this chapter
will soon turn. Secondly, Magnum’s photographers led the way in covering international
rather than domestic locations, and for at least a decade Magnum dominated Holiday’s
coverage of Europe. This included stories by individual photographers as well as group
efforts, including the 1953 issue on Paris which was illustrated exclusively by Magnum’s
Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, and Dennis Stock.
24
[Figure 3.3]
Between 1950 and 1954, Robert Capa produced more stories for Holiday than any other
Magnum photographer, and everyone at Magnum acknowledged that the magazine was

22
Capa developed this strategy and taught it to other Magnum photographers. Whelan, Robert Capa, 270-
278.
23
John Morris, Magnum & Its Markets, June 21, 1954, AJGM.
24
Cynthia Young explains that following the success of Budapest, Alps, and Rome assignments, Capa was
commissioned to provide photographs for special issue on Paris and that Capa brought in Cartier-Bresson,
Chim, and Dennis Stock. Young, Capa in Color, 129. Patrick reported to Capa that the issue had sold out
completely by the middle of the month. Ted Patrick to Robert Capa, April 17, 1953, AJGM. My analysis of
the first decade of Holiday issues demonstrates that Magnum’s European coverage was the most consistent
and extensive and that no other agency was given the free hand of illustrating entire issues, as in the case of
the April 1953 issue on Paris and the April 1954 issue on Europe. Competing agencies such as Black Star
or PIX received no credits at this time.

174
“Capa’s baby” because of Capa’s close relationship with Ted Patrick and Patrick’s
openness to Capa’s editorial suggestions.
25
During his lifetime, Capa crafted an image of
himself as an avid skier, partier and traveler in his own right. He embraced the Holiday
mood and the magazine’s preference for color, and indulged in the fact that living it up
meant working for Holiday, and vice versa.
26
In his Holiday stories, Capa became the
model for aspirational travelers who wanted to be at home in the world and to have fun
while globe trotting, camera in hand.
27
Capa’s “The Winter Alps,” for instance, published
in January 1951, humorously narrated Capa’s attempts to learn the French, Austrian,
English and Swiss philosophies on skiing and to find the best places to eat, stay, and
party, all while taking great pictures for the magazine. [Figure 3.4] The photo essay
shows that Capa deftly captured blue skies and glistening, snow-peaked mountains, as
well as skiers in bright (preferably red) outfits who stood out against the Alpine
background. The task of taking great photographs became a recurring trope in Capa’s
story. He revealed, for instance, that he promised to give skiing lessons to a good-looking
American woman if she posed for pictures, and that he later found her a pair of multi-
colored ski pants in a French ski shop – “just right for color photography,” he explained.
But in the same article he explained that he would put his camera down for hours or days
just to enjoy new places and spend time with new friends. “There is no sadder sight to my
eyes than the American tourist who comes to Europe and never sees anything because he
puts his camera between himself and the world,” he was quoted as saying.
28
Holiday

25
Letter to Magnum Shareholders on Editorial Progress in the US, May 29, 1952, AJGM.
26
The photographer had already been working in that medium since the 1930s and resisted the transition to
color photojournalism far less than some of his other colleagues. For an overview on Capa’s relationship to
color film, see Young, Capa in Color.
27
Robert Capa, “The Winter Alps,” Holiday (January 1951), 90-103 and Robert Capa, “Deauville and
Biarritz,” Holiday (September 1953), 90-97, 121-122.
28
“Holiday Camera: Robert Capa shares his tricks for shooting snow,” Holiday (January 1952), 23.

175
editors helped Capa to make this point more subtly in the Alps story, when they included
a color photograph of a hokey American tourist, holding a camera up to her eye and
wearing a coat covered in resort insignia. [Figure 3.5] She served as a warning to
American tourists on how not to behave when they went abroad: how not to dress and
how not to experience the sights, constantly squinting through a viewfinder. Capa’s
advice to readers thus ran the gambit of how to become better travelers and truly
experience a place instead of simply collecting good snapshots.
Although Holiday instructed its writers to include their voice and personal
adventures in their destination profiles for the magazine, this editorial strategy was used
less frequently with photographers. The inclusion of the photographer and his unique
personality or perspective was therefore another unique characteristic of Magnum’s
Holiday features. Holiday relied on the agency’s mostly European members to cover the
“Old World” with personal expertise and they also drew attention to Magnum
photographers’ reputations, established in other magazine contexts or their photography
books and exhibitions. This was especially true in the case of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who
became the subject and primary photographer of the April 1954 issue on Western Europe.
As Holiday editors explained, this was the first issue of any large modern magazine in
which all of photographs were taken by one man. “Taken alone,” they wrote, “this fact
might rate only as a curiosity, but when that one man is Henri Cartier-Bresson, the
Frenchman whom many consider to be the best photographer in the world today, then it is
news.”
29
By 1954, Cartier-Bresson had an established reputation in both journalistic and
artistic circles. He had contributed dozens of award-winning and exclusive photo essays

29
“Who & Where – A Who’s Who of People on the Go: The Hundred Days of C.B.,” Holiday (January
1954), 28.

176
to the best-known illustrated magazines (including the Gandhi and Chinese Revolution
coverage for Life, examined in the previous chapter) and his photographs had already
been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (in 1947) and the Louvre (1955). Moreover,
in 1952 Cartier-Bresson had published his monumental photo book, The Decisive
Moment (Images à la sauvette in France) to rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic.
The book reproduced Cartier-Bresson’s best-known photographs (many of which first
appeared in magazines such as Life) in large scale with minimal white borders and no
text. [Figure 3.6] Luxuriously printed by Draeger Frères in Paris and distributed in the
United States by Simon & Schuster, the book also canonized Cartier-Bresson’s
philosophy on what it meant to take a great photograph: “To me, photography is the
simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well
as a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.”
30
The
theory of the decisive moment emerged from Cartier-Bresson’s complex treatise on the
art and industry of press photography, which served as a preface to his photo book. Over
the course of its reprinting and popularization in a variety of print and exhibition
contexts, the decisive moment treatise began to function as shorthand for the split instant
when the fortunate photographer saw a geometrically balanced scene and clicked the
shutter just in time.
31

Thus in laying out and captioning Cartier-Bresson’s portfolio of photographs for
the April 1954 issues, Holiday editors used remarkably similar language and layout
strategies that had been used in The Decisive Moment. They also printed his black-and-
white photographs in large scale on a white background with minimal text – an

30
Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952).
31
On the legacy and reinterpretation of the decisive moment see Nadya Bair, “The Decisive Network:
Producing Henri Cartier-Bresson at Mid-Century,” History of Photography 40:2 (May 2016), 146-166.

177
uncharacteristic decision for a magazine that usually alternated black-and-white with
color images, resulting in layouts that Magnum critiqued internally for being busy and
“jumpy.”
32
[Figure 3.7] The leading photograph from Cartier-Bresson’s Europe took up
most of two pages with a short column of text to the left and the photographer’s name
below the title. The extended caption, composed by picture editor Louis Mercier,
transported readers into the scene: “The bow of your gondola knifes into a quiet canal in
the little Venetian island of Torcello. And then, just before you shoot under the ancient
bridge, a young girl runs over it and is silhouetted for an instant beside the bare trees and
against the bright sky…it is only an instant of time, but an instant to remember…”
33

Expressed in more colloquial terms and altered to accommodate the experience of the
American tourist, Mercier’s caption offered a clever counterpart to Cartier-Bresson’s
definition of the decisive moment – “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a
second, of the significance of an event as well as a precise organization of forms which
give that event its proper expression.”
34
Holiday editors suggested that Cartier-Bresson’s
ability to recognize and record such scenes as the Venetian canal was also a lesson in
how to travel. Mercier proceeded to instruct readers: “The real traveler, like the great
artist, learns to make his instants count, to see with a trained eye the flick of life, the
exact moment of significance.”
35
In this context, the philosophy of the decisive moment
became a way for the conscious and thoughtful tourist to make the most out of his or her

32
Magnum and its Markets, June 21, 1954, AJGM.
33
Louis Mercier, “The Face of Europe,” Holiday (January 1954), 32.
34
Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, n.p.
35
Mercier, “The Face of Europe,” 32.

178
traveling experience: by learning to see the significant and the picturesque, by staying
alert, and by having a camera ready to capture the fleeting moment.
36

Yet before these more glamorous and poetic vacation stories of the mid-1950s,
Magnum photographers first helped Holiday confront the war-torn world that they had
been covering for the editorial market. The agency and the magazine shared an alliance
of interests from the beginning: Magnum was finding that more traditional news
magazines were quickly losing interest in the story of European and global recovery,
while Holiday was in need of stories that would slowly re-acquaint readers with the
postwar world, and which still needed a few years to rebuild its infrastructure before
American tourism could really take off. The shift from news to travel in the late 1940s
was barely distinguishable for Magnum and is a process worth tracking because it shows
Magnum cultivating an expansive application for photojournalistic images in the postwar
period. Instead of covering events, photographers turned to documenting people and
everyday life for Holiday in the regions where they were already working. Yet the
visibility of the war in the form of rubble, ruins, or even visibly fatigued people also
demanded that they engage with the history of World War II and its aftermath, thereby
creating stories with more historical awareness and analysis than they could for editors at
other magazines (including Life and This Week). Such an approach may not at first be
associated with a travel publication that was self-avowedly “dedicated to the pursuit of

36
Not until 1956 would other photographers receive the kind of treatment that Cartier-Bresson received in
1954. In those cases, the photographers - such as Arnold Newman and Slim Aarons - were Americans and
their subjects were often American as well, making Cartier-Bresson one of the most prestigious European
photographers covering Europe in the first decade of Holiday’s history. Yet in the cases of Arnold Newman
portfolio, “The American Indian” Holiday (February 1956) or Slim Aarons “The View from Villa d’Este”
Holiday (September 1956), neither of the photographers were listed in the table of contents as the authors
of the stories.

179
happiness.”
37
Yet as the next section will demonstrate, Holiday editors proved more open
to publishing the kind of “serious” photojournalism that Magnum staff told Chim to
avoid because of their interest in planting the seeds for tourism while addressing recent
history.

“Don’t Pack Now”
Holiday began preparing readers to travel to Europe immediately after the war by
confronting the traces of continent’s recent past.
38
In its inaugural issue, the magazine
forecasted that international travel would grow but also asked readers to be patient and
compassionate towards Europe’s problems, including the lack of food, hot water, and
heating.
39
The magazine was unafraid to publish rubble photography that showed the
extent of the destruction in places such as London, Vienna, or Poland even while
couching those images in relatively optimistic rhetoric.
40
[Figure 3.8] Thus a 1947 feature
on “Londoners and the War” led with a sunny view of the iconic St. Paul’s Cathedral,
captured in color against the cloudy but bright sky. Having survived the incendiary attack
on London on December 29, 1940, St. Paul’s became a potent symbol of British
resilience during the war after it was photographed, rising out of the night-time flames,
by the British photographer Hebert Mason. Mason’s black and white photograph

37
“In Pursuit of Happiness,” Holiday (March 1946), 3.
38
Such stories were sporadic in 1946-1947 but steadily increased after 1948, beginning with the first
Holiday issue on Paris in May of that year.
39
“Holiday News,” Holiday (March 1946), 11.
40
The English-language literature on rubble photography is more limited than the literature on rubble films.
Texts I found helpful include Neil Matheson, “National identity and the ‘Melancholy of Ruins’: Cecil
Beaton’s photographs of the London Blitz,” Journal of War and Culture Studies 1:3 (2008), 261-274;
Robert R. Shandley, Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich (Temple University
Press, 2001); and Steven Hoelscher, “Dresden: A Camera Accuses” in History of Photography 36:3
(August 2012), 288-305, which cites a number of German sources on the subject. See also Donna West
Brett, Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2015).

180
circulated widely throughout England, Europe and the United States, and other
photographers, including Cecil Beaton, regularly came back to the sight of St. Paul’s,
photographing London’s tallest building through the ruins of shops and other structures.
41

Six years later, the Cathedral was still surrounded by rubble, as the Holiday photograph
attests. Yet unlike the eerily deserted, black-and-white rubble photographs made in the
immediate aftermath of the war, this color image gestures towards the future as much as
it recalls the past. While the empty lot in front of the Cathedral awaits new construction,
the bright scene beckons readers to set aside their stereotypes of London as a gloomy and
foggy city and to imagine themselves taking in its sights – old and new – in the near
future.
42
On the left-hand side of the page-spread, an image of Londoners crowding
around the General who led Britain’s Eighth Army to a victory in North Africa similarly
gestures back towards wartime experiences as well as the hopeful beginning of
reconstruction and healing, leading to a stable society welcoming of visitors.
“Londoners and the War” was one of a series of early Holiday articles that
recounted the details of World War II, informing Americans on how everyday people and
Europe’s iconic landmarks had fared. Such features functioned simultaneously as
historical accounts, as news (dealing with future elections, new laws, or construction
plans), and as teasers for international travel. When the first story of this kind appeared in
the second issue of Holiday in April 1946, its headline read, “Don’t pack now - but
despite the most destructive war in history, Europe’s still there.” [Figure 3.9] The article

41
On the documentation of St. Paul’s during the London Blitz see Neil Matheson, “National identity and
the ‘Melancholy of Ruins,’” 261-274 and Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Random House
Limited, 1991).
42
By the 1950s, advertisers were designing campaigns that centered on overturning weather stereotypes
associated with a place, from rainy England to Southern California with its unbearably hot summers. Popp,
Holiday Makers, 103-127.

181
was illustrated with two color photographs, both of which suggested that Europe’s
familiar sites had been preserved and were waiting for eventual tourists. The opening
photograph showed the recognizable, red facades of a Parisian restaurant and
boulangerie. Although both were closed, the “untouched domes” of the Sacre Coeur
could be seen “still gleaming” in the background, promising visitors the same views of
the Montmartre as before the war. Published just one year after the Allied victory in
Europe, the article recounted sites of battle and warned readers that Europeans would
only be “psychologically receptive to pleasure-seeking visitors” when they had regular
food to eat. To make the point, such stories regularly included photographs of
housewives queuing for food and other basic goods, and they effectively planted the seed
for future travel with astonishing bluntness about Europe remaining off-limits for the
time being.
Magnum’s photography started appearing in Holiday in the winter of 1948-1949
as part of this postwar recovery genre, beginning with a series of photographs by Chim
from Vienna, which illustrated a story by Vincent Sheean titled “Music in the Ruins.”
[Figure 3.10] Chim took the leading photograph from above the sidewalk, likely having
climbed up a pile of rubble in order to capture both the traces of ruins and the young
music students walking down the street. Chim’s photograph served as a visual
counterpart to Sheean’s account, which focused on the revival of the Viennese Opera and
Philharmonic against the backdrop of destroyed theaters and the bureaucratic chaos
generated by the Allied forces and the new Austrian government. The story was more
sentimental than optimistic (“even now, in the privation and anxiety, cold and hungry in
the wreckage of the past, Vienna is still making music”), describing the lives of Viennese

182
performers and audiences who were returning to opera halls, their Nazi memberships
forgiven if they could show that they “minded their own business” during the war.
Sheean made no mention of Chim in the story, because although the writer and
photographer knew each other personally, they did not work on the story together. In the
summer of 1948, Chim was traveling through Europe for UNESCO and it seems that the
Magnum office in New York, regularly in touch with Holiday, telegrammed him to ask
for a few photographs from Vienna since he already had plans to be there.
43
Except for
the opening photograph, which was printed across the top half of the page, Chim’s
images received relatively little space and captured formulaic scenes of the opera house,
of musicians preparing backstage, and of audience members watching from their seats on
the hall’s balcony.
Magnum photographers soon became involved in producing postwar recovery
stories from the beginning rather than supplying the images to illustrate texts after the
fact. In 1949, Robert Capa travelled to Poland with Theodore E. White, the chief
correspondent of the Overseas News Agency, to document how Soviet power was
affecting everyday life behind the iron curtain.

Although Capa set out for the trip without
precise story assignments, he soon received word from Magnum’s Paris bureau chief
Maria Eisner on what Holiday wanted to see: “Louis [Mercier, Holiday’s picture editor]
still wants an article from Teddy [White] – something along the lines of Life Behind the
I[ron] C[urtain]. And they want pictures from Capa illustrating this text – what the people
look like, how they live, dress, eat, what they can buy in the stores.”
44
Their collaborative
article on Poland, titled “From the Rubble,” was published in the June 1949 issue of

43
Chim to Rita Vandivert, December 11, 1947, MFNY
44
Maria Eisner to Robert Capa, October 7, 1948, ICP.

183
Holiday, and was replete with descriptions of state planning and criticisms of the
Communist government – not an unusual angle for an American publication dealing with
the Soviet bloc in the early days of the cold war.
45
It was an awkward story that went
through the motions of catering to Holiday’s focus on travel while making clear that no
American in her right mind would find a trip to this part of the world enjoyable any time
soon:
If you come as a visitor you will be welcomed as a dollar-bearing animal
and the Poles need dollars to buy machinery, cotton and oil. Visas are
more easily granted for Poland than for any other east European country.
You will not be welcomed in Warsaw, but this is because Warsaw lacks
rooms to accommodate you. The Hotel Polonia and Hotel Bristol are
reserved only for journalists, diplomats and dignitaries…One thing the
returning visitor will find missing in postwar Poland are the Jews who
formed one tenth of its population ten years ago.
46

White answered readers’ practical questions on travel conditions without shielding them
from the uncomfortable and depressing truths of life in a country still reeling from the
war and the mass murder of the city’s Jews. Just a month prior to the publication of this
issue, the editors of Holiday explained: “We were always determined to be more than just
a ‘travel’ magazine. And each new issue makes clearer, we hope, that a global interest in
people and places includes travel just as it includes the food people eat, their politics,
homes, clothes, and customs.”
47
At first, the effects of World War II made being “more
than just a ‘travel’ magazine” a practical necessity. If Holiday wished to acquaint readers
with the world beyond America’s borders, it would need to deal with recent history,
economics, and the politics of postwar reconstruction – topics that were simultaneously

45
While American magazines from Life and Look to Readers’ Digest published stories on the USSR in the
early days of the Cold War, they frequently positioned the Soviet Union as the authoritarian foil to the
freedoms of America. Popp, Holiday Makers, 76-77.
46
Theodore E. White, “From the Rubble,” Holiday (June 1949), 144.
47
“Report from Holiday,” Advertising Age (May 9, 1949), 14-15.

184
of interest to newspapers and policy journals. The categories it included in addition to
travel – “the food people eat, their politics” – showed that the idea of postwar tourism
was as much about becoming an informed global citizen as it was about personal
pleasure.
In recognition of the realities on the ground, Holiday selected those photographs
by Capa that confronted readers with Poland’s grim wartime experiences as described by
White. [Figure 3.11] The story led with a large image, taking up two-thirds of the page,
of what remained of the Warsaw ghetto: bricks and debris occupied the vast majority of
the frame, with only a thin slice of the sky and horizon visible at the top. The caption
explained that the extent of Warsaw’s wreckage led the city to raise the sidewalks six feet
above ground, and Capa appears to have shot the image while crouching down on the
vast mound of wreckage. No people or other signs of life animated the view and the lack
of recognizable structures or paved walkways made the image both disorienting and
overwhelming, with the rubble overtaking one’s visual field. On the following page, a
photograph showed a group of children walking home from school, surrounded by the
blown out facades of Warsaw’s old city. Reorienting the story of rubble towards the
young students’ experience, Capa photographed the group from street level and he
contrasted the past with the future by juxtaposing the traces of buildings in wartime with
the youth who had survived and grown up in the shadow of the war. Coupled with the
portrait of the Silesian miner above, dressed in rags and emerging from the darkness of a
mine shaft, the images referenced both the material and human costs of the conflict. The
story continued for five more pages but with the exception of this opening page-spread,
the text and images were (like the Vienna story) confined to half-page columns or less,

185
and pressed between a variety of advertisements for scotch whiskey, Union Pacific trains
to Los Angeles, Triscuit, golf clubs, and car upholstery. Despite the cheeriness of the
latter and despite Eisner’s request on behalf of Holiday for not too serious human
interest, the Poland story did not take on a lighter tone. In fact, it concluded with a
horrifying account of Capa and White’s visit to a mass grave that had not yet been
covered, illustrated by Capa’s photographs of the road leading to Auschwitz and the
barbed wire surrounding the perimeter of the concentration camp. [Figure 3.12]
These were the first images of a concentration camp to ever be published in
Holiday.
48
Remarkably, they appeared alongside a large advertisement for Ganter
swimwear, which showed an attractive young man and woman, their skin glistening in
the sun, eyeing each other suggestively. Though it may now read as a sign of the
magazine’s shocking insensitivity to recent history, this juxtaposition of the Holocaust’s
aftermath with a sandy beach in California was not so different from how other
magazines treated Holocaust imagery in the late forties: presenting them between
advertisements for perfume and Campbell’s soup, or banal features on baseball leagues.
49

In Holiday, such a visual pairing effectively demonstrated the magazine’s highly
controlled, dual mode of address to 1940s readers. Holiday felt a responsibility to inform
readers about specific places in the world of “today.” As we can see from the stories
analyzed above, it cultivated a form of travel reporting that closely mirrored the news.
Through image and text, Holiday prepared readers for the world they would soon
encounter and even gave them insight into places that did not allow for tourism, since

48
This is based on my review of each issue of Holiday, the full run of which I consulted at the U.C. Davis
Library.
49
This is the progression of visual content in Life (May 7, 1945), 32-50. On how Holocaust photographs
were presented in the U.S. and British press in the late 1940s, see Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 86-140.

186
Americans could not easily travel to Soviet satellite states, including Poland, during the
Cold War. At the same time, Holiday encouraged readers to travel and close to home,
showing them swimsuits that would come in handy for a trip to Hawaii, Los Angeles, or
Florida, all of which received extensive coverage in early issues.
50

Such advertisements were supplied by Madison Avenue agencies including
David, Ogilvy, & Mather, who represented a range of clients and who were thinking
about how to design advertisements that best fit the magazine context in which they
would appear. According to the advertising executive David Ogilvy, who was largely
responsible for making illustrations obsolete in magazine advertising by the 1960s,
photographs had more power than drawings to ignite realizable fantasies of a place.
51

They not only crystallized readers’ concrete fantasies and desires but also allowed readers
to easily imagine themselves within the scene.
52
The Capa – Ganter swimwear
juxtaposition aptly demonstrates that there was a fair amount of discordance between the
photography in Holiday’s editorial and advertising contexts in the immediate aftermath of
the war. The editorial content, which reflected the world of feasible travel, lagged far
behind the aspirational, fantasy world of the advertising image.
53
The juxtapositions
between history and present, between rubble and leisure, happened on the level of

50
“Things to Look for in Hollywood,” Holiday (October 1946), 20-24. Many winter issues were dedicated
to warm places, including the January 1948 issue of Holiday on Florida, while the April 1948 issue ran
with a cover story on Hawaii.
51
Of course advertisers employed photography in advertisements well before the postwar period, including
in the Weimar Republic, but the postwar period saw a shift towards editorial photography within
advertising, which has not been adequately studied. On pre-WWII photo advertisements see Estelle
Blaschke, “Photography and the Commodification of Images,” 35-38, Sherwin Simmons, “Advertising
seizes control of life: Berlin Dada and the power of advertising” Oxford Art Journal 22:1 (1999), 121-146;
and Johnston, Real Fantasies.
52
Ogilvy, Confessions, 131-138. On Ogilvy’s contributions to 1950s advertising culture Frank, Conquest of
Cool, 45-50.
53
On the relationship between fantasy and advertising imagery see Johnston, Real Fantasies.

187
magazine production and relied on the Holiday editors who decided upon layouts and
chose which photographs and advertisements to pair on each page.

Human Interest Travel
From Poland, White and Capa traveled together to Hungary, and Holiday
entrusted Capa to both author and illustrate a story on Budapest which appeared in print
in November 1949. Unlike White’s report, Capa’s “Conversation in Budapest” made no
recourses to the possibility of American travel to the Hungarian capital, and he took on
the confrontation between old and new (Communist) ways of life with significantly more
humor and irony than White’s severe account of the Polish bureaucracy.
54
The narrative
was also much more personal, continuing the humorous and colorful style of writing that
Capa employed in his 1947 wartime memoir, Slightly Out of Focus.
55
Capa opened with
his own story of political exile from Hungary and his experiences of returning to his
native city were intertwined with the characters he met: a countess turned bartender, an
old Jewish friend who ran a fur business, and a collective farmer. Even Communist
leaders, with nicknames such as Vast the Provider and Goro the Builder, came to life in
his text, which was more colorful than many of the photographs that accompanied it.
[Figure 3.13] The opening page showed four scenes of political life in Budapest and took
advantage of the inherent optics of color photography to highlight both the colors and the
political message captured. The red of the Communist flags, scarves, and banners jumped
out from the parades and street scenes, showing a city in the process of building

54
Theodore White’s presence became part of Capa’s story, with White as the good western reporter
wanting to get to the bottom of how evil communism is, and the Hungarian people failing to give him what
he wants. Instead of hearing the truth, White proceeded to pass out from all the Hungarian wine. Robert
Capa, “Conversation in Budapest,” Holiday (November 1949), 65-66, 68-70, 120, 122-125.
55
Robert Capa, Slightly Out of Focus (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1947).

188
socialism.
56
On the right-hand side, the building process was more literal in Capa’s
photograph of a worker teetering high on the edge of a hotel’s destroyed façade, shot
dramatically from below. When Capa saw “the silhouettes of the working men against the
sky,” he wrote, the sight “made me want to open my camera,” but the image lacked the
poignancy of his other observations about the city: “Looking down on the burned-out
row of hotels and the ruined bridges, Budapest appeared like a beautiful woman with her
teeth knocked out.”
57
It also did not help that the magazine employed the same layout
principle here as in the Poland story, reproducing most of Capa’s photographs in black
and white, in small scale, and in between advertisements and his own text. While the
photographs were mostly unremarkable and lost within the page design, Capa’s
colleagues acknowledged the story’s masterful prose. Holiday’s editors were thrilled with
the text piece as well, reprinting it in the magazine’s anniversary publication alongside
soon-to-be classic travel essays by authors such as E. B. White, Irwin Shaw, John
Steinbeck, and Arthur Miller.
58

In his story from Budapest, which he wrote in the form of a letter, Capa also
achieved what Holiday editors increasingly wanted: a personal travel account organized
around the human-interest angle. As Maria Eisner explained to Capa, “[The] human
interest story is easier to sell, not only to Holiday but generally to all American
magazines. There is definitely no interest in big take-outs of let’s say ‘Shoe Industry in
Hungary’ …we have to face the fact that in general our stories are too big, too serious,

56
On the optics of color in photographs of the USSR see David Shneer, On the Road in the Soviet Empire:
Semyon Fridlyand Photographs (Denver: Victoria H. Myhren Gallery and the Center for Judaic Studies,
University of Denver, 2008).
57
Capa, “Conversation in Budapest,” 68.
58
“Capa is back. His Return to Budapest piece is at last in the current Holiday, and reads very well. I value
him more and more as the years go by.” John Morris to Ernestine Evans, November 4, 1949, AJGM. See
also Fadiman, Ten Years of Holiday.

189
and even too good… I don’t suggest we give in to them entirely, but still we should make
an effort to meet them halfway at least.”
59
The human-interest angle was already a staple
of photojournalism and after World War II, the majority of photo essays published about
recovery efforts in Europe were centered around the struggles of nameless individuals.
Holiday’s editors took a cue from such illustrated magazines as Life, Look, Saturday
Evening Post (which, as we saw in chapter 1, also pushed Chim to organize his
reconstruction stories around a human interest angle) when they asked contributors to
focus on people, hoping that this would leave a stronger impression on readers than mere
descriptions of places.
In fact, Holiday editors were known for closely editing the work of professional
writers whom they hired to write destination profiles, helping them to craft “real” figures
that would serve as archetypes and help bring places to life without departing too much
from readers’ preconceived notions about that destination.
60
Editors also frequently hired
authors who were already associated with the place that they would be describing, in a
sense extending the human interest element to include the author himself. Capa’s
Budapest story is an early example of this kind of personal destination profile because the
photographer had already written about his Hungarian childhood in his well-received
memoir Slightly Out of Focus. He also included his Hungarian origins (including his
early “disagreement with Mr. Horthy,” which led him to leave Hungary at the age of 18)
in the autobiographical blurb that Magnum distributed to editors and which was reprinted
in a number of American magazines after World War II.
61
While Holiday’s editing of

59
Maria Eisner to Robert Capa, October 7, 1948, ICP.
60
Popp, Holiday Makers, 86-91.
61
Robert Capa biography, n.d., MFNY. The biography was reprinted with a few edits in Ladies Home
Journal (February 1948), n.p. and Illustrated (May 1, 1948), n.p.

190
Capa’s humorous, character-centered writing in the case of Budapest appears to have
been minimal, it is evident from Magnum correspondence that Holiday nurtured a
specific kind of photography to accompany the popular travel writing at the magazine.
Certain iconic scenes would often be included, but Holiday also asked that photographers
provide more than the timeless landscapes and urban views that had dominated the visual
culture of tourism since the invention of photography.
62
Bondi’s advice to Taconis, we
may recall, included both “pretty girls,” a standard convention of magazine photography,
as well as local “aristocracy.” Human interest reporting would become indispensible to
the visual culture of tourism that Holiday crafted and that Magnum photographers
supplied, and it also brought the photographer’s own personality and travel adventures
into the story. Capa took the human-interest message to heart and made sure to
emphasize the role that people would play in his features when pitching new stories to
Holiday.

Proposing what would become a photo essay on the South of France, Capa
promised Ted Patrick that he would model it on his “Winter [Alps] story but the human
element could be much stronger and funnier and far more varied than the other.”
63

If Holiday asked its writers and photographers to pay attention to the people they
met on their travels, it gave the same advice to its readers. In November 1949, Capa’s
“Conversation in Budapest” was followed by a humorous and entertaining guide to sea
travel titled “What Every Traveler Should Know.” The article quickly departed from any
practical advice and instead dwelt on the people one would meet during their voyage

62
The literature on the visual culture of tourism is vast. I found the following helpful: P. Osborne,
Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000); David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson, eds. Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity
(University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2010); and Jo-Anne Lester and Caroline Scarles,
Mediating the Tourist Experience: From Brochures to Virtual Encounters (London: Ashgate: 2013).
63
Robert Capa to Ted Patrick, May 5, 1951, ICP.

191
across the Atlantic. Readers were told to steer clear of the sports directors on board who
organize group recreational activities, and were given advice on how to deal with the
older, wealthier, know-it-all woman who appeared on each sea journey and was sure to
pull you into an endless conversations.
64
The frivolity of the piece succeeded in setting
the mood of travel at a moment when American tourism was growing, but not as quickly
as it would after 1952, when a new and reduced tourist fare on airplanes enabled many
more people to travel than ever before.
65
That year, an American travel guide to Europe
devoted an entire chapter to how to engage in “human interest travel,” with tips ranging
from how to seek out a foreigner who occupies your profession or shares your hobbies in
order to exchange experiences, or how to look at art, design, and architecture in order to
analyze the national character of the people who live there.
66
Tourists were told that
human interest travel was not about what to see but how to see it, and that by turning their
vacations into case studies of national character, the everyday traveler would be more like
a foreign correspondent, “whose job it is to size up our friends and neighbors. It is travel
with a purpose.”
67

But when Capa’s story appeared in 1949 most Americans’ European vacations
were still a few years away and the photographer’s concerns extended well beyond the
changing requirements of travel photography. As President of Magnum Photos, Capa
knew that the photo cooperative needed a reserve of capital to maintain its operations –
something that single assignments could not generate, even when the client was the high-

64
James Thurber, “What Every Traveler Should Know” Holiday (June 1949), reprinted in Fadiman, Ten
Years of Holiday, 67-76.
65
The tourist fare was introduced in 1952 and the first flight carrying tourist class passengers departed on
May 1, 1952 from New York to Paris. Van Vleck, Empire of the Air, 215.
66
Erik Sjogren, “Human Interest Travel” in Travel Key to Europe (New York: This Week Magazine,
1952), 21-61.
67
Ibid., 25.

192
paying Holiday. Between 1947 and 1949, Magnum seemed to be growing on a daily
basis, attracting new photojournalists such as Werner Bischof and Ernst Haas, and
expanding its office staff in New York and Paris, who could barely keep up with editing,
captioning, and distributing the vast amounts of material produced by the traveling
photographers. That was when Magnum’s photographers had collaborated on “People are
People the World Over” for Ladies’ Home Journal. The project seemed miraculous for its
scale and even more so for the fact that it generated significant income for the young and
financially struggling organization, whose operations were regularly supplemented out of
pocket by Magnum’s founders.
68
In early 1949, talk of a new global survey akin to
“People are People the World Over” began at Magnum, with the hopes that such a “fat
assignment” would save Magnum financially.
69
Although it would end up in the pages of
Holiday a full three years later, the project was conceived of as an editorial feature
reflecting Magnum’s interest in the state of the world in 1950 and especially in young
people’s views on politics and the prospects for another war. At the Journal, picture
editor John Morris had had strict control over “People are People’s” politically hopeful
albeit didactic message, while the series’ uniform layout emphasized visual
commonalities among farming families rather than highlighting their unique
characteristics or the photographers’ individual styles. For its new series, Magnum
wanted to give photographers more freedom to make exceptional images, including in
color. The agency also wanted the story to reflect photographers’ actual findings instead

68
July 31, 1949 Accountant’s Report to Magnum Shareholders, August 25, 1949, FHCB.
69
In the spring of 1949, Seymour shot a set of images for Morris at Ladies’ Home Journal on city life,
which Magnum hoped would be a sequel to the farming families’ approach of PPTWO. A Magnum staff
member wrote to Cartier-Bresson, “We are all holding our breaths hoping that John Morris will like the
story (on Rome) and that MAGNUM lands the fat assignment of covering the world’s cities, which would
save us financially this year.” Elizabeth Reeve to Henri Cartier-Bresson, May 31, 1949, FHCB.

193
of supporting a preconceived thesis, however noble. Photographers would need to capture
the young people’s surroundings but this would be only part of the story, which would
focus mostly on their opinions and everyday lives. The story’s migration from the
editorial market to a travel publication demonstrates the utility of Magnum’s human
interest-based reporting and sociological survey mode for the tourism industry, as
Holiday moved away from rubble stories and began to promote international travel more
aggressively.

Birthing Generation X
In January 1949, Maria Eisner wrote to Henri Cartier-Bresson with a brief
mention of Capa’s “latest brilliant idea to get Magnum another world-wide assignment,
and the pretext is the close of the first half of our century.”
70
Eisner anticipated a
straightforward and quick turn-around to the project, with photographers shooting their
stories in 1949 for a special issue of Look magazine in January 1950 – exactly the
midway point of the twentieth century.
71
By aiming to have the story coincide precisely
with the middle of the century, Magnum showed its awareness of the illustrated press’
demand for features that were current and timely. And by drawing attention to 1950 as a
historical marker, Magnum joined an impressive cohort of journalists and cultural figures

70
Capa planned to use the backing from an American publication to cover most of the production costs of
the survey and supplement the rest with funds from the British magazine Illustrated and the Italian Epoca,
two of Magnum’s steadiest clients across the Atlantic who would have first distribution rights to the story
in Europe. Epoca contract for Generation X, c. 1950, MFNY.
71
Look had initially shown interest in Generation X, but the departure of Daniel Mich and Henry Ehrlich,
the two editors who were most interested in the series, interfered with the sale. McCall’s recruited Look’s
editors Mich and Ehrlich to improve the publication’s editorial content and photographic quality and when
the magazine agreed to buy Generation X, it was with the purpose of showing that the editors could attract
reputable photographers to the publication. Maria Eisner to Henri Cartier-Bresson, January 20, 1949,
FHCB; Maria Eisner to “GX photographers,” November 22, 1950, AJGM; Robert Capa to Pat Hagan, May
29, 1951, AJGM; Whelan, Robert Capa, 276-277.

194
who were also grappling with the dawn of the new half-century (and the shadow of the
first) in newspapers, magazines, films, and books.
72
Magnum’s human-interest approach,
pitched to magazines in a short proposal, would literally put a face to the mid-century
transition through the form of the photographic survey:
The purpose of the project is to explore the problems and aspirations of
youth – Generation X – the generation which is now coming of age and
on whose shoulders lies the burden of history during the coming half-
century. The work will be done in twelve countries representing the
varied cultures of the five continents… For example, Generation “X” in
India is the first to face the problems and potentials of a country which
has just gained independence. Generation “X” in Germany not only grew
up during a war, but so did its fathers and grandfathers…One might
expect to find Generation “X” in India free, hopeful, independent …in
Germany confused, disappointed, bitter… But is this so? We can hold this
only as hypothesis. We must search for genuine answers. To treat these
problems with conscientious and candid understanding is both the aim
and justification of the project.
73

It is easy to see through Magnum’s insistence that photographers lacked any ideological
motivations and could report on the world objectively, especially since the descriptions of
the Indian and German youth are heavily laden with assumptions about the role of
nationalism in producing social and cultural relations. These undertones, however, should
not take away from understanding that this was a piece of marketing meant to convince
magazine editors – i.e. the story’s potential buyers – that Magnum could offer an
unprecedented survey by virtue of the photographers’ unique access to and knowledge of
disparate parts of the world. Generation X proposed to allocate the same amount of space

72
See Janet Flanner, “Letter from Paris,” The New Yorker (January 7, 1950); “The American Task,” Life
(January 2, 1950), 28; The March of Time 16:1 (February 3, 1950); and Hanna Arendt’s 1950 preface to
The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc. 1994 [1948]), vii-ix.
73
Magnum “Generation X,” October 20, 1950, AJGM-UC. The original pitch is in Morris’ files alongside
multiple versions that show Morris editing the text, making Capa’s English sound more like Morris’
writing in “People are People the World Over” and therefore more presentable to Morris’ editors at the
Journal. In an email to me on November 28, 2011, Morris said that after “People are People,” he wrote “a
questionnaire directed at Young People [sic] around the world but couldn’t sell it to [his] editors. Capa sold
it as a Magnum project to McCall’s…”

195
and attention to each subject, no matter how much or little readers thought they knew
about Germany or India, Italy or America. The agency likewise wanted to demonstrate
that it was committed to serious reporting on contemporary life and would not merely
illustrate what people around the world looked like. For this reason, the proposal was
accompanied by an eight-page questionnaire that photographers would use in
interviewing their subjects on everything from home life, education and money, to
religion, sex, slang, and politics. Finally, Magnum insisted that the project would have
visual appeal: instead of a “standard picture formula” or “prescribed pictures as such,” (a
reference to the highly regimented look of “People are People the World Over,” with
which magazine editors were likely familiar) Generation X would rely on the personal
visions and skills of multiple Magnum photographers to represent their subjects in the
“strongest possible terms.”
74

Magnum initially sold Generation X to the American women’s magazine
McCall’s, but the relationship between Magnum photographers and McCall’s editors was
strained from the beginning. In need of money, Magnum agreed to the magazine’s
unreasonable deadlines but could not always meet them.
75
The photographers also tried to
accommodate McCall’s changes to the subject list when the magazine cut countries such
as Israel and Egypt or requested more neutral subjects over Magnum’s proposal for
soldiers, political activists, and a prostitute.
76
When nearly half of the project was
completed, the magazine switched course again, asking for new locations and radically

74
Magnum, “Generation X,” October 20, 1950, AJGM-UC.
75
Maria Eisner to “GX photographers,” November 22, 1950, AJGM; Robert Capa to Pat Hagan, May 29,
1951, AJGM; Robert Capa to John Morris, July 23, 1951, AJGM.
76
Magnum, “Generation X,” October 20, 1950, AJGM-UC. Magnum’s proposal included a French
communist and Egyptian prostitute. Capa lamented about the final choices of subjects: “I felt that as much
as the major problem of this generation is war, we certainly should have had a Western European conscript
or at least a British sailor in it.” Robert Capa to Pat Hagan, May 29, 1951, AJGM.

196
political, preferably anti-American, subjects in order to make the series less
“documentary” and more “exciting,” but Magnum refused to switch course and walked
away from the contract.
77
The agency had invested hundreds of hours and much of their
own money into producing a story and it was left without an American publisher to cover
the costs. Numerous Magnum biographers and photography historians have villainized
the over-involved magazine editors with whom brilliant and independent photographers
had to work and to whose instructions they begrudgingly succumbed.
78
Yet at the
moment of the Magnum-McCall’s break, Generation X proved that not enough editorial
guidance and collaboration could be far more detrimental to a group of photojournalists
with limited time and resources. Photographers could not afford to come back to, or stay
in, one location to reshoot if they did not have other work there.
To save the series, and to make the “documentary” realism of the photographs a
virtue rather than a source of “dullness,” as the McCall’s editors had declared, Magnum
needed to do a better job editing down photographers’ films, and it needed to find the
right publication context. Magnum began the editing process in-house. Capa selected
locations to be “freshened up” and working in collaboration with his friend and protégé
Ernst Haas cut the series down from ten to three installments. This would allow for the
most exciting, variable and picturesque images to be arranged on fewer pages, which
would improve the survey’s visual effect and make it easier for potential magazine
buyers to find the space and money to take on the survey.
79
“The full package is going to

77
As the finished stories began to come in, both Magnum and McCall’s felt that the profiles were “too
documentary, lacking mobility, excitement, and interest.” Pat Hagan to “GX Photographers,” July 27,
1951, AJGM.
78
On the tyranny of the photo editor, see for instance Galassi, Modern Century and Janssens and Kalff,
“Time Incorporated Stink Club.”
79
On Haas’ involvement in producing Generation X see Inge Bondi, “The Life and Work of Ernst Haas,”
(unpublished manuscript, 2012), 142, Inge Bondi Archive, with thanks to Vanessa Schwartz.

197
be the biggest job ever done in photography,” wrote an enthused Capa as he neared the
end of the editing process, but he still needed the right editorial partner.
80
In 1952, he
personally sold the story to Ted Patrick of Holiday and the project finally appeared in
print in January 1953.
81

Holiday’s Youth and the World
Generation X, renamed “Youth and the World,” was first introduced to Holiday
readers as a feat of photo editing and the result of a close collaboration between the
magazine’s leadership and the talented photographers with whom it was privileged to
work. The “Who & Where” page of the January 1953 issue, regularly devoted to the life
of the magazine, showed an unusual portrait of Robert Capa: cigar in mouth, his dark
eyebrows furrowed as he seemed to peer into the editing room of Holiday. [Figure 3.14]
Photographs of Capa had appeared in print as early as 1938, when he graced the cover of
England’s Picture Post and was called “the Greatest War Photographer in the World.”
82

[Figure 3.15] But rather than showing Capa with his camera and in the act of taking a
photograph – a common trope for portraits of photographers – Holiday showed Capa as
the master of a job that usually went undocumented, directing photographers in the field
and working with the magazine’s editors to lay out a photo essay of unprecedented scale.
Adjacent to Capa’s profile was a group shot of Louis Mercier, Frank Zachary, and Roger
Angell (the Associate Editor at Holiday and author of the text accompanying “Youth and

80
Robert Capa to “GX photographers,” ND, circa 1951, AJGM.
81
Letter to Magnum Shareholders on Editorial Progress in the US, May 29, 1952, AJGM and Whelan,
Robert Capa, 277-278.
82
Note that Capa is holding a film camera rather than a photographic camera. Though not much has been
written on Capa’s motion picture work from the Spanish Civil War, see some mentions of it in Lebrun and
Lefebvre, Robert Capa, 142-146 and Young, Mexican Suitcase, 119-123.

198
the World”), with mock-ups of Magnum’s photo essay pasted on the walls of their
cramped workspace. Readers were told that the seven hundred twenty hours of writing,
layout, and editing that its staff had invested in the project was “the biggest job Holiday
had ever faced.”
83

Indeed, this impressive statistic could not be gleaned from looking at the finished
story, whose neat and thoughtful arrangement on the page was meant to engross the
reader in the colorful and diverse content rather than expose the long and tedious
construction of a photo essay that had been almost four years in the making. The casual
inclusion of this bit of “shop talk,” as the editors called it, with its close echoing of
Capa’s enthusiasm over Magnum’s achievement (“the biggest job ever done in
photography”) demonstrated that both sides wanted to underscore the tremendous scale
of the project, marketing themselves as the only photographic agency and magazine that
could produce far-reaching photo reportage that so adeptly folded human interest news
and social documentary into a sophisticated form of travel reporting. Holiday promised
readers that the story offered a “deeper kind of travel writing.”
84
“Youth and the World”
also represented the first feature in the magazine dealing with more than one place or
group of people.
85

The magazine framed each introductory spread of “Youth and the World” with a
ribbon of small color portraits of the subjects streaming across a silhouette of the globe, a
recurring graphic used by Holiday magazine since its inaugural issue. [Figure 3.16] Each
installment of the Magnum essay was printed over a dozen pages and it presented readers
with an attractive portfolio of large-scale photographs. No subject took up more than

83
“Holiday: Who and Where,” Holiday (January 1953), 25.
84
“Youth and the World: Part II,” Holiday (February 1953), 48.
85
Again, this is based on my analysis of the full run of Holiday magazine at U.C. Davis.

199
three pages and each photograph offered new visual information about the young
person’s life. The layouts drew readers into the worlds of twenty-somethings who led
typical yet fascinating lives: an Indian dancer who cared for her elderly parents [Figure
3.17], a London bus ticket collector saving up money to marry her fiancé [Figure 3.18], a
budding actress searching for fame in Rome. As planned, the subjects had professions,
hobbies, and aspirations that asserted their individuality, but these choices also
conformed to readers’ expectations about the cultures from which they came. To achieve
this photographically, Magnum photographers – including Eve Arnold, who had joined
Magnum in 1951 as its first female photographer and was assigned to document an
American woman for Generation X – took care to frame the subjects within potentially
familiar surroundings. [Figure 3.19] These descriptive photographs were often
reproduced at a smaller scale and located the subjects in their contemporary culture. In
the page spread dedicated to Arnold’s American medical student, we see the woman
named Nancy balancing her work with typically American leisure activities: trying on a
dress, gardening with her mother, or cheering at a baseball game. As much as this story
was about Nancy, it also served as a commentary on American society and the expanding
opportunities for women in the second half of the century. Most of the profiles therefore
used a single young person to represent national trends and were explicitly interested in
connecting the person’s individuality to a type and a place that readers could easily
recognize.
When Holiday printed Magnum’s “Youth and the World” in 1953, it presented a
journalistic feature about young people coming of age in the aftermath of WWII – and
therefore a story about postwar reconstruction – as well as a human interest travel story.

200
Robert Capa’s profile of a German miner and Werner Bischof’s profile of a young
communist in Japan offered insight into the defeated nations of World War II and
addressed latent fears among American leaders and the public. Have young Germans
learned from their country’s mistakes or was Nazi ideology still festering below the
surface? Would the Communist wave take hold of Japan, undoing the democratization
efforts of the American occupation? These are the questions that these profiles grappled
with, and they were somber and ponderous. With Magnum, Holiday selected black and
white photographs that symbolized the young men’s psychological states of isolation and
disillusionment. Bischof’s “bitter young critic” was shown sitting alone at the bottom of a
staircase, his hair disheveled and his contemplative gaze directed away from the camera.
[Figure 3.20] The tightness of the frame suggested that he was stifled and lacked a
traditional place in society, and in subsequent images, he was never shown interacting
with people in a way that brought on satisfaction or a smile. [Figure 3.21] The text of the
story elaborated on his anti-Americanism, his disenchantment with Japan following its
defeat, and his newfound Communist beliefs, which inspired his activism but also
estranged him from society.
86
The closing image of Goro Suma, which took up a full
page, underscored that estrangement with gravity, as readers were shown the back of his
dark silhouette on an almost deserted street corner near Kyoto University. Although he
was waiting to distribute pamphlets about unionizing and the power of collective action,
the young man was completely alone in his efforts. The profile of Suma may have been
disconcerting to Holiday’s American readers, who were informed about the ongoing

86
Through these details Goro Suma stood in for American fears of its relationship with Japan after the war,
including the potential fall of Japan to Communism. On the latter, see John W Dower, Embracing Defeat:
Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton & Company, 2000).

201
American military presence in Japan, but the last image may have suggested that anti-
Americanism was a limited occurrence rather than a nation-wide phenomena.
Magnum did not initially plan for its survey to address future travelers. As we saw
in Magnum’s first pitch for the series, “Generation X” was conceived for a general
editorial market. It also did not reflect any one set of national concerns, in part because
Magnum wanted the photographic surveys to be published simultaneously in the US,
England, and Italy. Nevertheless, “Youth and the World” served additional goals once it
appeared in Holiday, the largest financier of the project. An American thinking of
traveling overseas may have been looked to the story for answers on how he or she would
be received at a moment when Cold War politics and anti-Americanism encouraged
many to travel domestically instead. As Jennifer Van Vleck explains, such geopolitical
factors, coupled with the growing comforts of American life, made Americans hesitant to
leave the US and led companies such as Pan Am to launch advertising campaigns
consisting of “warm, human stories” and “appealing situations” to convince middle class
families that they were wanted abroad.
87
One such Pan Am advertisement was printed on
the inside cover of Life on April 9, 1956. [Figure 3.22] It showed six smiling faces of
people from around the world and asked readers to test their visual and geographic
literacy by figuring out their countries of origin. Although each person represented a
unique culture, profession, and lifestyle, the advertisement assured readers that they were
united in their friendliness and that “they all like Americans.”
88
Unlike the Pan Am
advertisement, Magnum’s project was not preoccupied with assuring Americans of young
people’s amicability. On the one hand, Magnum’s subjects were “types” who represented

87
Van Vleck, Empire of the Air, 219-221.
88
“Can you name the homelands of these people?” Life (April 9, 1956), inside cover.

202
different tendencies in their nations’ political cultures. But Magnum’s young people were
also significantly more complicated than Pan Am’s foreign subjects who, in a different
advertisement, were meticulously rendered as cartoon characters by Norman Rockwell on
his own global adventure sponsored by the airline. [Figure 3.23]
The magazine also used Magnum’s photo essays to serve Holiday’s dual mode of
address. Holiday editors selected photographs that served as both documentation and
promotion, sometimes in the span of one mini-feature. For instance, the series featured
plenty of familiar views of London by Cartier-Bresson and Paris by Robert Capa, often in
color. Readers could glimpse inside the Parisian model’s wardrobe of haute couture,
which Americans clamored after, as they followed her from morning coffee to mid-day
fashion shows to late-night parties in “gay Paris.” [Figure 3.24] They could see the
cheery image of the red London double decker bus, which Americans would soon ride in
themselves, and revel in the Gothic architecture of the Winchester Cathedral, which,
coupled with the advertisements for England featuring other abbeys and castles found in
Holiday, “offered a charmingly anachronistic counterpoint to the hard rationality of
American modernity.”
89
[Figure 3.18] Such countries as England and France were
beginning to accommodate tourists again in 1953, and through mini photo essays such as
these, Holiday made use of Magnum’s photographic survey to show Europe as it
recovered from war and slowly transformed itself into a travel destination.
In blurring the boundaries between promotion, editorial analysis, and human
interest travel, Magnum’s photographs and the research on the subjects they provided

89
Popp, Holiday Makers, 118. In Ogilvy’s advertising campaign for the British Travel Association, the
advertisers focused heavily on “castles, thatched roofs, and quirky ‘Olde-Curiosity-Shoppe aspects’ of
British culture so as to suggest that American tourists coming to England would get a taste of the “patently
non-American, British essence for themselves.” Ibid.

203
showed that Holiday’s project of encouraging tourism overseas hinged not only on
economics but also on helping Americans to understand foreigners. Some readers picked
up on this as well. “Your series on young people in different parts of the world…makes a
step forward in travel literature,” wrote one subscriber from New Hampshire. “You are
contributing something vital to a new concept of travel which could lead American
tourists to a better understanding of people in other countries and eventually improve the
standing of the United States among foreign countries. The recent wave of anti-
Americanism in Europe is compounded by our lack of understanding of Europe and its
peoples. Holiday is headed in the right direction.”
90
By including this type of comment in
the Letters to the Editor section after the series’ conclusion, Holiday editors showed that
they too believed Magnum’s series had a direct connection to travel, because it could
improve Americans’ knowledge of the world and make them better tourists and better
ambassadors of the United States.
91

Cold War Holidays?
In its presentation on the page and through Holiday’s editorial analysis, “Youth
and the World” was also built on the assumption that photographers (and by extension
Holiday readers) should be able to go anywhere they pleased. In the late forties and early
fifties, many of the advertisements and editorial features that appeared in Holiday did not
simply cultivate wanderlust; they suggested that being fenced in and not allowed to travel

90
Letters to the Editor, Holiday (April 1953), 4.
91
On travel abroad as a form of ambassadorship, see Endy, Cold War Holidays, 116-121, 226.

204
was a violation of being American.
92
With money in the bank and mandated vacation
time to spend, Americans increasingly bought into the notion that “free time and easy
mobility [were] at the heart of citizenship.”
93
Messages in government-sponsored and
private publications helped propagate this idea. One editorial appearing in Holiday in
1951 was accompanied by an illustration of Americans flying to Europe on a piggy bank
of savings covered in international stamps, and proclaimed that readers had the “right to
be restless.” [Figure 3.25] It told the story of six couples from Canton, Ohio who had
saved enough for “their first airline journey and their first overseas adventure.” The
editorial affirmed that travel was not a symbol of class but could be “everybody’s
adventure” and concluded with a motto that effectively summed up Holiday’s philosophy
on travel’s democratic reach: “If you can, go; if you can’t, plan.”
94

In light of this rhetoric, Holiday’s editors chose to draw attention to a very
particular absence in the third installment of “Youth and the World,” when they informed
readers that Yugoslav officials had selected which young people would be featured in
Magnum’s story from that country. As a result of this bureaucratic interference, Holiday
explained that “their lives therefore may be considered to be the picture of youth which
that government wishes the world to see.”
95
Magazine editors regularly made decisions
about what to include and exclude in their features – indeed, this was the editor’s main
professional responsibility – so attuning readers to the process of selection needed to
have a secondary motivation. In this case, Holiday editors used the conditions of

92
On the wartime effects on American consumption and the immediate changes after 1945 as they relate to
vacationing, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic; Charles F. McGovern, Sold American:
Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
93
Popp, Holiday Makers, 28-30.
94
“Your Right to be Restless,” Holiday (April 1951), 30.
95
“Conclusion: Youth and the World,” Holiday (March 1953), 51.

205
photographing in Yugoslavia to visually stage a confrontation between the United States
and the Soviet bloc in the March 1953 issue. Holiday laid out five pages of Fenno Jacob’s
most dramatic photographs from Yugoslavia to demonstrate the contrast between East
and West. [Figure 3.26] The leading portrait of the Milosav Obradovic was shot from
below and at a close distance, recalling the favored composition of socialist realist
photographers who sought to show their larger than life subjects through similar angles.
But instead of glorifying this young peasant, Jacobs revealed a bored young man
squinting into the bright sun without any apparent joy. In contrast to Milosav’s unexciting
and unrevolutionary life – despite his involvement in ample village council meetings,
shown on the next pages – Jacobs showed Nada Zivkovic working towards a Communist
future with zeal. [Figure 3.27] The sequence of the young woman’s city life unfolded
with a few telling stereotypes. [Figure 3.28] In a photograph on the top left, she was
shown behind a glass test tube, a symbol of the scientific advancements in the Soviet
bloc. In another image, she sat at a Communist party meeting, the walls behind her
adorned with portraits of party leaders. The sequence concluded with a full-page color
portrait of Nada, shot from the shoulders up. Posing in front of two busts of Tito and
Lenin, she took on the appearance of a sculpture and seemed to complete a socialist
trinity. For both of these profiles, Holiday exploited the visual cues of Communism and
chose images in which Jacobs’ composition closely resembled socialist realist
propaganda. In so doing, the editors heightened readers’ awareness that his images were
produced in and about a country where all cultural production was invested in political
ideology.

206
The most striking aspect of the final installment was the immediate transition
from Yugoslavia to the United States, and especially the contrast between Nada Zivkovic
and the American Marine lieutenant, photographed by Ernst Haas. [Figure 3.29] Readers
were told that Ted Kostrubala had thought much about “his uneasy world and times,” and
that he believed Russia and the United States were insincere about their desire for peace.
Holiday’s editing choices supported this claim. The leading photograph of Nada showed
her aiming a pistol during shooting practice in the army reserves [Figure 3.27], while the
last photograph of the entire series was a close-up of Kostrubala taking aim on the firing
line as he “trains for the hard duties of a young man of the free world in 1953.”
96
[Figure
3.30] Neither the weapons carried by the Cold War protagonists nor the editors’
conclusion to the series provided any assurance about the future of the world. “Due to the
Iron Curtain there are no young people in this story from the nations of the Soviet bloc,”
readers were reminded. “Because they are not here, it is difficult to speak with confidence
about the chances of peace.”
97
This statement signaled to readers that “Youth and the
World” had allowed Holiday and Magnum to ask serious questions about the world and
its people but that the political and social conditions of travel reporting had shaped the
parameters of the project. Although the same could be said of any photographic report,
Holiday editors brought readers behind the scenes selectively, suggesting that sections of
“Youth and the World” were more transparent (and less ideological) than others.
Revealing the process of production became an additional way to enforce the magazine’s
Cold War narrative.

96
“Youth and the World: Conclusion” Holiday (March 1953), 58.
97
Ibid., 59.

207
The visual standoff between Zivkovic and Kostrubala was indicative of a larger
trend in American magazine reporting about life behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s. A
1953 Holiday feature on Czechoslovakia beckoned readers: “If you like good food and
superb scenery, and don’t mind trains without tracks or the secret police of Yugoslavia,
you’ll enjoy your Adventure in Tito-land.” [Figure 3.31] Despite having little to do with
Tito himself, the story opened with a close-up portrait of the Socialist leader, while the
author expounded on his haphazard travels to the Dalmation coast and frequent run-ins
with undercover agents who seized his film.
98
A 1955 Holiday story titled “Holiday in
Russia” proclaimed that the USSR was hosting more foreigners than ever before: it had
recently issued 42 private visas, ironically noting that “even this controlled dribble of
tourism may be called progress.” Descriptions of the usual sights in Moscow and
Leningrad, which the state travel agency included in every itinerary, were interspersed
with warnings such as: “in the provinces, the manager of your hotel will, like as not,
double as local boss of the MVD [the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which included the
secret police].” As not only Holiday but also Look and Readers’ Digest printed stories
about the intense surveillance and limited mobility in the Soviet bloc, the magazines used
communist countries as foils to the United States and promoted their own society as
exceptionally free.
99

Ultimately, Magnum’s report enabled Holiday to communicate a similar message
even though the agency did not necessarily want this to be the case. Capa had become
somewhat uncomfortable with the strategic categorization of place that he saw unfolding

98
Don Smith, “Adventures in Tito-Land,” Holiday (April 1953), 36-46, 69-70.
99
But as Popp notes, certain groups, including African Americans and Jews, faced impediments when they
traveled in the US, with some hotels and resorts not selling accommodations to such guests. Popp, Holiday
Makers, 71-81.

208
during the series’ arrangement. “I am more and more convinced that we should mix not
only the persons, but the countries, to show more contrast and to show how many
different continents and backgrounds can produce the same type of thinking in the same
generation,” Capa wrote to Lou Mercier in 1952, advice that went ignored in favor of
Holiday’s country-by-country organization.
100
Capa wanted the series to focus more on
the people as individuals rather than allowing them to stand in for larger issues that
reflected Americans’ political and economic concerns; to focus more on the young
people’s forecasts for the future and their everyday lives, which would allow readers to
see the commonalities between them regardless of their cultural and geographic
differences. In Holiday’s final arrangement, however, Magnum’s photographs and
research allowed readers to see the world organized according to categories and themes
that represented America’s relationship to and concerns about the world, including the
Cold War.
101

The Biggest Job Ever Done in Photography
From Holiday’s perspective, “Youth and the World” allowed the magazine to
promote itself as capable of doing a bit of everything: offer globally scaled reporting,
show attractive young people with whom readers might identify, expound on
contemporary politics and culture, and collaborate with a rising photo agency that
included the best-known photographers in the world. Holiday was excited to publish

100
Robert Capa to Lou Mercier, June 25, 1952, ICP, cited in Young, Capa in Color, 24.
101
In the second installment of the series, published in February 1953, the young people’s individual
narratives were subsumed by their nations’ recent past and their relationship to the US, first as war-era
enemies and then as recipients of American aid. The installment featured young people from Italy Japan,
and Germany – “each of the three defeated, formerly enemy countries” – as well as France, “a country
bitterly hurt by defeat and occupation in the last war.” See “Youth and the World: Part II” Holiday
(February 1953), 48.

209
more such surveys, and within a few months of the first series’ conclusion, Holiday
allocated $25,000 to Magnum for two more Generation series – one on women, which
was published in the winter of 1954-1955, and one on children, published a year later.
102

Magnum’s “Youth and the World” had a tangible effect on Holiday’s editorial policies,
encouraging editors to develop more serialized stories in order to keep readers interested
from issue to issue. In addition to the new Magnum surveys, Holiday instituted a “New
World of Asia” feature, as well as multi-part profiles on international personalities such
as the Duke of Edinburgh and the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini.
103
From Magnum’s
perspective, “Youth and the World” proved tremendously important for the agency’s
finances, reputation, and international system of distribution. It went on to be reprinted in
fourteen publications around the world and received a special award from the University
of Missouri School of Journalism.
104
The project symbolized to Magnum and the
photographic community that the agency was becoming more professional and more
effective as an organization, capable of producing complicated, globally-scaled projects
involving dozens of photographers.
105
In the first major publicity article devoted to
Magnum in the American press, John Morris emphasized the agency’s editorial initiative
and its ability to partner with clients. He held up “Youth and the World” as proof that
Magnum was “attempting to match the ingenuity of its photographers in the field by

102
“Magnum and Its Markets,” June 21, 195, AJGM.
103
Han Suyin, “The New World of Asia: Singapore,” Holiday (September 1954), 46-51, 83-84; J. Bryan,
III “The Duke of Edinburgh – Part I” Holiday (May 1956), 52-56; “Toscanini: Portrait of a Genius, Part I
of IV” Holiday (October 1955).
104
“Magnum Update on Photographers,” December 7, 1955, AJGM
105
In the early fifties, Magnum had a few agents in countries such as Germany, Italy, and Switzerland but
they did not always have much experience or allegiance, and changed on a regular basis. Capa did much of
the selling in Europe himself, while the New York office worked on American sales and assignments and
Paris focused on editing and finishing the actual stories. The international sale in 1953 was an
organizational feat for Magnum that was aided by the eagerness of relatively new European publications to
secure fresh, timely content, which Magnum noticed were “joining the general trend, looking for stories
with more guts, drama, and timely journalistic angles.” Robert Capa, Magnum Stockholder Report,
February 15, 1952, AJGM.

210
developing its own editorial projects – preferably in collaboration with editors who are
prepared to pay.”
106
Addressing his colleagues two years prior, Capa had already
implored Magnum photographers to cease producing “pretty pictures” and improve their
“journalistic quality.” He emphasized that picture stories needed to have contemporary
relevance as well as a clear beginning, middle, and end – ideas that Magnum staff in New
York and Paris continued to reiterate in the following years.
107
In order to compete for
subscribers and advertising dollars, magazine editors at a host of publications – including
Look, Paris Match, This Week, McCall’s, Redbook, Business Week and many others –
regularly asked that Magnum generate story ideas and send in complete photo stories,
consisting of a final selection of images with informative captions and often a story text.

108
This kind of work, which involved much more than taking photographs, was what
could distinguish Magnum from competing photo agencies.
The publication of “Youth and the World” as well its international distribution
suggested that the organization could very well specialize in coordinating global stories
as long as editors were interested. In that brief moment of excitement, Magnum thought
up over a dozen more “World-Around” projects with spectacular reach: From “A Baby is
Born” (on the birthing conditions and feelings of new parents worldwide) and “The
Crowned Heads” (about royalty) to pictures of religious ceremonies in unconventional
places, the famous old and new streets of the biggest cities, “The World’s Finest Trains”
(intended for Fortune magazine’s business-oriented readers), “The World’s New
Wonders” and “The Seventh Day.” One story idea intended for Robert Capa – “famous

106
John Morris, “Magnum: An International Cooperative,” US Camera (1954), 110-152.
107
This is a recurrent theme in the Magnum archive, including Robert Capa to Magnum Shareholders, May
29, 1952, AJGM and Trudy Feliu, “European distribution report,” n.d. (circa December 1956), AJGM.
108
Revised Schedule of Meetings, January 8, 1959, AJGM; Erich Hartmann to Elliott Erwitt, April 4, 1960,
AJGM; Letter to Magnum Shareholders on Editorial Progress in the US, May 29, 1952, AJGM.

211
war photographer looks for Peace on Earth” – quickly grew to a Magnum-wide effort to
search out chances for world peace, from Indochina to the Israeli border.
109

Yet Magnum was able to produce only two more such surveys. This was partly
because of the increased demands on Magnum photographers and staff, who had more
customers and less time to devote to such highly orchestrated projects. Capa’s death in
1954 meant that the primary photographer and businessman pushing his colleagues to
undertake such projects was gone. Moreover, the idea that the world could be contained
and analyzed in a single editorial feature, no matter how thorough, became increasingly
naïve as the 1950s wore on. The experience of tourism brought magazine readers into
contact with new cultures and showed them how different and complicated each place
really was. This challenged the digestible, world at-a-glance nature of the first Holiday
survey. And as the gun-touting American and Yugoslav in “Youth and the World”
suggested, Cold War politics were foiling the travel industry’s utopian hopes for
uninhibited global tourism after World War II. As Popp notes, “tourism was a way to
operationalize the One World philosophy” shared by cultural, political, and business
leaders in the aftermath of World War II.
110
Magnum’s photographic surveys of the world
were integral to these efforts, evolving alongside the needs of its editorial partners and
willingly serving editorial and tourism agendas alike. Within the span of a few years,
Magnum produced both the idealistic “People are People the World Over” in 1948, which
represented a one world philosophy through its layout and message, as well as the grittier
and more complex “Youth and the World.” As tourism’s relationship to the one world

109
Robert Capa to all photographers, May 1, 1951, AJGM; John Morris to Robert Capa, July 25, 1953,
AJGM; List of stories and assignments accepted and given out by Robert Capa in London for Picture Post,
(n.d. - late 1953), AJGM; David Seymour to John Morris, May 14, 1956, MF-NY; Magnum Memo,
November 26, 1958, AJGM.
110
Popp, Holiday Makers, 76.

212
spirit evolved away from fostering an idealized notion of global camaraderie and towards
cultivating segmented markets and travel locations, Magnum’s surveys with Holiday
evolved as well. The agency’s later group projects would be rather different in spirit,
doing away with Generation X’s troubled existentialism to better suit Holiday’s fun mood
and preference for the “finer things in life.” In so doing, the surveys would resemble the
more conventional glamorous travel reporting happening in the magazine’s editorial
features and its advertising. Shot and laid out to incorporate Holiday’s dual mode of
address to readers, these later surveys effectively bridged the journalistic, entertainment,
and advertising genres within the photo essays themselves.
111

Tourism Overtakes the Editorial: The Worlds of Women and Children
Magnum’s “The World of Women” [Figure 3.32] and “The World of Children”
[Figure 3.33] ran in Holiday magazine for three months each, from December 1954 to
February 1955, and December 1955 to February 1956, respectively. Like “Youth and the
World,” the surveys were worldwide queries into the lives of citizens in “our modern
world,” and each led with a montage of faces whom Holiday readers would meet in the
following months. But whereas “Youth and the World” featured twenty-three
protagonists from thirteen countries, the later series were more modest in scale: one
woman or child was selected to represent one of eleven nations. With fewer subjects, the
agency had less to coordinate, and there was also more space for photographs in the
magazine, so the later series were more visually alluring than the first, with more large-
scale portraits, more color, and more small pictures illustrating the subjects’ daily lives.

111
Robert Capa to Pat Hagan, May 29, 1951, AJGM and Young, Capa in Color, 20.

213
Although the Holiday editors insisted that these surveys were meant to help
readers gain an understanding of the world and of other human beings, the people
featured in the later series were far from everyday. The “World of Women” included a
range of talented and remarkable professionals – doctors, lawyers, and celebrities – as
well as nationally known authors, political activists, and even a queen. With more space
available to each subject, the editors and photographers alike seemed to revel in their
beautiful appearances, producing many close-ups of their smiling or contemplative faces,
[Figure 3.34] with careful attention to the texture of their clothing [Figure 3.35] and
intimate domestic surroundings. [Figure 3.36] The “World of Children” was presented as
a story to which everyone could relate because of the “bright appeal” of childhood and
the “nostalgia” and “curiosity” that it elicited, yet the lives of these children were also far
from universal. They came from many more countries that would have seemed exotic to
Holiday readers and American travelers, including Lapland, Peru, Holland, and Uganda.
Magnum’s photographers presented the children as picturesque symbols of their cultures,
who wore beautifully colored and carefully sewn costumes and who often appeared
framed by the breathtaking beauty of the mountains [Figure 3.37] and steppes [Figure
3.38] in which they lived. With no intention to spoil the good mood, the stories
completely overlooked people from behind the Iron Curtain, focusing instead on leading
Western nations – especially France, Italy, the United States – and a selection of less
frequently visited countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, where
photographers had relatively free access even though the infrastructure posed its own
challenges.
112

112
Preparing to shoot the World of Children story, Eve Arnold wrote from Cuba about her reliance on a
single person to get around the country and to find lodging while on assignment: “I have met a man…who

214
While still rooted in the human-interest travel genre, much of the historical
specificity and political content of “Youth and the World” was absent from these later
Magnum projects, which the Holiday editors called “essays in human geography.” This
term could have just as well described the work that Magnum photographers had
produced for Holiday since the late 1940s, but the label’s appearance in the mid-1950s
signaled bigger changes in the field of geography and in the travel magazine itself. When
the United States entered World War II, Americans’ interest in geography expanded at an
unprecedented rate and was reflected in the growing consumption of maps, globes,
atlases, and issues of National Geographic magazine. As Susan Schulten explains, the
“nation-wide attention to maps brought the farthest reaches of the war into everyday
conversation,” shaping the very nature of spatial representation and Americans’
understanding of their proximity to – rather than isolation from – Europe and Asia in
particular.
113
In these years the very parameters of “geography” were shifting as well.
Professional geographers to schoolteachers recognized that traditional physical
geographic knowledge – the study of topography and national boundaries – was
becoming less relevant for an interconnected world, and they increasingly turned towards
human geography – the study of people’s relationship to and effect on their physical
environment. Holiday’s use of the term “human geography” demonstrates that by the
mid-1950s, such changes in geography made their way into popular culture and the
tourism industry, as the latter became the primary arena for fueling people’s interest in

knows all about the Cuban coast…[he] has promised to take me in his amphibious plane to a small cay off
the coast of Cuba where I can find the kind of child I want. … If we find the little girl (fisherman’s child)
my friend will provide a yacht on which I can live while working.” Eve Arnold to Magnum, March 22,
1954, AJGM.
113
Susan Schulten, Geographical Imagination in America. See also Derek Gregory, Geographical
Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) and Joan M. Schwartz, “The Geography Lesson: Photographs and
the Construction of Imaginative Geographies,” Journal of Historical Geography 22:1 (1996), 16-45.

215
the world after World War II.
114
Indeed for middle class travelers, older forms of
geographic knowledge were made obsolete by such developments as air travel, which
traversed the globe without consideration of the physical boundaries posed by rivers or
mountains.
115

Human geography also required a different mode of production that was more
akin to the experience of travel for which Holiday readers were being prepared. As Paula
Amad explains, physical geography consisted of abstract knowledge that could be learned
from textbooks, but human geography required fieldwork and direct observation in the
contemporary moment.
116
The skills required by Magnum photographers to undertake the
surveys on women and children had much in common with what was demanded of
photographers and cinematographers involved in the earliest studies of human geography:
embracing natural curiosity, observing real life, noting first impressions, keeping an open
eye, and showing initiative in their fieldwork.
117
Holiday editors therefore made sure to
draw readers’ attention to how these stories were made and again, as with “Youth and the
World,” played up the prestige of the “remarkable” Magnum with which the magazine
had partnered.
118

114
On the relationship between geography and popular culture, see Jacqueline Brugess and John R. Gold,
eds. Geography, the Media and Popular Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1985) and Leo Zonn, ed. Place
Images in Media: Portrayal, Experience, and Meaning (Savage: Rowan & Littlefield, 1990).
115
On the ways that air travel shaped representations of the world, including Rand McNally’s “air globe”
for American Airlines, see Schulten, Geographical Imagination in America, 121-147.
116
Paula Amad, Counter-Archive, 49-51, 71.
117
The best-known human geography effort is Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planete. See Amad, Counter-
Archive.
118
Roger Angell, “World of Women: Part I,” Holiday (December 1954), 41. The introduction to “World of
Children” echoed the description of process – “Like the previous series, this is a collaboration between
Holiday and Magnum Photos, the international photographic agency whose staff took all the pictures for
these stories. The text is based entirely on searching interviews with the children and their parents, and
upon the children’s answers to a long and detailed questionnaire.” Roger Angell, “Children’s World: Part
I,” Holiday (December 1955), 41.

216
Behind the scenes, however, these later Generation series took more energy and
coaxing of photographers to fulfill the shooting scripts and answer the long
questionnaires that by then seemed a bit too formulaic. Certain photographers resisted the
magazine’s prying questions into the subjects’ lives: Cartier-Bresson refused to ask
nearly a third of the questionnaire which inquired into how much money a child’s parents
made, or whether he or she knew any communists.
119
Many of the stories were delivered
late or incomplete because of photographers’ changing travel plans and schedules, often
in flux when news stories arose. The magazine also deflected attention away from the
constructed and pre-determined nature of these surveys. Holiday editors Ted Patrick and
Lou Mercier were deeply involved in crafting these profiles in part because Capa was no
longer alive to drive the editing process but also because the series now needed to
promote the “Holiday mood” more emphatically than “Youth and the World” had done.

They offered strict guidelines on story angles: the children’s situation needed to be
“basically positive” and “not unpleasant,” insisted Mercier, reflecting the extent to which
the magazine had broken from its late 1940s publication of grim rubble stories. Holiday
wanted the children to be “definitely linked to a social significance in his or her country,”
but they insisted that the subjects be “rich, or happy, or hopeful, or progressive if not all
of these.”
120
The editors also suggested recognizable, even cliché tropes for some of the
subjects’ lives, including “a French girl aristocrat in the poor-little-rich girl tradition who

119
The questionnaire in Cartier-Bresson’s archive shows the photographer crossed out many of the
questions, and commented that others were “indecent” or “none of my business.” An exchange between
Cartier-Bresson and Roger Angell of Holiday ensued in which the editor pleaded for more information to
make the “Petit Rat” profile come alive in the text. Roger Angell to Cartier-Bresson, July 21, 1955, FHCB.
120
Lou Mercier to John Morris, January 13, 1954, AJGM.

217
represents a vanishing form of culture but one to which the French are tenaciously
clinging.”
121

It is no surprise, then, that the images that Magnum produced for these later series
included scenes that were becoming iconic and which resonated with other articles (and
advertisements) readers could see in Holiday. Cartier-Bresson’s profile of the “Petit Rat”
for “Children’s World” showed the French ballerina-in-training leaving rehearsal at the
now recognizable Grand Opera in Paris, whose ballet company Holiday had already
featured in 1951. [Figure 3.39] In a photograph on the bottom right of the same page, she
was shown having lunch with her family at a quintessentially Parisian café, which had an
uncanny resemblance to the one Cartier-Bresson had photographed for the 1953 Holiday
issue on Paris. Moreover, all of the neighborhoods the young ballerina traversed and the
experiences that structured her daily routine were also the ones that appeared in
advertisements for her home city. In the same April 1953 issue on Paris, a Pan American
advertisement used three colorful photographs to show that a “Wedding Anniversary in
PARIS [sic]” was possible with Pan Am’s fast “Presidential” flight overseas. [Figure
3.40] The married couple had wisely flown to France and now had nine glorious days to
engage in pastimes not unlike the “Petit Rat”: to drink and people-watch from sidewalk
cafés, choose a bouquet at an outdoor flower market near the Notre Dame, and order an
exceptional meal from an exceptionally friendly Parisian waiter.
While informing readers about people around the world, the women and children
series directly helped to sell the experience of travel, showing how in less than a decade
Magnum embraced the shift from editorial to travel photography and bridged these two

121
“Approved List of Subjects for Children of the World, n.d., and Margot Shore to John Morris, February
20, 1954, AJGM.

218
modes in their work for Holiday. Many of the youngsters in “Children’s World” were
presented as specimens of their local dress and cultures, including Cornell Capa’s
saturated, storybook shots of a boy from Peru captured against the breathtaking landscape
of the Andes [Figure 3.37] and Elliott Erwitt’s young cowboy from the Colorado
ranchland, outfitted in a recognizably American red plaid shirt, jeans, cowboy boots and
hat. [Figure 3.41] This approach – combining expected landscapes with subjects
imagined as typical to the surroundings – resonated with the straight travel features that
Magnum photographers produced for Holiday in the same years, including the Holiday
special issue on Paris in April 1953. Most notably, Henri Cartier-Bresson supplied a
portfolio for that issue which Holiday titled, “Paris! City of Types.” His images indulged
in Parisian stereotypes while also presenting them within recognizable surroundings,
including famous landmarks or typically Parisian parks and sidewalk cafes. [Figure 3.42]
One photograph of a couple in front of the Paris Opera, which filled most of one
magazine page, echoed Robert Doisneau’s iconic photograph of the kiss from 1950 but in
order to meet the interests of the travel magazine client, Cartier-Bresson focused as much
on the couples’ architectural surroundings as on their affectionate display.
122

While “Children’s World” included stories about the subjects’ lives and factored
in their family dynamics or personal dreams for the future, both Holiday and Magnum
recognized that the images and choices of subjects needed to resonate with Americans’
popular associations of a given place. For Holiday editors as well as advertisers, such
associations came from the realm of “popular geography,” which included films, books,

122
On the mythology of Doisneau’s image and the humanism of French postwar photography, see Nina
Lager Vestberg, “Robert Doisneau and the Making of a Universal Cliché,” History of Photography 35:2
(2011), 157-165.

219
and other illustrated magazines.
123
Holiday’s requests for popular and stereotypical
subjects were unrelenting and sometimes comically uninformed, leading Magnum’s
bureau chief in Paris, Margot Shore, to write to John Morris with anguish: “As for the
Holland Chimney Sweep, [which Holiday wants Kryn Taconis to photograph] they exist
in Germany only. Which I know, Chim [Magnum’s new President] knows, Kryn
[Taconis] knows. Everybody knows but Holiday.”
124
Holiday’s off-the-mark insistence
on types demonstrated that the magazine was less interested in the subjects’ humanity or
the universal appeal of their lives than in presenting them as characters that Holiday
readers would meet when they traveled to these places for themselves. Human
geography, which “both Holiday and Magnum believe…is the most stimulating form of
reporting that can be undertaken in our world of today,” was no abstract geography
lesson, but would help those “well-heeled Americans” to become savvier travelers who
would know what to expect when they arrived at their destination.
It is therefore not surprising that some children in the Magnum series actually
worked in their cities’ local tourist industries and could ostensibly meet a Holiday reader-
traveler in the near future. Once Holiday accepted that no chimney sweeps could be
found in Holland, Kryn Taconis produced a colorful portrait of Wolmoed Jonk instead.
The opening portrait of this “old-fashioned Dutch girl” showed her in a lacy cap and a
frilly red dress, which she wore like everyone else in her fishing village. [Figure 3.43]
Holiday told readers that her town “is an oddity much admired by tourists” and that
Wolmoed did not feel the need to travel to see the world because “the world comes to see

123
Popp, Holiday Makers, 113-115.
124
Margot Shore to John Morris, February 20, 1954, AJGM.

220
Volendam.”
125
Taconis’ snapshot of Wolmoed walking with her mother, shot in black
and white and reproduced just to the left of Wolmoed’s portrait, was rudimentary enough
to have been stolen by a curious foreigner with a camera rather than a professional
photographer. [Figure 3.44] Such images encouraged readers to be on alert for their own
snapshots while on vacation, but they also gestured towards the multiple roles that
Magnum photographers were now filling: working as photo reporters, still as sociologists
conducting interviews with local subjects, but also as expert travelers establishing actual
travel itineraries and identifying the best vantage points from which to shoot.
If Taconis’ profile suggested a trip to the northern fishing village, Holiday readers
also had the option to venture further south to see the Gothic cathedral of Orvieto, where
they would very likely meet Roberto Moncelsi. Photographed for “Children’s World” by
Chim, Roberto was an industrious little boy who had taught himself multiple languages
and who was always the first to greet tour buses and their “camera toting visitors,”
Holiday explained in text and image. [Figure 3.45] Chim’s photos show the boy waiting
for the arrival of visitors, running to welcome a tour bus, and then gesturing expertly
while he lectures groups of tourists. Explaining its history and architecture to a group of
monks in a picture on the bottom left of the page spread, Roberto makes a frame with his
hands through which to focus on the church’s details. His gesture equally insinuates a
good vantage point through which to take a picture of the building and in the other
photographs, tourists follow his guidance about where to look and what to see. On the
pages of Holiday, the Children series was embedded into a culture of travel with less and
less subtlety, going so far as to suggest locations that seemed “off the beaten path” – a
fishing village in Holland rather than Amsterdam and Orvieto rather than Rome. With

125
“World of Children: Part II,” Holiday (January 1956), 98-99.

221
“off the beaten path” travel still at least a decade away, Magnum’s well-traveled,
cosmopolitan photographers offered stories about places that were just unfamiliar enough
to inspire readers to experience more than the typical travel route, or at least show that it
was possible to do so.
126

By including images of tourists within Chim’s profile on Roberto, the series also
gestured towards a trope that was coming up frequently in Holiday’s destination profiles
by the mid-1950s. Story authors as well as Magnum photographers regularly offered
Holiday readers direct advice on how to behave as tourists and photographers in little side
notes and scenes interwoven into their features. On the bottom left of one page spread in
Cartier-Bresson’s “Paris! City of Types” portfolio from 1953, Holiday editors published
an unremarkable picture of a tall man walking down the street under the watchful gaze of
a French guard. [Figure 3.46] The caption explained the reason for the photograph’s
inclusion: “Summer sight on the boulevards is that tireless migrant, the tourist. In front of
the Elysees Palace, the straw hat, the bright necktie and dark glasses are unmistakable: an
American.”
127
The photograph represented the American tourist in the eyes of a
quintessentially French citizen (the photographer Cartier-Bresson), allowing American
editors of Holiday to feign association with the great and cultured French photographer
and suggest to readers that they try a little harder not to stand out when they traveled
abroad so as to avoid becoming the subject of French ridicule. We may also recall Robert
Capa’s silly “picture-snapper” who appeared in his 1951 story on the Winter Alps.
[Figure 3.5] She represented both a staple character that Holiday readers would find on

126
As Popp explains, American Express first noticed off the beaten path in mid-1950s as Americans started
renting cars to escape crowds. Erich Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day appeared in 1957, becoming a bible
for Americans looking to rough it across Europe. Yet notions of authenticity were a minor theme
throughout most of the vacation boom, emerging only by the late 1950s. Popp, Holiday Makers, 129.
127
“Paris – City of Types,” Holiday (April 1953), 50.

222
the slopes but also a lesson in how not to dress and behave. So even though most issues
of Holiday were filled with advertisements for black and white, color, and motion
cameras that Americans could take with them on vacation, editorial features by such
European photographers as Cartier-Bresson and Capa also insinuated that readers could
use them sparingly and attempt not to fit the stereotypical mold of the US tourist.
For Magnum, meeting Holiday’s intertwined editorial and commercial agenda
meant choosing the right subjects and supplying editors with photographs that could be
arranged into travel features that resonated with advertising content. Generation
Women’s Cora Lahorra, a Philippine stewardess who had become a true “cosmopolitan”
through her work, appeared in a profile that looked much like Holiday’s “lure”
advertisements promoting vacation spots and the airlines that took people there.
128

Attending to passengers on flights around the world, the self-sufficient and hardworking
Lahorra had picked up eight languages and developed an international network of suitors
– a fact that readers could believe based on the photographs that George Rodger provided
and that Holiday editors selected for publication. [Figure 3.47] A large-scale profile
shows Lahorra’s slender yet supple form wearing a strapless bathing suit, its patterning
blending into the foliage that surrounds her. As she poses in front of a picturesque
waterfall, Lahorra’s gracious and full smile beckons Holiday readers to travel to the lush
Phillipines.
In many ways her image was quite similar to the ones that appeared in the
colorful advertisements for other Pacific islands that readers could see on adjacent pages.
[Figure 3.48] In one example, an advertisement for Hawaii functions like the page of a
scrapbook, combining seven photographic snapshots of a young woman’s vacation. In the

128
On lure advertising in Holiday, see Popp, Holiday Makers, 103-122.

223
largest image, she is pictured wearing a similar bathing suit as Lahorra as she leans
against a tree overlooking the ocean. In other photographs she takes part in quintessential
Hawaii experiences: greeted by a surfer, adorned with lei, and taking part in a luau. The
remaining scenes are ones she may have photographed herself, including a stretch of
beach in Waikiki with a view of Diamond Head in background, and a portrait of three
hula dancers performing on the sand. Such advertisements prepared reader-travelers for
the attractive and real sights that they would see as much as they anticipated the
photographic opportunities that would be available to them. Moreover, since the
Generation Women protagonist was a real person rather than a nameless model (as in the
case of the Hawaii advertisement), Rodger’s image suggested that Holiday readers could
be waited on by Lahorra on their next international flight or meet countless other
stewardesses whose prettiness and charm would be a welcome start to their next vacation.
The Generation profile was an editorial feature grounded in reality and documentary
photography while also referencing the real possibility of exotic travel.
These later surveys for Holiday were also a testament to how the work and lives
of its photographers had changed since Magnum’s founding in 1947. Both the women
and children series featured well-known or otherwise important figures who were
instrumental to photographers’ industrial assignments, which was a growing market for
Magnum by the time these stories were published. David Seymour had crossed paths with
the Queen of Greece after World War II when he was sent to the region by UNESCO to
document international aid efforts in the region, and again in 1953 when he covered the
earthquake in Greece. When the Holiday assignment materialized he already had contacts
in her government and in Athens, and he used them to set up the photo shoot and to

224
interview the Queen based on the Holiday questionnaire.
129
[Figure 3.49] While Seymour
specialized in stories for relief agencies, George Rodger – committed to photographing
Africa and the Middle East – worked for the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey’s
illustrated magazine, The Lamp. Through the company’s connections with local political
leaders and its ability to finance months-long expeditions, Rodger gained access to
subjects like the young Emmanuel Rwahwire, who was growing up in a royal court in
Central Africa and became one of the protagonists in the World of Children. [Figure
3.50]
While some industrial assignments helped photographers find the right subjects
for the Generation series, Magnum’s work on film sets – which accounted for around ten
per cent of business in the first decade of operations – was almost indistinguishable from
the demands of the Holiday profiles. This was convenient: David Seymour’s photographs
of the Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, published in the second installment of the “World
of Women,” were actually made when he was already working on the set of “The
Woman of Rome.” [Figure 3.51] The final selection of images, as well as the exceedingly
short text that accompanies them, shows that the Generation project was added on to
Chim’s promotional work and was made possible by a few extra shots, such as
Lollobrigida at breakfast with her husband. That picture accompanied more typical
celebrity pictures of the actress with her stylist, discussing a script, or surrounded by her
fans. The large-scale color portrait of the actress, which focused the reader’s attention on
Lollobrigida’s busty figure and bright red blouse, resembled the kinds of photographs

129
Holiday likewise sent letters of introduction but these were delayed. See the following correspondence
all in the MFNY: Chim to John Morris, February 24, 1954; Magnum to Chim, February 27, 1954; Chim to
John Morris, March 1, 1954; Chim to John Morris, March 3, 1954; Chim to Margot Shore, March 9, 1954;
Magnum to Chim, March 20, 1954; Chim to John Morris, March 31, 1954; Chim to John Morris, April 19,
1954; Chim to John Morris, “Frederica, Queen of the Hellenes,” n.d. (circa April 19, 1954).

225
that Magnum photographers produced regularly of celebrities on the set of their movies
for general weeklies including Picture Post, Look, and Paris Match.
130
[Figure 3.52] In
Holiday, Lollobrigida’s profile was loosely suited to the Generation series while
effectively presenting Italy as the home of a glamorous and growing film industry
featuring attractive female leads with undeniable sex appeal. This concept had appeared a
year earlier in the magazine’s entertainment column, which was devoted to the
popularization of Italian films in America. [Figure 3.53] There, the Holiday writer
summed up the message that was buried within the Generation Women profile: “The
truck driver, not just the esthete, can smack his lips over the ellipsoidal charms of Gina
Lollobrigida.” Just as Italian cinema went from being the domain of the cultural elite to
becoming “familiar and important” among a range of American viewers, so too had
photojournalists transformed avant-garde stars into popular cultural icons, including
through images of the stars in real scenarios at home and at work.
131

After publishing Magnum’s Generation Women series, Holiday soon began a
two-page feature on the world’s most fashionable women, each month profiling a new
fashionista from a different country with color images by the British fashion and lifestyle
photographer Jacques Ronny.
132
[Figures 3.54] If some of Magnum’s subjects had been
both fashionable and hardworking, or fashionable and successful at their work –

130
Chim enjoyed close working relationships with and was trusted by a number of actresses in the last
years of his life, including Lollobrigida, Ingrid Bergman, and Sofia Loren, when he was predominantly
working on film sets. Chim to John Morris, October 19, 1956 and John Morris to Chim, October 4, 1956,
MFNY. Chim to John Morris and Inge Bondi, January 23, 1956, MFNY; John Morris to Dan Mich, August
8, 1956, AJGM.
131
On the history of candid celebrity exposes, see Charles L. Ponce de Leon, Self Exposure: Human-
Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940 (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 2002).
132
Ronny regularly contributed fashion, lifestyle and travel photography to magazines such as Holiday,
Harper’s Bazaar, and Town & Country. See Pamela Fiori, Stolen Moments: The Photographs of Jacques
Ronny (New York: Glitterati Incorporated, 2009).

226
including Rodger’s Cora Lahorra and Inge Morath’s Mercedes Formica, a Spanish
attorney representing battered women whom Morath photographed in a flamenco
costume [Figure 3.35] – in the new feature, fashion took primary place over editorializing
about the women’s careers, aspirations, and the cultures in which they lived. In
retrospect, this editorial decision also reveals what was likely at the heart of Holiday’s
interest in Generation women. The magazine wanted to partner with established
photojournalists known for their analysis of the contemporary world through human
interest reporting and photography, but it also wanted to entertain and allure readers with
stories about the favorite photographic subject of nearly all illustrated magazines,
including those dedicated to travel: women.
The women and children profiles sprung from Magnum’s and Holiday’s shared
interest in the world but were also infused with the increasing glamour found in other
Holiday travel profiles – including Capa’s and Cartier-Bresson’s photographic stories
from Europe – as well as the lure of destination advertisements, which were themselves
turning to photography to draw in readers. Both projects showed how the genre of the
global photographic survey – and by extension, Magnum – was adapting to the demands
of Holiday, which wielded more financial power than general editorial publications.
Through its partnership with Magnum, Holiday turned the political and cultural dream of
one world into a graspable and attractive reality for Americans through editorials, ads,
and everything in between.

227
Conclusion
Magnum’s relationship with Holiday was significant not only because it allowed
photographers to expand the market for editorial photography to include the tourism
industry, but also because it represented one of the most generative collaborations
between photographers and editors that the organization experienced in its early history.
In the early fifties, Holiday relied on Magnum, and especially Robert Capa, for ideas that
were ambitious in scale and which would be lucrative for both the photographers and the
magazine. This included “Youth and the World,” Capa’s stories on the jet-set in France
and the Alps, features on Paris (by Magnum photographers) and Europe (by Cartier-
Bresson) as well as two more “Generation” series, which John Morris coordinated and
edited together with Holiday after Capa’s death in 1954. The trajectory of projects
charted here demonstrates that there were parallel interests at both at the magazine and
the photo agency: from surveying the immediate postwar world through editorial features
and rubble photography, to looking at the world’s past, present, and future at mid-
century, to embracing that “the future,” i.e. the aspirational world of consumption travel,
was taking over the past. All of these goals could be accomplished through human-
interest photography, which was central to the visual culture of tourism promoted in
Holiday and which Magnum provided for its editorial and travel clients alike. By working
with Holiday, Magnum could employ many photographers and make life around the
world into an editorial possibility. Yet if in the beginning the photographers and
magazine editors were more interested in how people and places were faring after the
war, over the decade this human-interest reporting began to look more like the glamorous
travel destination profiles and photography-based advertisements in the rest of the

228
magazine. At the same time, the role of the Magnum photographer shifted as well, from
photo reporter in the early rubble stories of 1948-1949, to a hybrid reporter-traveler mode
in “Youth and the World,” and finally to embracing that the photojournalist was the
model traveler in the “Worlds” of women and children (1954-1956).
Holiday’s dual mode of address mapped well onto Magnum’s approach to
photography which already included industrial photography as well as editorial work.
While making their Generation profiles, Chim was also photographing movie stars as part
of Magnum’s movie coverage, and Rodger was working for one of his most important
industrial clients, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Such partnerships were
central to Magnum’s entry into industrial photography, which began to increase in the
early 1950s alongside Magnum’s work with Holiday. If the Holiday projects allowed
Magnum to take what they were already doing and apply those pictures to the travel
market, Magnum’s industrial work showed that corporations were also looking to the
aesthetic, prestige, currency of photojournalism to promote their operations. How
Magnum participated in the latter phenomenon is the subject of the next chapter.
229
Chapter 4

Their Daily Bread:
Magnum’s First Decade of Public Relations Photography

On September 14, 1959, Life printed a photo essay titled, “Birth Pangs at Detroit
for a New Company Car,” which was shot by Magnum photographer Cornell Capa.
1

[Figure 4.1] Capa worked on the story for three months, documenting Ford engineers in
the boardroom and on the assembly line as they worked feverishly to produce the Ford
Falcon - America’s smallest, most fuel-efficient economy-sized car to date.
2
The
automotive giant had paid Magnum for this editorial feature, and when the story was
printed in Life it was visually indistinguishable from other photo essays published in the
same issue, including a report on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s tour through Europe and a
story on seven American astronauts training for their first flight into space. Cornell Capa
successfully brought viewers into the key engineers’ exhausting group deliberations
[Figure 4.2] and communicated the excitement of younger team members as they peered
under the hood and body of the new model. [Figure 4.3] The story took readers from the
car’s inception to its test drive on a Colorado road, and in the process it demonstrated
Ford’s human capital, the company’s creativity, and its serious work ethic. It contained
elements that appeared in standard, well-rounded photo essays of the era, including a

1
Cornell Capa, “Birth Pangs at Detroit for a New Company Car,” Life (September 14, 1959), 157-165.
Previously a Life staff photographer, Cornell Capa joined Magnum after the death of his brother in
Indochina in 1954, and he assumed Presidency of Magnum in January 1957, two months after Chim’s
death in the Suez. Naggar, George Rodger, 247.
2
Ford was no newcomer to publish relations. In the 1920s, the Ford Motor Company hired well-known
artists such as Charles Sheeler and Margaret Bourke-White to represent River Rouge plant. Their efforts
culminated in a body of work that, as Terry Smith has shown, was crucial to the industrial aesthetic in early
20
th
century American art. Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 15-137. On Sheeler’s photography for Ford, see Theodore E.
Stebbins, et. al, The Photography of Charles Sheeler: American Modernist (Boston: Bullfinch, 2002) and
Charles Brock and Mariah Shay, Charles Sheeler: Across Media (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2006).
230
captivating frontispiece image, which summed up the story without giving too much
away and piqued the reader’s curiosity. [Figure 4.1] Subsequent page spreads included
group and individual profiles; action shots demonstrating physical and psychological
activity; a number of intimate close-ups to communicate practical or symbolic details;
repetitive compositions in order to emphasize a point or a mood; and a large-scale
photograph demonstrating the setting of the action.
3

Three weeks later, The New York Times ran a special supplement to the paper
with its own version of the photo essay, which Magnum staff had hurriedly laid out
across over eight pages with the encouragement of Ford’s public relations manager. The
day before this supplement hit the stands, Magnum’s Executive Editor John Morris wrote
a letter to Magnum’s friends and clients, asking them to be on the lookout for the Detroit
story the following morning. Morris proudly observed that Cornell Capa’s coverage
proved that corporations could benefit from Magnum’s “photojournalistic thinking.” He
continued: “MAGNUM is first and foremost a journalistic organization, devoted to
covering world history. And history is made by People - from Khruschev to Marilyn
Monroe to the previously anonymous FORD [sic] engineers.” Before signing off, Morris
assured potential clients that Magnum not only specialized in making such photographs,
but that it could also see those images through to publication, “utilizing the varied
formats afforded by magazines, newspapers, booklets, and advertisements…”
4
A decade
prior, Morris produced “People are People the World Over” to insist that “the anxious

3
Life’s layout of Capa’s Ford pictures combined a range of techniques that were typical for the publication,
such as “busy” and “fun” picture spreads, “bleeding pictures” (which were stretched to the edges of the
page), and double-trucks (pictures printed across two pages). See especially Wilson Hicks, Words and
Pictures: An Introduction to Photojournalism (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), 63-80, as well as
Daniel D. Mich and Edwin Eberman, The Technique of the Picture Story (New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, 1945) and R. Smith Schuneman, ed. Photographic Communication: Principles, Problems, and
Challenges of Photojournalism (New York: Hastings House, 1972).
4
John Morris, “Magnum and Ford” (October 3, 1959), AJGM.
231
maneuvers of diplomats” could not disturb everyday life.
5
In the early fifties, Magnum’s
“Youth and the World,” published in Holiday magazine, signaled that Magnum’s
photojournalism could help the travel industry to explain and market the world that
Americans would soon see for themselves. By 1959, Morris was ready to expand his
understanding of Magnum’s human-interest photography and “sincere reportage” in order
to accommodate the needs of a new market: industrial promotion.
Unlike advertising photography, which promoted a product, industrial
photography, also called public relations photography, aimed to teach the general public
about a company and often used established media channels. Readers easily recognized
advertisements as sponsored messages, which companies paid to place in a variety of
settings, from billboards to posters to magazine pages. By contrast, public relations often
took the form of editorial content, planted in the press for free as if it simply reported on
the news.
6
This preliminary definition already suggests why Magnum photographers
would have been well positioned to produce the latter: they excelled at documenting
editorial features and the existence of a corporate sponsor was unlikely to affect the
content or appearance of the story, since companies necessarily wanted public relations
pieces to be perceived as no different from editorial copy.
Between the late 1940s and the end of the 1950s, the aesthetic and mode of
producing photographic news stories migrated into corporate promotion with Magnum at
the helm of that shift. This chapter begins by demonstrating how Magnum’s approach to
public relations photography evolved in quantitative and qualitative terms in that time
span, and what Magnum learned from its dealings with the postwar film industry in

5
John Morris, “People are People the World Over,” Ladies’ Home Journal (May 1948), 43.
6
David E. Nye, Image Worlds: Corporate Identities at General Electric, 1890-1930 (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1985), 15-18.
232
particular. Although dozens of companies enlisted Magnum photographers to create
public relations material, the rest of the chapter focuses on two American corporations
that made particularly extensive use of Magnum’s journalistic photography: The Standard
Oil Company of New Jersey (SONJ, also known as ESSO), which employed George
Rodger during his travels in Africa, and the Pillsbury Company, whose corporate image
Erich Hartmann helped to shape as it evolved into an international corporation.
This chapter demonstrates that public relations was a vibrant and crucial sector of
Magnum’s activities from the early 1950s, and it challenges the notion that Magnum
photographers “sold out” by giving into corporate work.
7
All of Magnum’s photography
discussed in previous chapters was sold at a competitive price, whether to news
publications or non-profit organizations, because the photo agency dealt with images as
commodities. Taking on corporate assignments did not necessarily stifle Magnum
photographers’ creativity or force them to produce work of lesser quality than their
editorial work. As Magnum’s reputation and brand – established predominantly through
their editorial work in magazines – became better known, corporations explicitly asked
for their publicity to look just like the other photographs that Magnumites published in
the illustrated press. American corporations were competing for attention in a saturated
visual economy, and their embrace of photojournalism shows that they were heavily
influenced by and needed to be seen within “the visual and narrative strategies of

7
Scholars, critics, and some Magnum photographers have distinguished between the practice of selling
photographs to news outlets and to corporations, suggesting that dealing with the latter market signaled
crude commercialization and the decline of journalistic standards. The history of photography is itself often
narrated according to that premise, with the journalistic and documentary work of the 1930s, 1940s, and
1950s seemingly giving way to the consumer frenzy of the 1960s and beyond. My aim is to show that this
was not so clearly the case. See Lili Corbus Bezner, Photography and Politics in America: From the New
Deal to the Cold War (Baltimore: The Jon Hopkins University Press, 1999); Stimson, Pivot of the World;
and Cookman, “Cartier-Bresson Reinterprets Career.”
233
commercialized mass culture,” which included illustrated magazines.
8
Magnum’s
corporate promotion demonstrates that postwar companies embraced the aesthetic of
photojournalism to promote their companies’ internationalism and humanism – qualities
that could be documented with the help of Magnum’s own international structure and
exceptional human interest photography. Far from turning Magnum photographers into
producers of “reams of lookalike headshots of men in suits that nobody wanted,”
promotional photography often enabled Magnum members to develop niche markets and
even articulate their unique styles and approaches to the medium and the world.
9

Public Relations Photography Before Magnum
Public relations photography in the United States developed hand-in-hand with
the medium of photography itself between the 1840s and 1880s, as railway companies
and government expedition projects hired photographers on a temporary basis in order to
document and promote their activities to the general public.
10
The invention of halftone
printing in the 1880s enabled photojournalism to take off and it also allowed the private
sector to integrate photographic illustrations into their print materials. In these years,
companies such as General Electric, AT&T, General Motors, and many others began
establishing public relations departments in order to improve their reputation in the eyes
of the general public, which was concerned about the rise of impersonal, large

8
Fehrenback and Rodogno, eds. Humanitarian Photography, 11.
9
This is Alison Nordstrom’s assessment of Magnum’s corporate work in “On Becoming an Archive,” in
Hoelsher, Reading Magnum, 27, which also demonstrates the tendency to conflate different eras and types
of corporate and industrial publicity.
10
On survey photography for the United States government and its expeditions in the West, see Weston
Naef, Era of Exploration: The Rise of Landscape Photography in the American West, 1860-1885 (Buffalo:
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1985). On power relations within survey photography, including the role of
sponsors, see Joel Snyder, “Territorial Photography” in Mitchell, W.J.T., ed. Landscape and Power
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 175-202 and Robyn Kelsey, Archive Style: Photographs and
Illustrations for US Surveys, 1850-1890 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).
234
corporations in the United States.
11
By 1915, the largest corporations in America had
established house publications and had internal photographic units, and they were using
photography to illustrate their internal newsletters, magazines, booklets, and pamphlets.
12

As Roland Marchand, Elspeth Brown and David Nye have shown, these public relations
activities aimed to show that the corporation had risen above “mere commercialism” and
had removed “the taint of selfishness” from its activities.
13
Public relations photography
certainly differed from company to company, each with its own team of photographers,
photo managers, and public relations directors, but this body of work generally focused
on group and individual portraits, employing a sharp focus and no unusual camera angles
in order to deflect attention away from the presence of the photographer and focus instead
on the subjects. The content of these images spoke to the public’s changing concerns and
evolved alongside developments in business practices. To show that mechanization
would not displace people, for instance, turn of the century images generally showed
individual workers who engaged in artisanal labor and craft while emphasizing the
corporation’s paternalistic responsibilities towards its workers. As the labor force grew in
the 20
th
century and absorbed many new immigrants, images of orderly groups replaced
worker portraits, showing teams divided by task or engaged in leisure activities such as

11
Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: the Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in
American Big Business (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
12
For an overview of these developments see Nye, Image Worlds, 31-34.
13
The leading work on industrial and public relations photography in the United States focuses mostly on
the first half of the twentieth century rather than the postwar period. Roland Marchand, Creating the
Corporate Soul; Nye, Image Worlds; and Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the
Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884-1929 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2005).
235
sports. Distributed to employees through employee magazines, these images reinforced
the notion of the corporation as a family and enabler of community.
14

Government-sponsored photographic projects were also important to the
development of public relations photography, which cannot be understood without
considering the efforts of the American Farm Security Administration (FSA). Under
leadership of Roy Stryker, the FSA photographic unit produced an unprecedented body
of work to raise public awareness about the plight of America’s Dust Bowl and to
generate support for New Deal programs, which extended government aid to the nation’s
poor. Stryker saw to it that these images circulated in sessions of Congress and appeared
regularly in the popular press.
15
While photographic historians regularly examine the
FSA as a watershed in the documentary genre, few note that the government branch
started a revolution in public relations as such, and that it raised the bar for the kind of
promotional photography that would be published in general magazines.
16
FSA
photography excited corporate and industrial leaders. In the postwar period, the private
sector would increasingly ask for work made on assignment by well-known
photojournalists and would demand that their company’s activities be documented with
the same amount of human emotion and drama as in the FSA era. To ensure results of the
same caliber for its own public relations, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey

14
See Nye, Image Worlds, 44-54, 74-85 and Anthony Lee, A Shoemaker’s Story: Being Chiefly about
French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a
Nineteenth-Century Factory Town (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
15
See William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford, 1973); Forrest
Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the
Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972); and John Raeburn, A Staggering
Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 143-
192.
16
A welcome exception is Michele Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
236
actually hired Roy Stryker in 1943 to create a photographic unit and archive along the
lines of his work at the FSA.
17

Aside from producing internal promotion, public relations departments also
employed agents to interact with the press and to place editorial copy and images into
mainstream publications to shape a positive image of their employers. Yet it has been
difficult to track exactly how such images were used in the popular press because they
were often unattributed so as not to draw attention to their corporate sponsor. Indeed,
given the vast quantities of images circulating in print in the 20
th
century, historians of
visual culture have generated more enlightening scholarship on the use of promotional
images in internal (or “house”) publications and on the formation of company
photographic archives than on the lives of promotional images in the public realm.
18
It
has also been difficult to track how public relations photography developed after the war,
since scholars of the 1940s and 1950s have largely focused on new developments in
advertising in those decades.
19
Yet public relations remained a vibrant activity and
industry, with at least one significant change. Into the early postwar period, corporate
archives had served as image banks for any magazine that wanted to print a specialized
photograph of a particular industrial activity. Companies were often happy to provide
these images for free, as long as magazines attributed the photographs to the company in
print. But by the end of the 1950s, the high quality of photography in the illustrated press

17
On Stryker at Standard Oil, see Steven Plattner, Roy Stryker, USA 1943-1950: The Standard Oil (New
Jersey) Photographic Project (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983) and Ulrich Keller, The Highway as
Habitat: A Roy Stryker Documentation, 1943-1955 (Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, 1986).
18
Some scholars have keenly recognized that the documentation of their subject matter represented public
relations efforts. See Vanessa Schwartz’s discussion of the Cannes Film Festival in Schwartz, It’s So
French, 60-78.
19
For instance Roland Marchand, following his study on the rise of public relations and corporate imagery
in America, turned his attention to advertising in Advertising the American Dream: Making the Way for
Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
237
led public relations professionals and magazine editors to question the free pictures
provided by company libraries, which often appeared static and out of date by
comparison. As a result, companies increasingly began to assign established, well-known,
and independent photographers – including those at Magnum – to produce original public
relations stories that shared the visual and journalistic tropes of the news.
20

Promoting Cinema
Magnum’s work in public relations began around 1950, when American and
European film directors turned to the cooperative to document the production of their
movies, which were increasingly being produced around the world and on location rather
than in Hollywood studios.
21
Between 1949-1950, three of Magnum’s founders
documented films – Robert Capa photographed the making of Bitter Rice in Spain; David
Seymour covered Rossellini’s The Flowers of St. Francis in Italy; and Henri Cartier-
Bresson documented the production of Anatole Litvak’s Decision Before Dawn in
Germany.
22
Such assignments were practically suitable for Magnum photographers, who
were already stationed in the countries where the films were being made, including

20
Magnum Memo, April 6, 1957, AJGM.
21
On the globalization of film after the war, including “cosmopolitan films” that used multinational casts,
were produced and distributed globally, see Schwartz, It’s So French, and the introduction and first chapter
in Toby Miller, ed. Global Hollywood (London: BFI, 2001). Much literature on postwar global Hollywood,
however, studies the distribution of American films abroad, including Kerry Segrave, American Films
Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present (London:
McFarland & Company, Inc. 1997) and John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World: US and
European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
22
Not all of these pictures ended up in the press and it is difficult to establish the precise dates for the film
shoots without further research in the relevant film archives. The dates on the photographs, some published
online by Magnum, note when the film was debuted instead of when it was made. Capa photographed
movie productions before Magnum was established, including Hitchcock’s Notorious and the Arch of
Triumph in 1946. See Ingrid Bergman and Alan Burgess, Ingrid Bergman: My Story (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., 1980), 190-226. Cartier-Bresson had already worked on film sets as well. One of his most
iconic photographs of a former inmate about to strike her guard at the Dessau liberation, was made during
the filming of Jean Renoir’s Le Retour in 1945.
238
France, Italy, Spain, and Great Britain. They were also the result of personal connections
rather than institutional decision-making. Such work had its roots in World War II, when
directors such as John Huston and Anatole Litvak filmed combat alongside the Magnum
founders.
23
The subject of film was not new to Magnum photographers, since many of
them had already participated in film productions over the course of their careers as
producers, directors, filmmakers, and even actors, and often carried moving image
cameras during and after the war. In the context of postwar film productions, Magnum
photographers did not make movie stills or portraits of actors on the set or on location,
which were used as publicity by the studios; this was the responsibility of film studio
photographers (“still men”), who often worked alongside Magnumites. As a typical
contract between Magnum and a movie producer delineated, “The primary function of
MAGNUM photographers is to tell the story of the motion picture and its production from
the standpoint of independent photographic journalists.”
24
Rodger elaborated on this
business model to a colleague: “No editor of a national magazine wants to publish
publicity handouts but, if we cover the same subject, the probability is we can get it
published as a feature story. To any producer, a two page feature is infinitely more
valuable than two pages of advertising space and is only a fraction of the cost. This

23
Anatole Litvak worked on a number of wartime movies and collected footage for the Why We Fight war
training film series, with Frank Capra. He also oversaw the filming of the D-Day Normandy landings
because of his ability to speak multiple languages. See Harlow Robinson, Russians in Hollywood,
Hollywood’s Russians: Biography of an Image (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press 2007), 16, 27.
Chim’s papers at the Magnum Foundation archive demonstrate that he had a personal relationship with
Litvak and that Chim introduced Litvak to other Magnum photographers. John Huston made films for the
US Army Signal Corps during WWII as well as the controversial wartime series Report from the Aleutians
(1943), The Battle of San Pietro (1944) and Let There Be Light (1945); he also received the Legion of
Merit for his work under battle conditions. Huston, a life-long friend of Litvak, met Capa in London in
1943. Axel Madsen, John Huston (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1978), 55-72. See also Alain Bergala’s
introductory essay in Magnum Cinema: des histoires de cinema par les photographes de magnum (Paris:
Cahiers du Cinema, 1994).
24
Magnum film contract sample, August 5, 1954, AJGM.
239
technique is a natural for movies as the production of the film in itself is so easily adapted
to a feature story.”
25

Magnum photographers were therefore enlisted to document the film production
itself and to bring readers behind the scenes of how a movie was made. Their coverage
was meant to drum up excitement about the production, which would be released later
that year, and to augment the audience’s interest in the locations where the movie was
made as well as the celebrities involved.
26
In this way their activities differed from the
network of photographers who would, later in the decade, turn movie premiers and
celebrity gatherings at international film festivals into photographic news. And whereas
paparazzi photographers aimed to turn celebrities’ lives into photographic stories and
even cinematic images, Magnum photographers working on movie sets used the aesthetic
of news reporting to turn cinematic illusion back into stories about real life, including the
real people and the real places involved in the productions.
27

For instance, while Ava Gardner magically appeared as a gypsy on the screen in
The Barefoot Contessa, Robert Capa’s “color camera” captured her as she underwent that
transformation, making her very real and necessary training, rehearsals, and bruised bare
feet into a story for Collier’s in 1954.
28
[Figure 4.4] Capa’s work on the set of John
Huston’s “Beat the Devil” became a three-part photo story in London’s Picture Post
showing movie stars and the director in action. [Figure 4.5] Each installment revealed
new plot developments and offered photographs of the production on new locations.

25
January 28, 1957 Rodger to Col. Stewart Chant, SA.
26
Bergala, Magnum Cinema, 8-14.
27
Schwartz, It’s So French, 70-99; Carol Squiers, “Original Sin: The Birth of the Paparazzo” in Sandra S.
Philips, Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2010), 221-228. On the ways in which stars and movies bridge reality and dreams, see Edgar Morin,
The Stars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972).
28
“Ava Gardner Plays the Gypsy” Collier’s 134:2 (July 23, 1954), 28-29.
240
Capa followed the crew from Tunisia to the beaches of Rome in order to capture the
range of exotic locations where the filming took place. [Figure 4.6] As in other editorial
work by Magnum photographers, this feature expected readers to care because of the
people involved – from the photographer Robert Capa, to Hollywood’s “most famous and
notorious film director,” to “a glittering international cast” – and because of the
importance of the story, since the Picture Post vaguely promised that the film “may
become the picture sensation of the year.”
29
In these ways Capa’s story operated on the
same principles as traditional news features after the war, which appealed to readers’
desire to stay up to date about contemporary events happening around the world.
At the same time that Magnum turned the making of a film into an event worth
seeing and reading about in the press, it used the same discourse in dealing with
magazine clients, whom Magnum agents hoped would purchase the photographers’ work.
When Inge Bondi, Magnum’s Editor of Exhibitions, Special Projects, and Advertising
tried to sell David Seymour’s photographs of Around the World in 80 Days to Harper’s
Bazaar, she pitched the coverage as an unprecedented visual record and even a “scoop”
of sorts.
30
She reminded Brodovitch of Jules Verne’s epic tale on which Mike Todd’s
movie was based, and especially the detailed descriptions of the Reform Club in London,
where the main character made the famous bet with his companions and from where he
set out on his incredible journey. Bondi explained to Brodovitch: “Seldom has a
photographer had the opportunity to use his camera inside the hard to get in club [which]

29
Robert Muller, “Beat the Devil” Picture Post (August 1954), 18-21, 39.
30
Mike Todd asked Chim to photograph the entire production of his film, but Chim completed just a few
locations in Europe – including the bullfight scene in Spain and the club in London – before handing off the
US-based shoots to Magnum photographer Burt Glinn. Chim to Inge Bondi, May 20, 1955, MFNY. I
suspect that even more would have been done with Chim’s photographs of Todd’s film had it not been for
Chim’s death in the fall of 1956, at which point the press became inundated with stories about the
photographer’s fate and ceased publishing some of the stories he was in the midst of producing. See Chim’s
publication record in Young, We Went Back, 278-279.
241
has remained unchanged since the days of Phileas Fogg. The current production by Mike
Todd…opened the door to photographic inspection. David Niven, who plays the role of
Phileas Fogg in the film, spent a day in the club, and this event was recorded by David
Seymour.”
31
Bondi’s pitch succeeded, and Harper’s Bazaar published two pages of
David Niven as Phileas Fogg in February 1956, as part of the magazine’s regular feature
on celebrities in and around the movie set. [Figure 4.7] Later that year Bondi also sold
Chim’s photographs of Fred Astaire and Richard Avedon working in Paris on the
production of Funny Face, demonstrating Bondi’s keen understanding of the kinds of
pictures Brodovitch would be interested in: portraits in black-and-white rather than color,
shot up close and during the production of what would become the films’ most iconic
scenes.
32

Magnum’s editorial standards also affected how its movie coverage was sold to
the press. Robert Capa devised Magnum’s system for public relations in 1952, the year
that he and other Magnumites photographed the production of John Houston’s acclaimed
Moulin Rouge in Paris, a story that Magnum sold widely to magazines such as Look and
London’s Illustrated.
33
As with its editorial assignments, Magnum insisted on keeping
the rights to its negatives instead of giving them away to the client who had
commissioned the work. Magnum also retained first distribution rights to those images,
and could sell those images to major media outlets. The client – most often, the motion

31
Inge Bondi to Alexey Brodovitch, November 25, 1955, MFNY. On the production of Mike Todd’s film
and its centrality for the postwar cosmopolitan film cycle, see Schwartz, It’s So French, 160-190.
32
Magnum photographers worked in both black and white and color to capture the films of this era, which,
as Vanessa Schwartz has demonstrated, were themselves explosions in color and color technology.
Schwartz, It’s So French, 18-55.
33
Young, Capa in Color, 176-178. In an interview later in life filed in her personal archive now at Yale’s
Beinecke Library, Inge Morath said the first big assignment Capa gave her after admitting her to Magnum
was to photograph on the set of John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. I have not yet been able to find this work in
print.
242
picture producer – had second distribution and advertising rights, allowing him to
distribute Magnum’s photography to fan magazines as well as trade publications. This
division of rights meant that Magnum was in the position to make far more money from
the sale of the photographs than what the client could pay alone. It was also Magnum’s
responsibility to edit and package the movie coverage into a timely news feature that
could be sold to magazine clients. Magnum already had close connections to magazine
editors and knew about various publications’ tastes, deadlines, and editorial plans for
each issue. Film companies therefore paid Magnum not only for the work done by their
photographers, but also for the staff’s work as agents in the distribution process.
34
Alain
Bergala has pointed out that Magnum’s connections to the magazine market often
ensured that as many mediocre and now forgotten films received coverage in prestigious
publications such as Life, Look and Collier’s.
35
Yet another way of understanding this is
to recall that many of these films, though forgotten by some film histories, were
commercial and critical successes in their day and that the extensive, positive media
coverage that they generated could be traced to the publicity efforts of photo agencies
such as Magnum.

From Cinema to Corporations
The income Magnum derived from movie productions began to rise in 1952,
reaching 8% of Magnum’s U.S. income in 1953 and 11.9% in 1954. But between 1955
and 1957, movie production work declined slowly while other kinds of public relations

34
Chim to John Morris, August 15, 1955, AJGM and Bergala, Magnum Cinema,10.
35
Ibid., 11.
243
assignments in America began to grow, particularly from corporate clients.
36
Magnum
photographers and staff were relieved not to have to deal with film productions because
this part of Magnum’s portfolio had become the most tumultuous, sporadic and least
strategic direction of its work. Photographers often found it difficult to plan for movie
assignments and gain access to the right people (such as movie writers and editors) who
would help them produce editorial copy to accompany the pictures. In 1954 John Morris
noted that Magnum’s movie work caused “anguish” and was a “headache”; in 1957 he
called the movie business “emotional” and unsatisfactory to both sides, because Magnum
could never “deliver enough ‘breaks’ to make a movie publicity man really happy” while
the income Magnum derived from such work often did not justify the amount of hassle
required from its staff and photographers.
37
The small amount of movie coverage from
the late 1950s, therefore, was often the result of a personal request by a producer or actor
to have a specific Magnum photographer work on the set.
38

Although movie promotion never became a priority market at the Magnum offices
in Paris or New York, it shaped subsequent industrial assignments in a number of ways.
The diversity of Magnum’s industrial clients was not the result of methodical decisions,

36
These percentages went from 7.5% to 6%, then to 4% of Magnum’s U.S. income by 1957. Magnum
Memo, April 6, 1957; Cornell Capa Report to Shareholders of Magnum, August 22, 1957; A report to
members on the state of Magnum, July 1, 1955, all AJGM. Public relations for the Magnum-Paris office,
by contrast, was an insignificant market as European companies generally lagged behind the United States
in their embrace of photography for publicity and advertising. Whereas the New York office started
generating advertising income as early as 1952, the European office generated advertising revenue for the
first time in 1959. Michel Chevalier, Report for 1960 Meeting, n.d. AJGM. Magnum’s European
photographers were slower to embrace industrial and advertising photography. Inge Bondi to Magnum,
February 14, 1959, and Inge Bondi to Magnum Board, Members, and Staff, n.d., both AJGM.
37
Magnum Memo New York, April 6, 1957, AJGM.
38
For instance, David Seymour was able to photograph Audrey Hepburn’s training for Funny Face –
including her rigorous dancing lessons – because the actress had requested Seymour by name. Chim to
John Morris, February 28, 1956, MFNY.
244
but resulted from photographers’ personal relationships with company executives.
39
The
photographers who pursued and prioritized industrial projects – which in the 1950s
included Erich Hartmann, Eve Arnold, Elliott Erwitt, Ernst Haas, Cornell Capa, and
Wayne Miller – attained more of these assignments, while others (especially Magnum’s
European photographers) had significantly less interaction with public relations work.
40

As with the film industry, a number of the leading companies with which Magnum
photographers worked, including Standard Oil and Schlumberger, had operations around
the world and were willing to pay for photographers to travel internationally to document
their activities overseas. Yet most public relations assignments – for companies such as
IBM, Corning Glass, Chrysler, and Ford – were shot in the United States. Whereas
European audiences regularly saw Magnum’s film photography in a range of Italian,
French, and British magazines, corporate promotion photography mostly targeted an
American audience of consumers and shareholders. Finally and perhaps most crucially,
Magnum’s earliest work for the film business helped the organization to articulate its
distribution policies and to recognize the financial value of working for private clients.
As Magnum struggled financially and searched for new markets in its first year of
existence, the organization was also hit with the deaths of two of its founders – Robert
Capa in 1954, and Chim in 1956. Before these tragedies, each had served as Magnum
president, a duty that included overseeing the organization’s finances. In that capacity,
each founder encouraged Magnum to work on film sets and take on other industrial

39
This included IBM, Schlumberger, Ford, and a range of airline companies. John Morris, Magnum Policy
and Plans to All Shareholders, July 6, 1953, AJGM.
40
In part this was because European companies lagged behind the US in their use of publicity photography.
Magnum Financial Report, 1958, AJGM. As a result of their advertising and industrial work, these
photographers were also the main earners of Magnum and their profits constituted over 60% of the
cooperative’s income in 1958. Henri Cartier-Bresson was the only photographer in the top 7 earners of
Magnum that year who did not do extensive industrial work.
245
projects. Yet the practical transition to corporate promotion, and then advertising, did not
happen easily. A recurrent theme in Magnum correspondence in the early 1950s suggests
that while photographers wanted to benefit from the high profits of the private sector,
they did not take seriously the amount of creativity, interpretation, and effort that
corporate work demanded. In 1952, Magnum’s bureau chief Pat Hagan, who worked
closely with Capa, insisted that paying clients interested in Magnum “expect to see
pictures of the kind we publish in LIFE, LOOK, VOGUE, HARPER’S BAZAAR, etc.” and she
asserted that photographers had to make even better, not easier or more contrived pictures
to succeed in public relations and advertising alike.
41
Hagan’s letter demonstrates that
staff were aware of how Magnum images were seen in the press – not only by “mass
audiences” but also by advertising and company executives, who followed the illustrated
press to learn about the latest trends in visual representation, and to discover what they
could adapt from the press into their own visual presence.
42
Likewise in February 1952,
Robert Capa wrote to all Magnum shareholders insisting that Magnum needed to
“attack…[its] superior attitude about publicity.” Showing his awareness of how public
relations had evolved, he explained, “Now an enormous amount of documentary type of
publicity has been used around the world and mainly in the US,” and he wanted Magnum
to take advantage of the trend.
More often than not, in so-called publicity jobs we can keep far more
photographic quality than we can in editorial jobs. Besides and beyond
this, they pay, which others do not. Our offices are definitely advised and
requested to look into all the possibilities that Magnum and Magnum
photographers may have in this field.
43

41
Pat Hagan to All Shareholders on US Editorial Progress and Plans, May 29, 1952, AJGM.
42
For an analysis of how advertisers learned from and made use of popular culture and counterculture
movements, see Frank, Conquest of Cool.
43
Robert Capa, Magnum Report to Shareholders, February 15, 1952, AJGM.
246
Capa noted that corporate clients paid more than magazines and that these commissions
could help Magnum’s struggling finances. Indeed by 1957, John Morris would estimate
that public relations work paid two to three times more than editorial work; not $100/day
but $200-$300/day.
44
Importantly, Capa suggested that paying clients were actually less
likely to dictate how they wanted their activities to be photographed, in contrast to
editorial boards of magazines, who often supplied strict shooting scripts.
45
This idea –
that industrial photography could offer more freedom and documentary potential, and that
industrial photography needed to have a journalistic style, which Magnum leaders often
called “our kind of photography” – was a recurring trope at Magnum.
46

While it can be read as an internal strategy to make photographers feel better
about taking commercial assignments, it is important that “documentary” in these
contexts also referred to a mode of work that was becoming less feasible in the press but
which corporate clients enabled. Magnum photographers preferred to take on in-depth
projects that required months, if not years, to produce. They wanted projects that utilized
extensive research, where they were the only photographer on assignment and did not
have to compete with other publications to gain access to the story, and where they had a
personal interest in and interpretation of the subject. These were exactly the kinds of
conditions that corporations were increasingly willing to provide, and which certain
photographers began to take advantage of. Moreover, because corporate assignments
rarely had tight deadlines, they allowed photographers to spend more time on location
and therefore take additional photographs on the side for possible distribution to other

44
Magnum Memo from New York, April 6, 1957, AJGM.
45
On shooting scripts supplied by magazines see Hicks, Words and Pictures; Galassi, “Old Worlds,
Modern Times,”11- 77; and Janssens and Kalff, “Time Incorporated Stink Club.”
46
Cornell Capa Report to Shareholders of Magnum, August 22, 1957, AJGM.
247
publications.
47
Photographers regularly worked on editorial and industrial assignments
simultaneously, suggesting that it is unproductive and historically inaccurate to
distinguish between these two genres, especially since rolls of film shot on location for
multiple clients did not betray a difference in style even though they may have contained
different kinds of visual information to suit the client’s requests.
48
Moreover, Magnum’s
insistence on keeping distribution and serial rights implied that the images could travel
between editorial and industrial contexts, which they often did.
Soon after Chim’s death, Robert Capa’s younger brother Cornell Capa – a former
Life photographer and Magnum member since the death of his brother in 1954 – assumed
the presidency of Magnum. He became deeply engrossed in Magnum’s affairs until the
end of the decade, authoring multiple reports in which he likewise encouraged Magnum
to embrace industrial photography. In 1957, he alerted his colleagues that industry
…is a direction that some of us turned for the past couple of years and a
lot of ‘know-how’ has been accumulated both in presentation and in
utilization of our kind of photography for INDUSTRY. INDUSTRY and
ADVERTISING have already supplanted our previous MOVIE work and
these two fields are well suited as additional fields to our kind of talent.
49

In this passage, Cornell Capa made an explicit connection between Magnum’s work on
film sets to its industrial work, and suggested that both of those markets were helping
Magnum enter the lucrative advertising field. But he carefully insisted that these
directions represented “additional fields” and would allow Magnum to produce “our
kind” of photography and make use of “our kind of talent,” referencing its unposed,

47
Rita Vandivert to Henri Cartier-Bresson, May 22, 1947, MFNY.
48
For instance when Magnum Paris accidentally sent all of George Rodger’s film from the Sahara to the
French oil company Schlumberger, its publicity team could not distinguish between the rolls of film shot
for Schlumberger, Standard Oil, National Geographic, and Life, and it selected images for its annual report
from across these assignments. George Rodger to John Morris, May 7, 1957 and George Rodger to Cornell
Capa and John Morris, June 11, 1957, SA.
49
Cornell Capa Report to Shareholders of Magnum, August 22, 1957, AJGM.
248
journalistic approach to photography as well as Magnum’s insistence on the freedom to
choose which kinds of stories photographers would cover. In so doing, Cornell Capa
addressed the divisions between Magnum photographers in New York and Paris, which
were becoming more acute in the mid- to late-1950s and which were rooted in differences
of opinion over whether Magnum should grow its operations (including photographers,
office staff, and markets) or not.
50
Nevertheless, due to the strong leadership and business
sense of Magnum presidents, from Robert Capa to Chim to Cornell Capa; the efforts of
individual photographers (including George Rodger and Erich Hartmann, discussed
below); and John Morris’ proactive dealings with New York clients, the New York office
succeeded in expanding Magnum’s markets to include industrial and advertising work.
While in 1954, industrial work constituted just 7.8% of Magnum’s U.S. income, by 1959
that percentage had doubled. In the same decade, Magnum’s work for advertising
companies began to climb as well, and as Magnum entered the 1960s, the income that
photographers made from public relations and advertising photography combined
surpassed what they made from magazines (i.e. straight editorial photography) by
roughly $2500.
51
The list of companies for whom Magnum worked in the first fifteen
years of the organization’s history was extensive and included Columbia Records,
Corning and Steuben Glass, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, CBS, United Fruit,

50
Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger in particular vociferously advocated for a conservative fiscal
policy that often sounded idealistic and reinforced mythological notions of what Magnum was “supposed to
be” when it was founded in 1947. George Rodger, Interim Report to All Stockholders from Magnum Paris,
June 7, 1952, AJGM-UC. Numerous letters in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s archive from June through
November 1959 expose the disagreements between the Paris-based photographers and New York staff. See
George Rodger to Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ernst Haas, June 16, 1959; George Rodger to Henri Cartier-
Bresson, October 30, 1959; George Rodger to Henri Cartier-Bresson, November 9, 1959; Henri Cartier-
Bresson to George Rodger, November 13, 1959.
51
The photographic cooperative started working with two advertising agencies in 1951 and this list
continued to grow over the course of the 1950s under the direction of Inge Bondi, including such agencies
as J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy, Benson and Mather. By 1959 advertising revenue made up 23.5% of
the U.S. income. Accountants’ Report, October 31, 1959, AJGM.
249
TWA, Pan American Airlines, IBM, General Foods, the Ford Foundation, and
Schlumberger.
52
To better understand the nature and content of Magnum’s industrial
assignments and relationships with companies, the rest of this chapter now turns to its
work with Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and the Pillsbury Company.

The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey
From the early 1950s on, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (SONJ)
represented one of Magnum’s most important industrial clients, paying Magnum
photographers to document its activities around the world and printing these images
primarily in the company’s magazine, The Lamp.
53
SONJ distributed The Lamp to all
employees and shareholders of the company, and also mailed it widely – to politicians,
publishers, “opinion leaders,” and even public libraries in the United States in order to
publicize SONJ’s contributions to the oil sector and to industrial photography.
54
After
World War II, The Lamp was one of nearly 6,000 company publications, often called
“house organs,” in America that relied on photography and picture stories to represent the
interests of a single company.
55
Yet whereas most house organs could not afford to
employ their own writers and photographers, The Lamp had a generous operating budget
and could hire photographers and writers to travel thousands of miles and spend a number
of weeks developing a single picture story. As early as 1945, the editors of a popular

52
John Morris, Report to Members on the State of Magnum, July 1, 1955, and Cornell Capa Report to
Shareholders of Magnum, August 22, 1957, AJGM.
53
In 1954, for instance, Magnum sold 6 stories to The Lamp ranging in price from $500 to $2500 even as it
recognized that it could have done much more in this market. Magnum & Its Markets, June 21, 1954,
AJGM. In 1955, Morris told Magnum shareholders that half of Magnum’s industrial income comes from
Standard Oil Company of New Jersey’s The Lamp. John Morris, Report to Members on the State of
Magnum, July 1, 1955, AJGM.
54
Keller, Highway as Habitat, 47-49.
55
Mich and Eberman, Technique of Picture Story, 208.
250
photojournalism textbook called The Lamp “an aristocrat among house organs. Its
photographs and artwork are of the finest quality. It is printed on heavy, glazed paper
stock, which reproduces both color and black and white with remarkable clarity. Its
editor, a former picture-story writer on a national magazine, has a budget which permits
him to send photographers on distant assignments, even to foreign countries…”
56

Magnum staff agreed with other editors and professionals in the business who singled out
The Lamp, under the editorial leadership of Edward Sammis, as one of the best industrial
and company publications in the United States.
57

A typical issue of The Lamp from the late 1940s or 1950s looked much like an
issue of Holiday or Fortune. Its covers often reproduced a painting by a well-known artist
such as Miguel Covarrubias [Figure 4.8] and employed sophisticated layout and design
principles, combining drawings, charts, and photographs with text. [Figure 4.9] The
magazine regularly printed a full-page, black and white photograph aestheticizing an
aspect of the oil industry on the inside back cover [Figure 4.10] as well as a colorful and
easily legible diagram on the back cover made up of geometric forms and short
explicative texts. [Figure 4.11] Portfolios of commissioned art, often watercolors,
appeared regularly and were printed on thicker paper, set off from the rest of the editorial
content. While in some instances, these features drew attention to the company’s art
collection, in other instances the watercolors served to illustrate a story, as in the case of a
set of drawings commissioned for a September 1951 feature on road architecture.
58

[Figure 4.12] In addition to ample photographic stories about transportation and
highways in the United States, each installment also included at least one photo essay

56
Mich and Eberman, Technique of Picture Story, 214-215.
57
John Morris to All Shareholders regarding Magnum Policy and Plans, July 6, 1953, AJGM.
58
On Standard Oil’s art collection see Bogart, Borders of Art, 273-275.
251
about SONJ’s activities around the world, particularly in South America, the Middle East
or Europe.
59

The Lamp’s commitment to outstanding art and documentary photography was
part of a larger effort at Standard Oil Company of New Jersey to improve the company’s
public standing that began during World War II, when the company was accused of
treason and was investigated by a grand jury for its dealings with the German company
I.G. Farbenindustrie.
60
Although SONJ had been notoriously bad at public relations ever
since the U.S. Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil monopoly in 1911 (creating over
30 subsidiary companies, of which SONJ was the largest), the WWII incident taught the
company that it could not simply take a defensive stance with the press, as it had done in
previous cases of bad publicity. Largely under pressure from John D. Rockefeller, who
was the subject of personal attacks in newspapers such as PM, SONJ hired Earl Newsom,
a public relations consultant from Madison Avenue, and established a public relations
department, which taught the company to support public opinion research, to seek out
positive media attention, and to present itself as a public institution that acts in the public
interest despite its private ownership.
61
As part of these efforts, SONJ also began a

59
Ulrich Keller’s work is the best and only analysis of SONJ’s documentation of highway culture in
America. Keller, Highway as Habitat, 9-55. Very little has been written about The Lamp and therefore this
analysis is based on my own study of the publication.
60
According to the American Assistant Attorney General, SONJ’s dealings with I.G. F. had caused a
shortage of synthetic rubber in the United States and therefore compromised the Allied war effort. Keller,
Highway as Habitat, 26.
61
On the history of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey during World War II, see Henrietta M. Larson,
Evelyn H. Knowlton, and Charles S. Popple, New Horizons: History of Standard Oil Company (New
Jersey), 1927-1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 427-454. The new public relations department also
decided to allow a group of scholars from the Harvard Business School to work in the company archives
and to write an official history of the corporation. These efforts resulted in four volumes, which constitute
the most extensive yet understandably biased account of the company’s evolution. In addition to the
Larson, et. al., volume cited above, SONJ also supported Ralph W. and Muriel Hidy, Pioneering in Big
Business, 1882-1911 (New York: Harper & Row, 1955); George Sweet Gibb and Evelyn Knowlton, The
Resurgent Years, 1911-1927 (New York: Harper & Row, 1956); and Bennett H. Wall, Growth in a
252
corporate art collection and commissioned a series of paintings from American artists,
which would constitute a positive “pictorial record of the development and distribution of
oil during the war years.”
62
Directed by George H. Freyermuth, SONJ’s public relations
department included an extensive publishing program, which produced magazines,
annual reports as well as special brochures. Ed Sammis’ work at The Lamp was part of
this effort, as were the efforts of Roy Stryker, whom SONJ hired in 1943 in order to
create an extensive photographic archive that documented the achievements of the oil
industry and related sectors around the world.
63

At SONJ, Stryker directed a team of great documentary photographers, many of
whom had worked with him during the 1930s, to create a “sequel” to the FSA file,
focusing on the people connected to the wide-reaching oil industry. Stryker’s tenure at
SONJ lasted until 1950, when the management’s support for his work (and their proactive
public relations efforts) ended, but in those seven years Stryker oversaw the creation of
an unprecedented industrial archive, consisting of over 70,000 oil-related photographs.
64

Although Stryker was not directly involved in The Lamp, he managed to influence the
magazine’s editorial policies. Stryker and Sammis worked closely together in the small
operations division of the company’s already small public relations group, where Stryker
was tasked with figuring out how to use photography as a “language” for the company
more broadly, and how images would help communicate positive ideas about the

Changing Environment: A History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), 1950-1972 (New York:
McGraw & Hill, 1988).
62
SONJ organized traveling exhibitions of its collection and reproduced its paintings in a variety of printed
materials in order to bolster its corporate profile and show that it was a patron of the arts. SONJ followed in
the footsteps of companies such as IBM, which began its collection of art in 1937, and was motivated by
negative publicity, as were pharmaceutical companies in the 1940s. See Bogart, Borders of Art, 273-275.
63
Larson. New Horizons, 629-647.
64
“The Photographic Section: Public Relations Department, Standard Oil Company [NJ],” November 8,
1946, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey Archive-Roy Stryker Papers, University of Louisville, KY
(RSP).
253
company to the public. He insisted on hiring excellent photographers, sending them into
the field with plenty of time and resources to produce comprehensive stories. Stryker also
stressed the importance of the human-interest element for SONJ’s photography, which
meant that photographers needed to cover, “in continuous photo sequences the life and
environment of the industry’s people in all aspects.”
65
Such picture stories would
humanize the corporation and show the public that the oil giant was involved in the daily
betterment of life around the world. As Ulrich Keller observed, the human-interest
element “is what brought together Stryker’s populist views and the goals of industrial
giants at Standard Oil – both agreed that the way to document an issue was to humanize it
and show its effect on people.”
66

While The Lamp’s articles from North America were frequently illustrated with
images from the company’s picture archive or with new material produced by SONJ staff
photographers such as Harold Corsini, Gordon Parks and Esther Bubley, the magazine
appears to have had a two-pronged approach to stories with international interest. Many
were illustrated with stock photographs – of varied quality and loosely related to the text
– that SONJ purchased for the story. In fewer instances, The Lamp hired professional
free-lance photographers and agencies such as PIX Publishing, Keystone, Rapho-
Guillamette, Black Star, and European to produce photographic essays in which image
and text went together and in which images drove the narrative rather than serving as
illustrations.
67
When it had such an assignment, The Lamp became a highly suitable

65
Roy Stryker, “Photographs in Public Relations at the Standard Oil Company,” n.d. (circa 1945), RSP.
66
As Keller observes, “If at the FSA Stryker oversaw the documentation of rural America, at Standard Oil
he oversaw the documentation of industrial life and highway culture.” Keller, Highway as Habitat, 10.
67
These agencies were attributed in the table of contents in issues including March 1948, June 1949, and
September 1951. From studying the credits, it appears that Black Star worked with The Lamp more
frequently than Magnum, which may have been because the agency gave away photographers’ negatives
254
employer of Magnum photographers because of the publication’s high production
standards, its commitment to human-interest stories, and the global reach of the
company’s, and therefore the publication’s, activities.
As in the case of Holiday, Magnum assignments for The Lamp mostly provided
the magazine with photographs and stories of about places outside of the United States,
and working for SONJ often allowed Magnum photographers to travel to regions that
interested them. In 1953 The Lamp hired Werner Bischof, who had joined Magnum in
1949, to document the building of highways in American cities including New York,
Boston, Detroit, and Chicago.
68
Until then the Swiss photographer was known for his
photo essays on the wartime destruction of Eastern Europe, which appeared in Du, and
for his photo essays on Korea, Japan and especially India, where he produced an award-
wining story about the famine in Bihar in 1951.
69
“Bold New Roads” [Figure 4.13]
became of the last stories that Bischof produced before his sudden death in 1954. The
support from Standard Oil allowed him to produce a body of images that showed his
fascination with the scale and pace of growth in US, which he wrote about in letters to his
wife and which he captured in many atmospheric, aerial photographs of city skylines.
70

Three years later, Magnum’s Inge Morath traveled to the Middle East to produce a
photographic book on the region with the French publisher Robert Delpire. Since the
independent venture did not come with financial backing, she arranged for two sources of
funding for the trip – an extensive assignment from The Lamp on oil drilling in Iran, and

and rights to the images. This would have been a welcome practice from the perspective of SONJ’s
growing picture files.
68
Werner Bischof to Rosellina Bischof, October 3, 1953 and January 1954, Werner Bischof Estate (WB).
His images appeared as part of “Bold New Roads” The Lamp 36:1 (March 1954), 20-23.
69
Boot, Magnum Stories, 42-49.
70
Bischof died on May 16, 1954 when his vehicle accidentally went off the road in the Peruvian Andes.
255
a story on Iran, Iraq and Jordan for Holiday magazine.
71
Based on the letters and shooting
scripts that the publications sent her, it was evident that Morath relied on both Holiday
and Standard Oil to connect her to people working in the region and gain access to
archaeological and industrial sites in the region, photographs of which then filled her
1958 De La Perse à l’Iran.
72

Likewise in 1956, Ed Sammis assigned Henri Cartier-Bresson to travel down the
Rhine River in order to document one of the most significant waterways for oil transport.
Since by the mid-1950s Cartier-Bresson was the most acclaimed Magnum photographer,
known through his photo books, museum exhibitions, and ample work in the press,
Sammis assured Magnum that The Lamp would treat his images as an “art portfolio,”
both during the selection process and in print.
73
Sammis also hoped that Cartier-Bresson
would produce the same kind of “documentation of lasting impact” that he had done in
the previous decade and which had brought him his “special standing” in the first place.
74

When Cartier-Bresson’s story appeared in the Winter 1956 issue of The Lamp, the editor
introduced the photographer using the same terminology that Cartier-Bresson had
articulated in his 1952 book The Decisive Moment, hoping to impress upon readers the
caliber of this Standard Oil assignment.

While the story was filled with helpful facts and
statistics about tonnage of oil carried and the owners of various barges, the photographic

71
Ed Sammis to Inge Morath, March 9, 1956 and Lou Mercier to Inge Morath, March 13, 1956, both from
the Inge Morath Foundation (IMF). Since I conducted my research, her archive has moved to the Beinecke
Library at Yale University.
72
Inge Morath, De La Perse à l’Iran (Paris: Editions Delpire, 1958).
73
SONJ traditionally kept photographers’ negatives but in the case of Henri Cartier-Bresson the company
agreed that he would make the first selection of images for SONJ (who would have the right to go through
and choose what he did not pick in the first round). The company would purchase only the first serial rights
to the selected images. After their initial publication in any company magazine, booklet, book or annual
report, Cartier-Bresson would retain the rights to the Standard Oil photographs and any unpublished
photographs shot on the assignment, and he would keep all of his negatives. Ed Sammis to John Morris,
February 14, 1956, AJGM.
74
Ibid.
256
essay showed Cartier-Bresson supplanting the research with landscapes, people, and
images of everyday life along the river that employed similar compositional techniques
and focus on individuals caught unawares that defined the photographs in his acclaimed
photo books, The Decisive Moment (1952) and The Europeans (1955). In one centerfold,
The Lamp featured just two images showing the abstract patterns of snow and ice on the
river, and the caption employed terminology that museum curators and photo critics
frequently ascribed to Cartier-Bresson’s interwar photography: “Snow makes a surrealist
pattern of terraced vineyards near Bingen, in the heart of the Rhine’s most beautiful and
romantic region.” [Figure 4.14] While the text explained the various natural resources
that German, French and Dutch ships transported along these waters, Cartier-Bresson’s
images drew attention to the spontaneous, geometrical forms one could find in nature if
one were only attuned.
75
All of the images selected for “The Rhine” related to Cartier-
Bresson’s treatises on and reputation in photography while also adhering to the
photographic goals of Standard Oil’s public relations department.
Whereas some Magnum photographers including Bischof and Cartier-Bresson
took on single assignments for The Lamp, George Rodger developed a long-standing
relationship with the oil company and its magazine editor in the wake of World War II.

In
fact, Rodger and his wife Jinx, who accompanied him on all of his long-term trips and
assisted with logistics, story production and writing, would not have been able to afford
their long road trips through Africa were it not for the financial backing of SONJ – a fact
that is rarely mentioned in writings on Rodger or Magnum.
76
The stories Rodger

75
On Cartier-Bresson’s Surrealist influences, see Galassi, “Old Worlds, Modern Times,” 34.
76
Naggar’s biography of George Rodger notes certain SONJ assignments, but does not underscore the
centrality of SONJ and Sammis to the Rodgers’ itineraries and story ideas. After I presented a piece of this
work at the New York Public Library in April 2016, Susan Meiselas – who is President of the Magnum
257
produced for The Lamp blurred the boundaries between photojournalism and corporate
promotion and they exploited Rodger’s reputation as a traveler, adventurer, and
memoirist, which he had already begun to develop during the war. But what mattered
most was getting there in the first place and maintaining a long term relationship with Ed
Sammis, a supportive and generous patron. Rodger’s travels through Africa between
1956 and 1958 well illustrate the photographer’s beneficial relationship with oil
companies, who also helped underwrite work that ended up in National Geographic,
bringing the Rodgers new prestige in the United States.

Desert Search
After a two year hiatus from photography and extensive travel due to health
issues, Rodger finally felt strong enough to work in late 1955, and he set his mind on
Africa – and to the sponsors who would be interested in financing his expensive travels
through the region. In order to be self-sufficient, Rodger needed a well-stocked Jeep that
included food, water, camping, and photography equipment, as well as visas and letters
of introduction to French and British colonial regions that were experiencing a fair
amount of political unrest, especially on the borders between French Algeria, Tunisia and
Libya. [Figure 4.15] Notably, Rodger was highly cautious about producing any reports
that could be perceived as anti-French and therefore harm Magnum’s French
photographers and the operations of the Paris office at a highly explosive moment in
France.
77
He therefore worked with clients and produced reports that only gestured

Foundation and deeply versed in the organization’s history – referred to my discussion of Rodger and
SONJ as my “discovery,” suggesting further that this story is far from known.
77
Rodger quoted in Miller, Magnum: Fifty Years, 166. Soon after Rodger’s trip to the Sahara, Kryn
Taconis produced a photo essay on the FLN that Magnum Paris chose not to distribute for fear of political
258
towards the political situation in the French colonies, focusing instead on the climate,
geography, and natural resources of the Sahara and neighboring countries. These were the
very subjects that interested Standard Oil Company of New Jersey as well as the French
oil company Schlumberger, which was prospecting for oil in many of the same areas as
Standard Oil.
When Sammis cabled Rodger in February 1956 asking him to travel to Libya “to
cover exciting oil exploration while taking … combination writing and photography,”
Rodger responded with enthusiasm and planned to proceed through the Sahara during the
mild spring season after completing The Lamp assignment.
78
Yet within two months, the
story fell through when the discovery of oil on the Libyan border created a dispute
between the Libyans, French, and SONJ prospectors. No other editorial or corporate
client would pay for their way to northern Africa from London, and the Rodgers found
themselves stuck at home for months with hardly any money or work, save for a short
Lamp assignment that Sammis produced for them on land reclamation in Holland.
79
From
the UK, the Rodgers planned to line up Sahara assignments for the fall and winter and
they were surprised to receive an urgent request from Sammis via John Morris to go to

repercussions in the first and most notorious case of Magnum’s self-censorship. Rodger supported the
decision and confided to Cornell Capa: “Of course we do emphasize freedom in Magnum…But freedom is
a loose word. It is very elastic and when it is extended to include freedom to cut one’s brother’s throat I
think it is about time we had some definite elucidation of the word in our bylaws. Kryn was bowled over by
the big talk of the propagandists in Cairo and he fell for it without ever looking ahead to the consequences.
If he had insisted on the distribution of his story it would have gone very badly for Brother Henri and
Brother Marc, besides the Magnum bureau itself, and I doubt if Kryn’s monetary gain would have been
commensurate with the unhappiness it would have caused them and the embarrassment he would have felt
himself...” George Rodger to Cornell Capa, December 3, 1957, SA. On the Algerian war see Todd Shepard,
The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2006); Matthew James Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for
Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and
Frederick Cooper, “French Africa, 1947-1948: Reform, Violence, and Uncertainty in a Colonial Situation,”
Critical Inquiry 40:4 (Summer 2014), 466-478.
78
Ed Sammis to George Rodger, February 10, 1956 and Rodger to John Morris, February 14, 1956, SA.
79
George Rodger to John Morris, April 3, 1956; Ed Sammis to George Rodger, April 9, 1956; Ed Sammis
to George Rodger, April 30, 1956, SA.
259
Libya immediately in the middle of the scorching summer.
80
Rodger knew the
assignment was poorly timed and that the heat and sandstorms would prevent him from
continuing through the Sahara as he planned, but he was also committed to nurturing his
relationship with Sammis and The Lamp for the long term. Asking the company to
postpone the trip by a few months until the weather cooled, he nevertheless concluded his
letter to Sammis: “There is no secret about The Lamp being our favorite magazine and
we are happy to work for it any time and anywhere.”
81
But Sammis was dealing with a
temperamental local team in Libya and was afraid the whole story would fall through if it
were postponed, leaving with George and Jinx no choice but to go immediately.
The trip resulted in “Desert Search,” which focused on a team of geologists
working in the Libyan desert in search of oil. This was a dangerous job because the
fighting between German, British, French and Italian armies during WWII had left
behind four million mines in the area, only a quarter of which had been recovered and
which therefore required collaboration with mine-clearing squads.
Reading and examining this photo essay today, two elements are striking: the
lyricism of the text and the relative dullness of the photographs. For the most part,
Rodger’s personal account read more like the travel diary of an imperial explorer than a
technical account of oil exploration. “Death still lurks beneath the sagebrush and the
Sodom apples,” he wrote, dramatizing the experience of working in the mine-littered
desert. In another passage, Rodger dwelled on the lonely and rough terrain, which he told
Sammis had impressed him the most: “All of [the desert vegetation] is worthless except
as camel fodder, and over it blows the dreaded ghibli – the hot south wind that comes

80
George Rodger to John Morris, July 6, 1956 and John Morris to George Rodger, July 10, 1956, SA.
81
George Rodger to Ed Sammis, July 11, 1956, SA.
260
laden with sand from the Sahara. It drives the Bedouin into the protecting folds of his
homespun barracan, plays havoc with the nerves of Europeans, and sends the
thermometer soaring to the dizziest heights recorded anywhere on the continent.”
82

Especially when compared to these vivid descriptions of the Libyan people and the
atmosphere of the place, Rodger’s photographs appeared relatively quotidian and
unexceptional. [Figure 4.16] The photo essay extended over four pages and featured ten
pictures in total, beginning with a bird’s eye view of a caravan getting ready to set out on
the expedition and a truck with the Esso logo, stuck in the desert sand. On the bottom of
the second page and across the third page were group portraits of the geologists and mine
clearing squads at work [Figure 4.17]: demining with the help of metal detectors, ducking
to watch a mine explosion from a safe distance, and making camp in the desert. In the
final photograph of the story, reproduced over one-quarter of the page, the Libyan team
was shown examining a Roman ruin, which they had seemingly stumbled upon during
their work.
When Rodger had first received the assignment, Sammis asked him to avoid
hackneyed approaches to desert stories, including the trap of “the geological cliché…the
man with the alidad, peering out across the great plains…or pouring over the
seismograph readings at night in his shack.” Though such pictures were “the very essence
of the geologist’s work,” Sammis asked Rodger to find some other visual angle through
which to document the story.
83
But the Rodgers faced an even bigger problem when they
arrived in Libya and discovered that the whole of SONJ’s operations were mostly on
hiatus because of the summer heat. They realized that when the weather cools, the

82
George Rodger, “Desert Search” The Lamp (Fall 1957), 18. George Rodger to Ed Sammis, March 1,
1957, SA.
83
Ed Sammis to Jinx and George Rodger, February 16, 1956, SA.
261
company’s teams would have been too busy with managing their field parties across
hundreds of miles of desert, but that during the summer they would have time to tend to a
photographer. Rodger therefore had to do more than avoid visual clichés; he had to stage
an entire geological expedition with the help of the local SONJ crews. This resulted in the
photographs that are almost too good to be true – i.e. the truck in the sand with “Esso”
visible from a perfect angle, as well as the unnaturally orderly queue of geologists, each
waiting for his turn to examine the Roman mausoleum. When the story was complete,
Rodger described the situation to John Morris with anxiety and frustration: “Our little
expedition was as authentic as possible, for all purposes it might as well have been the
real thing, and remembering Ed’s request that we leave the technical and scientific side
alone, we concentrated on how geologists live in the desert, how they get around, etc. –
the human angle…” Rodger was also disappointed when he could not get near enough to
a minefield to photograph it, and that there were not more mine explosions.
“Occasionally they will blow one up and I do have a picture of that,” he concluded,
asking Morris not to tell any of the facts to Sammis before Morris saw the pictures for
himself.
84

Unlike Rodger, Sammis was pleased with the images – including the mine
explosion, which he included on the second page of the story – and he wrote to Rodger
praising him for their “striking quality of genuineness and humanity [that] gave you the
feeling very clearly of what it was like to be in Libya with that particular geological
party.”
85
But the editor felt that Rodger’s first text was too dry and he asked him to
rewrite the story in the mode of a “narrative chronicle” sprinkled with some facts and

84
George Rodger to John Morris, August 8, 1956, SA.
85
Ed Sammis to George Rodger, November 9, 1956, SA.
262
ample “little personal observations,” effectively asking him to draw on the travelogue
mode that he had used in his wartime memoirs, Red Moon Rising (1943) and Desert
Journey (1944). Based on Rodger’s travels through Burma, and then the Sahara and the
Middle East, these early books focused less on the politics and military tactics of the war
than Rodger’s personal experiences navigating unfamiliar terrain. As such, they can be
seen as a continuation of 19
th
century chronicles by Western photographers, whose
memoirs were filled with narratives of “adversity overcome and heroic endeavor.”
86
In
the forties, Rodger painted vivid descriptions of his guides and the local people he met,
and he included details about the equipment he carried and the meals he consumed.
87

Both journeys had been made possible by Life, which assigned Rodger to photograph the
fighting in these regions, and he illustrated his stories about being stuck in swamps,
rivers, and sandstorms with dozens of images initially made for the magazine. Life was
also the first to publicize Rodger’s travels as a feat in their own rite. [Figure 4.18] In an
eight-page 1942 feature titled “75,000” Life printed seventy-six photographs and captions
by Rodger chronicling his journey through places such as the Camaroons, Equatorial
Africa, the Sahara, Transjordan, and Burma, and the magazine established him as a
resilient traveler as much as a great war photographer.
88

By enlisting Rodger to document Standard Oil’s international prospecting, the
company showed its own prestige by being able to attract a world renowned
photographer and in the final story, cited from above, the SONJ narrative became

86
Ali Behdad and Luke Gartlan, eds. Photography's Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation
(LA: Getty Research Institute, 2013), 1-2.
87
George Rodger, Red Moon Rising (London: Cresset Press, 1943) and Desert Journey (London: Cresset
Press, 1944).
88
George Rodger, “75,000 Miles” Life (August 10, 1942), 61. Some of the images had already appeared in
the magazine as part of its wartime coverage, including “Flight from Burma” Life (June 8, 1942), 30-32.
263
secondary to the war reporter’s return to a place he had covered before under very
different circumstances. The Lamp gestured towards Rodger’s previous accomplishments
in the magazine and in his own book when it explained that Rodger was “a professional
photographer and writer” who had traveled all over the world, and that this assignment
“gave him a chance to revisit territory he covered as a correspondent with the British
Eighth Army during World War II.”
89
In his revised “Desert Search” text, Rodger
exploited similar storytelling strategies to depict the postwar context of oil exploration,
writing in the first person and frequently harkening back to his own wartime experiences.
The roads he traveled on were “rich in wartime memories” and he described the history,
politics and ecology of Libya with personal expertise, having raced through the territories
as a British correspondent.
90
As for Life, he described his travels in Libya for SONJ as
dangerous and exciting, full of discoveries of relics of the past and traces of the future
(from Roman ruins to fortified farms) while painting SONJ’s activities as far more noble
than what occurred in the desert during the war. Whereas in the 1940s he traveled along
the desert covering military campaigns that put humans, vegetation, and livestock in
danger, documenting SONJ’s postwar work meant participating in an effort that could
help the Libyan people. “Oil royalties would mean new schools and hospitals, irrigation
projects in the desert, roads, and power for their own factories,” he wrote at the

89
Editor’s Note to “Desert Search” The Lamp (Fall 1957), 18.
90
Rodger’s reaction to the assignment showed that he was the right person for the job given his deep
knowledge of the region. “I photographed the 8
th
Army laying the mines in 1942 never suspecting that the
job of finding them again would be assigned to me 14 years later!... The story has interesting aspects
because on the May 26
th
riots, when the Gyppies burned down the Shepherds Hotel and the Turf Club etc.
they also tore up all the signs indicating where the mine fields were because they were written in English.
But they never thought of replacing the signs with others in Arabic. So, from then on, all trace of the
minefields was lost and sheep, goats, camels and Bedouins have been going up in a puff of smoke all over
the desert ever since. I wrote a story about it when we revisited the area in 1947. I wonder if I could find
it….” George Rodger to John Morris, February 14, 1956, SA.
264
conclusion of “Desert Search,” emphasizing that the oil company gave back to local
governments and populations by sharing its profits.

Sand in My Eyes
With the support of Standard Oil Company’s The Lamp as well as the French oil
company Schlumberger, George Rodger and Jinx were able to undertake two more long
journeys through Africa in their Land Rover between 1957 and 1958. In both cases, they
relied on the oil companies to finance and organize their trips – providing such invaluable
assistance as military escorts through war-torn areas of Algeria; visas and permits;
housing; and local guides. Each time after completing their assignment, the couple
continued traveling through Africa and produced stories that combined George’s
photographs with Jinx’s text for National Geographic. The first journey through the
Sahara resulted in a landmark photo essay and travel narrative called “Sand in My Eyes,”
published in May 1958 [Figure 4.19] while the second expedition led to the safari story
“Where Elephants Have Right of Way,” published in September 1960.
91
[Figure 4.20]
In late 1956, the Rodgers were in Paris for an emergency meeting of Magnum’s
board and directors following the sudden death of Magnum president David Seymour in
the Suez. While there, they worked with Schlumberger executive Jean Riboud, who was
the brother of Magnum photographer Marc Riboud, to set up an assignment
photographing Schlumberger expansion and prospecting in the Sahara for a company

91
The connections between Rodger’s Standard Oil assignments and National Geographic stories have been
difficult to weave into Magnum histories – likely because of what is now known about the effects of the oil
on the environment and international politics, and because Rodger’s photographs and texts play into
Orientalizing narratives, which have made biographers, curators, and other supporters of Magnum
uncomfortable. On the changing perception of the oil industry’s effect on American culture see Frederick
Buell, “A Short History of Oil Cultures; or, The Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance” in Ross Barrett,
ed. Oil Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 69-89.
265
publicity report.
92
Because the French company’s teams communicated slowly and
showed signs of internal disagreement, the Rodgers relied extensively on the Standard
Oil’s affiliate Esso Française, which had an established public relations with connections
to government authorities, to handle their visas to all of the countries on their itinerary.
93

Moreover, delays on Schlumberger’s part (the company kept changing the Rodgers’
schedules and location lists) as well as political developments in Algeria (the Rodgers
had to find a safe route for entering the Sahara via Libya) meant that the Rodgers had to
spend months in Paris waiting for the assignment to be cleared, racking up expenses in
the expensive city and arriving in Africa once again in time for poor weather, including
sand storms and flash floods.
94
Once on the ground, Rodger found that Schlumberger
offices and oil wells were separated by long, poor roads and that its lack of engineers,
staff, equipment, and activities made photographic documentation very difficult.
Although he had planned to finish the assignment in thirty days, it took double the
amount of time. In late March, Rodger confided in John Morris that Schlumberger’s “set
up here is rather scruffy and the Schlumberger engineer who is only temporary anyway,
is a most uncolorful character with whom it was quite impossible to stage very much.”
95

The images by Rodger chosen for Schlumberger’s Sahara report confirmed these
observations, featuring portraits of Schlumberger engineers trying to make do with their
living space, surveying the vast desert and their temporary offices, and struggling to drive
through the deep, soft sand dunes of the Sahara. [Figure 4.21]

92
Naggar, George Rodger, 147-148.
93
George Rodger to John Morris, December 14, 1956, SA.
94
George Rodger to John Morris, January 16, 20, 30, February 13, 24, March 3, 11, 1957; George Rodger
to Inge Morath, January 26, 1957, SA.
95
George Rodger to John Morris, March 11 and 20, 1957, SA.
266
While on the ground, Rodger wrote to Melville Grosvenor, editor of National
Geographic, proposing to do a story on his and Jinx’s drive through the desert. Unlike
other illustrated news magazines with which Magnum worked at the time, National
Geographic targeted middle class readers who fancied themselves amateur yet
sophisticated geographers and armchair travelers, and its content was tailored to this
aspirational, mostly white, and relatively conservative audience. The images and texts
served as a substitute for exploring the far reaches of the world, functioning on the level
of science and entertainment while demonstrating complicity [too harsh] with Western
imperialism through its representations of benevolent colonizers and primitive natives.
96

The American magazine was fervently patriotic and had a strict editorial policy of not
publishing any material that could be perceived as bad news, resulting in decisions to
exclude stories on communist nations in order to avoid the Cold War, for instance, and to
shun representations of suffering in the third world.
97
While National Geographic editors
prioritized stories for each issue that were, in their words, “timely,” their focus on
positive, encyclopedic, and relatively ahistorical material distinguished the publication
from news magazines such as Life, which regularly showed images of famines, floods,
and illnesses from the same countries.
98
High-quality photography, often in color, was the
centerpiece of National Geographic, supplied predominantly by free-lance photographers

96
Lutz and Collins, 38; Tamar R. Rothenberg, Presenting America’s World: Strategies of Innocence in
National Geographic Magazine, 1888-1945. (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007), 7-10.
97
For instance, there were no stories on the USSR in National Geographic between 1945 and 1959
(when Nixon reported on his trip to Moscow for the magazine). Lutz and Collins, 36.
98
Lutz and Collins, 105.
267
whose published work could be described as simultaneously ethnographic,
photojournalistic, and artistic.
99

Rodger had failed to sell a story from the Middle East to the National Geographic
in 1956, when editors told him that his images needed to be more personal: “…We would
like to see more pictures of the people with whom you came into contact – possibly
gathered around your Land Rover, you talking or bartering with people in their native
dress, etc.”
100
Like The Lamp, which asked Rodger to rewrite his Libya mining story to
focus on his personal impressions, National Geographic wanted to foreground the human
interest element that the photographer and his wife brought to the story, asking the couple
to turn the camera on themselves and organize their narratives around their experiences
of the journey. The magazine had a longstanding tradition of asking photographers to
document themselves in their surroundings, and since the 1920s had encouraged husband
and wife teams to describe what happens to gender norms, marriages and housekeeping
in various exotic locales – a trope that Stephanie Hawkins identified as the magazine’s
“jungle housekeeping” genre.
101
Rodger therefore promised Grosvenor: “We are being
much more personal this time and are shooting our own experiences in color – how we
live, whom we meet, etc.”
102
While Rodger was interested in the other stories he was
witnessing – including French investments into the Sahara, the building of roads by
European and American companies, and exploration for minerals such as uranium – these

99
Stephanie L Hawkins, American Iconographic: National Geographic, Global Culture, and the Visual
Imagination. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010).
100
Herbert Wilburn to Jinx Rodger, July 3, 1956, SA.
101
Hawkins notes three features of jungle housekeeping stories and photo essays: couples grappling with
uncertainties of changing gender roles in remote settings; women narrators commenting on domestic
arrangements, and photographers “working in improvised labs or preparing film in mobile jungle
darkrooms for the ultimate benefit of National Geographic Society members.” Hawkins, American
Iconographic, 139.
102
George Rodger to Melville Grosvenor, March 13, 1957, SA.
268
became the general background to the travelogue that Jinx and George produced for the
magazine.
“Sand in My Eyes” was accompanied by a banner that read, “The Unusual Story
of an Adventurous Couple Who Crossed the Strife-Torn Algerian Sahara by Car,” a
phrase that well encapsulated the story’s tone and exclusions. [Figure 4.19] Jinx’s
narrative focused on their everyday experiences of living in the desert, including the long
list of supplies that they carried in their jeep, and vivid explanations of setting up camp,
taking tea and meals with locals, as well as proper attire necessary for the heat in the
Sahara. The magazine devoted multiple page spreads to this personal narrative, printing
Rodger’s photograph of their desert camp across two pages so that readers could survey
Jinx in her makeshift home with sand dunes in the background. [Figure 4.22] Jinx did not
mention the oil companies that helped them gain access to this region, even though there
was ample evidence that their “French crews” were some of the only foreigners they met
on the road. [Figure 4.23] A few photographs showed the “Sahara oilmen,” as Jinx called
them, prospecting and resting in their camps, and in the magazine, the Rodgers were able
to address the infrastructural difficulties that they witnessed but which Schlumberger did
not wish to highlight in its own report. “Shortage of pipelines, roads, and railroads results
in some wellheads standing capped and idle. Existing routes, threatened by sabotage,
require heavy guard,” Jinx explained to American readers, and her use of the vague term
“sabotage” also underscored the extent to which she avoided addressing the historical
reasons behind the turmoil in the region. Such an approach was not uncommon for
National Geographic, however, given the magazine’s well-documented reluctance to
address the details of colonization and postwar independence movements while
269
promoting itself as an altruistic and objective educational organization.
103
Like Jinx’s
story, Rodger’s letters to Magnum colleagues from this trip described the Algerian
“rebels” and “guerillas” in the mountains as inconveniences delaying and threatening his
trip, hardly ever addressing the moral dimensions of a conflict that the photographer
Marc Riboud later claimed “all” Magnum photographers were against.
104
When Jinx
described needing to stop because of potential guerrilla fighters in the hilltops, National
Geographic included a photograph of the military convoys that accompanied the Rodgers
for much of their journey, but no mention was made of Schlumberger, which supplied the
armed guards in the first place. [Figure 4.24]
National Geographic and Magnum alike were thrilled with the Rodgers’ Sahara
story, which not only paid handsomely and allowed the Rodgers to offset the costs of
their Sahara trip that Schlumberger would not cover (Jinx’s text alone brought in $1,500),
but which also looked like the beginning of a new chapter in the agency’s relationship to
the magazine. The magazine had been slow to publish Magnum stories and take their
editorial suggestions into account when planning earlier issues, but after the Sahara story,
Magnum photographer Brian Brake (who was increasingly working with the magazine as
well) told the Rodgers, “Magnum is showing the way at National Geographic at the
moment and we’ve got to keep it up. They are trying to move away from their old style
and you can see it – look at the lead pix in your own story – wonderful use of a
picture.”
105
Referring to the opening portrait in “Sand in My Eyes,” [Figure 4.19] Brake
appreciated the clever play between the story’s title and Roger’s close-up, dramatic

103
Tamar Rothenberg called this National Geographic’s “strategy of innocence” in Presenting America’s
World. See also Lutz and Collins, Reading National Geographic, 57-70 and 87-117.
104
Miller, Magnum, 164.
105
Brian Brake to George and Jinx Rodger, June 7, 1958, SA.
270
portrait of a Tuareg tribesman, his head wrapped entirely except for the open sliver for
his eyes. Brake also told the Rodgers that National Geographic would be looking to them
as the magazine’s new contributing husband and wife team. “…I think there will be a lot
more work for the two of you. They like the team…”
106

Just as importantly, the Schlumberger assignment that enabled the National
Geographic article brought Rodger to the attention of more corporate sponsors. The Land
Rover Company in particular was thrilled about the coverage (and free promotion) their
vehicle received in “Sand in My Eyes,” including in Figure 4.22, where the Jeep was
shown helping the Rodgers to manage the wilderness. Within a few days of the article’s
publication, Land Rover purchased a number of Rodger’s photographs for their own
promotional campaigns and began thinking about how to have Rodger undertake a new
trip through Africa while driving their latest model.
107
Although the car campaign never
materialized, the Rodgers found themselves in Ethiopia in early 1958 to illustrate a Lamp
story on oil transport from Assab to Addis Ababa, and afterwards they continued through
a number of national parks in Africa, this time producing an extensive feature on wildlife
for National Geographic which was published two years later.
In the first decade of Magnum’s existence, Rodger was more committed to
covering “his” part of the world than any other Magnum founder. In Africa and the
Middle East, Rodger produced far more industrial photography for oil companies such as
Standard Oil and Schlumberger than he did editorial features. Such global companies had
local representatives who could help gain access to the right people; paid much more than
editorial markets; and had much looser deadlines which allowed him to shoot stories on

106
Ibid.
107
John Baldwin to George Rodger, May 9 and June 24, 1958, SA.
271
the side. The confluence of editors’ demands at The Lamp and National Geographic –
including their preference for personalized stories and images, their mutual support for
the Rodgers working as a team (SONJ regularly paid Jinx’s way to Africa), as well as
their arms-length distance from the political situation on the ground – demonstrates how
Rodger willingly produced coverage that made him into the protagonist of the stories. He
learned to promote himself as a knowledgeable, experienced traveler while nurturing
relationships with editors who had an inherent interest in the part of the world that most
interested him. Such connections are often deemphasized in biographies and
retrospectives even though without corporate sponsorship, Rodger practically would not
have been able to undertake the journeys in the first place and produce the photographs
that ended up in National Geographic and his later photo books and exhibitions.

Erich Hartmann and the Pillsbury Bake-Off
Whereas SONJ’s The Lamp enlisted well-known and well-traveled Magnum
members to work on stories that benefited both the company and the photographers,
Erich Hartmann’s work with the Pillsbury Company was deeply collaborative and even
personal, and it lasted for over a decade. Born in Munich in 1922, Erich Hartmann
arrived in the U.S. in 1938 as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He trained at a portrait
studio before becoming a free-lance photographer and meeting Rober Capa, who invited
him to join Magnum in 1952. At Magnum, Hartmann was one of the earliest and most
enthusiastic supporters of industrial and public relations photography, which became his
niche market. Often without the help of Magnum staff, Hartmann invested most of his
time into cultivating relationships with companies such as Corning and Steuben Glass,
IBM, General Motors, Spencer Chemical, Schlumberger, General Foods, and
272
Pillsbury.
108
Magnum’s weekly memos and reports regularly held up Hartmann’s efforts
in the industrial sector as worth emulating.
109
Hartmann’s activities were the inspiration
for Cornell Capa’s call to Magnum photographers above to pursue more industrial
photography. In a 1960 memo, John Morris lauded Hartmann for “regularly (to my
knowledge) actually [taking] the trouble to go and talk with Fortune editors.”
110
Indeed,
Deborah Calkins, the photo editor at Fortune magazine, was Hartmann’s closest
colleague outside of the corporate sector, and his work appeared regularly in that
publication throughout the course of his career. Because of the magazine’s focus on
American industry at home and abroad, many of his articles were necessarily connected
to the very corporations that also hired him to produce their annual reports and other
public relations materials.
111

In 1954, a public relations agent named Alwyn Powell assigned Hartmann to
cover one of the contestants in Pillsbury’s National Bake-Off, staged at the Waldorf

108
Current Summary of Outstanding Industrial and Institutional Projects, April 8, 1959, AJGM. Hartmann
kept meticulous records of his various assignments and clients, which I consulted at the Hartmann Estate
(HE) in New York. According to his calculations, his most frequent clients in the 1950s and early 1960s
were IBM, Fortune, Ford, and Vogue.
109
Hartmann was also instrumental in helping Magnum slowly break into the coveted and high-paying
airline industry through his work with El Al, Schlumberger, and American Airlines. Magnum & Its
Markets, June 21, 1954; Cornell Capa Report to Shareholders of Magnum, August 22, 1957; Magnum
Memo, April 4, 1959; Inge Bondi to Board, Members, and Staff, Report for 1960, n.d.; Advertising Log,
May 27, 1960, all AJGM.
110
Magnum Memo, April 2, 1960, AJGM.
111
Hartmann’s stories for Fortune, often in brilliant color and exceedingly creative in their representation
of industry, warrant longer and separate treatment, not only because Fortune is an ideal site for
understanding how public relations photography functioned as photographic news, but also because very
little scholarship exists on Fortune’s postwar activities in comparison to the magazine’s politics and
modernist aesthetics in the 1930s. Hartmann’s Fortune stories, which were related to his industrial
assignments, include “Technology: Greatest Year for Glass” (May 1955); “The Executive Outlook” (1956)
“General Motors World,” (1957); “The Transformation of European Business” (1957); and “The World’s
Greatest Industrial Laboratory” on Bell Laboratories (November 1958). On Fortune magazine, see Chris
Mullen and Philip Beard, Fortune’s America. The Visual Achievements of Fortune Magazine 1930-1965
(Norwich: University of East Anglia Library, 1985); Michael Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant
Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America (Ithaca: Cornell, 2004); John R. Stomberg, “Art and
Fortune: Machine-Age Discourse and the Visual Culture of Industrial Modernity” (Ph.D. Dissertation,
Boston University, 1999).
273
Astoria Hotel in New York. Established in 1949 by the company’s sophisticated
advertising and marketing team, the celebrity-hosted baking contest (Eleanor Roosevelt
awarded its inaugural prize) was produced in order to generate good will and publicity for
the company, which was one of the largest flour millers and food product manufacturers
in America. The event relied on extensive media coverage in the illustrated press and it
was later nationally broadcasted on CBS.
112
Hartmann’s Bake-Off photo essay appeared
early the following year in Women’s Home Companion in the form of a standard editorial
feature, complete with unposed photographs which were taken on the spot using a small,
hand-held camera; explicative captions; and a short text tying the images together.
[Figure 4.25] In the leading photograph, the exuberant winner Nancy is lost in laughter
and seemingly unaware of the camera as she receives her check from co-hosts Arthur
Godfrey and Art Linkletter.
113
On the adjacent page, smaller photographs show the 15-
year old contestant exploring New York city, conversing with Pillsbury’s team of home
economists, and on board her flight home in the company of Hartmann, who is there to
capture her first time on an airplane. [Figure 4.26] Subsequent pages showed Nancy
going about her daily life at home in Centralia, Kansas – cheering at a basketball game,
tending to the family farm, and baking her award-winning recipe for her brother and
father. Hartmann’s “A New World for Nancy!” disguised public relations as human
interest journalism, allowing Companion readers to peer into the life of a regular girl
from Kansas whose dream to attend teacher’s college has just come true. Mentioning the
Pillsbury name just once, right under the headline, Hartmann’s photographic report made

112
William Powell, Pillsbury’s Best: A Company History from 1869 (Minneapolis: The Pillsbury
Company, 1985), 149-151.
113
Both were contemporary television and radio personalities, and Linkletter served as the first host of the
Pillsbury Bake-Off.
274
Nancy into the embodiment of the company’s good will and community-oriented spirit
while inspiring readers to see themselves in Nancy’s story.
Hartmann became a regular photographer for Pillsbury after this assignment and
the company gave him a relatively free hand, relying on him to help steer the company’s
public relations efforts beginning with Pillsbury’s 1958 annual report titled Portrait of a
Corporation. [Figure 4.27] Presented to shareholders upon the rebranding of “Pillsbury
Mills, Inc.” as “The Pillsbury Company,” the report aimed to reestablish the company’s
values and look ahead to its goals for the second half of the twentieth century. Pillsbury
underscored that its employees would be central to the company’s growth and to “the
character of the corporation,” which was “made up of no more than the people who work
with our physical properties, and who express themselves as they do so.”
114
For the
report, Hartmann turned his camera on the company’s employees, applying the human
interest angle and photo essay format to a piece of internal publicity.
The clean, white pages of the large format publication (at 11x14 inches, it was
about the size of the big slick Life magazine) included short captions to anchor the black
and white photographs, which were printed in a variety of sizes and which focused on
individuals engrossed in their work. [Figure 4.28] Along the top of one page spread,
smaller pictures showed men and women tending to Pillsbury’s clients and company
logistics over the phone, and taste-testing new recipes in the company’s abundantly-
staffed research laboratory. Below, larger photographs showed a Pillsbury printer and a
Bake-Off host, reminding shareholders that the company’s promotional activities,
whether in the media or through discovering the baking talents of its customers, were as
integral to “the true character of the corporation” as its activities in flour milling and food

114
“Portrait of a Corporation: The Pillsbury Company 1958 Annual Report,” EHE.
275
product distribution. Throughout the report and especially on its opening and closing
page spreads, Hartmann focused on the employees’ facial expressions and hands,
suggesting that Pillsbury’s activities were about individual rather than mechanized labor,
and so diverse that they could not be represented through any single image. [Figure 4.29]
Hartmann’s photo essay and his approach to the Pillsbury employee portraits
paralleled a larger shift in postwar American corporate culture towards humanizing
businesses, which meant focusing on the individuality and variety of their employees or
showing that the company had a penchant for civic service and could be a good neighbor.
In earlier decades, industrial photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White had
aestheticized the machine and dwarfed workers, as seen in a 1929 photograph from the
Chrysler factor by Margaret Bourke-White.
115
[Figure 4.30] By comparison, Hartmann’s
photograph of a worker operating a grain elevator in Chicago focuses in on the man
himself. [Figure 4.31] This photograph was cropped so that the fragments of levers,
pillars, and freights would not overshadow the worker but rather focus attention on the
positioning of his body and intensity of his gaze as he operates the heavy machinery
located beyond the frame. Hartmann’s picture also differs from the interwar portraits of
workers, such as Lewis Hine’s “Powerhouse Mechanic,” made for the Western Electric
employee magazine. [Figure 4.32] As Elspeth Brown has argued, worker portraits such as
Hine’s were part of a broader visual culture of capitalist realism in the 1920s that
emphasized the dignity and heroism of labor, often to increase job satisfaction and to
discourage unionizing.
116
Pillsbury’s use of Hartmann’s photographs demonstrates that
postwar corporate photography had different aims. Beginning in the early 1950s, the

115
See Stephen Bennett Phillips, Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design, 1927-1936 (New
York: Rizzoli, 2005), 18-53.
116
Brown, Corporate Eye, 137-158.
276
entrenchment of corporate management models and increased dependence on the
computer raised concerns about corporations’ attack on the individual and human labor
alike.
117
In response, American companies began to represent themselves through their
human capital, encouraging the humanist aesthetic that originally came from press
photography and often employing the same photographers who produced human-interest
journalism for general magazines.
But from Hartmann’s perspective, working with Pillsbury meant more than
helping to project a positive corporate image. While leading American magazines
employed teams of photo and managing editors who gave photographers instructions on
what to shoot and how, and then laid out photo essays from their work, corporations
newly attuned to the power of public relations photography were likely to rely on an
established photojournalist’s editorial initiative in shooting and arranging a story –
especially if the company did not have a preconceived idea of how to use photography to
represent its identity or values. This seemed to be the case with Pillsbury.
On his first trip to Kansas for Pillsbury in 1954, Hartmann struck up a friendship
with Nancy’s father Leonard Harden, and he returned to Kansas that fall to photograph
the wheat harvest, focusing on the mechanical and human labor it entailed. He would
continue to document different aspects of bread production and consumption for the next
eight years. As his other Magnum assignments and even family vacations took him
around the world – to places such as North Africa, Israel and France – Hartmann
photographed bakers, farmers, millers and grain merchants, calling upon his connections

117
This included William Whyte’s influential The Organization Man (New York: Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1957). On postwar fears of automation, see John Harwood, The Interface: IBM and the
Transformation of Corporate Design, 1945-1976 (Minneapolis University of Minnesota, 2011), 161-216.
277
at Pillsbury when he needed an introduction or special accommodations.
118
In his story
log, in which he kept track of each completed roll of film by assigning it a story number
and recording the location and client for whom it was made, Hartmann went back and
forth between labeling the bread sequences as PR (public relations) and IP (independent
project). He understood that Pillsbury was part of a global story about feeding the world,
providing work and sustaining the global economy, but he did not yet have a specific goal
for the image archive he was amassing.

Our Daily Bread
Hartmann had fortuitous timing because in the same years that he committed to
documenting the global story of what he called “Our Daily Bread,” Pillsbury embarked
on a new wave of international expansion, acquiring companies in West Germany,
England, Switzerland and Australia and building up its Latin American holdings.
119

Whether or not Hartmann knew about these developments is unclear but his experience
photographing American industry in an international context suggests that he was well
aware of the rise of global capitalism of which Pillsbury was a part.
120
In early 1962,
Pillsbury executives encouraged Hartmann to organize an exhibition from his materials,
offering to present “Our Daily Bread” as “a curtain raiser” for the Fifth International
Food Congress (FIFCO) in New York that fall. [Figure 4.33] The photographer agreed
and worked on the show for the next seven months, taking charge of picture selection,

118
Erich Hartmann, Draft for “Our Daily Bread” book project, September 1962, EHE.
119
Powell, Pillsbury’s Best, 166-175.
120
At this time Hartmann’s stories for Fortune included a feature on the Americanization of Europe
(published in November 1957) and by 1963, Pillsbury would assign Hartmann to photograph its European
companies, noting that Pillsbury’s “international photo situation is rather sad.” Deborah Calkins to Mr.
Donovan, May 6, 1957 and Kay Kelley to Erich Hartmann, November 21, 1953, EHE.
278
exhibition design, and the production of a catalog while Pillsbury funded and publicized
his efforts. [Figure 4.34] As seen in Hartmann’s meticulously arranged album of
installation shots, the exhibit consisted of two parts. In the first, Hartmann offered a
chronological narrative of how wheat was grown, sold, processed, and turned into bread.
[Figure 4.35] Interspersing photographs from Pillsbury’s annual report with images made
on his own time, Hartmann combined scenic views of wheat fields in Kansas and
Chartres, and contrasted portraits of American and Bedouin farmers and merchants. He
also relied on symbolic compositions, such as a fist clutching a mound of earth or a single
blade of wheat rising out of the grass, which could not be traced to a specific country and
which universalized the agricultural process.
He created a similar effect in the exhibition catalog, which contained an extensive
photographic essay showing the life cycle of wheat and the people involved in its
processing. Hartmann’s catalog was laid out similarly Pillsbury’s Portrait of a
Corporation and it featured a number of Pillsbury people, including Nancy’s father
Leonard Harden, whose photograph opened the catalog [Figure 4.36] and the housewife
using Pillsbury flour to bake a cake. [Figure 4.37] Yet Hartmann also departed from the
narrow Pillsbury story in many of the introductory layouts, foregrounding a more
universal relationship between bread and labor, which he showed through images of
unidentified people working around the world in the fields under a blazing sun. [Figure
4.38] The photographer’s wife Ruth Hartmann composed short statements to accompany
the images in the catalog and on the exhibition panels, and they helped to underscore
Erich Hartmann’s universal message: “Men are linked by common purpose. Some work
to feed, some to shelter, some to entertain, some to protect. All are linked in the service
279
of fellow men.” In another one, Ruth Hartmann wrote: “Each man bears a different
burden, hoes a different row. The meaning and measure of his burden becomes the
meaning and measure of a man.”
In the second half of the exhibit, Hartmann encouraged viewers to arrive at their
own narratives about the meaning of bread and labor around the world. He juxtaposed
images of hungry and satiated children; of bread lines and plentifully stocked
supermarket shelves; and of ritual uses for bread.
121
The exhibition thus oscillated
between a narrative photo essay format (used in the press and in Pillsbury’s publicity
materials) and a series of photographic fragments; between corporate publicity and a
personal, universal message that Hartmann chose to encapsulate with the quote,
“Whoever eats the bread that another has reaped and kneaded is under an obligation to
his brother and cannot say he owes him nothing.” The later part of the catalog offered a
slightly different effect, as it was dedicated to photographs of people making, buying,
eating and making ceremonial use of bread around the world. These later images were
unaccompanied by text and each photograph carefully focused on the particularities of
people’s surroundings, from a Parisian bakery and an American supermarket to a Sunday
communion and a Passover Seder. [Figure 4.39] This series demonstrated that eating and
bread were central to the fabric of the universal human experience while encouraging
readers to recognize that Pillsbury’s business was a part of this global story. By appealing
to and representing multiple interests, including the journalistic, the promotional, and the
humanitarian, “Our Daily Bread” defied any easy categorization.
Hartmann was evidently drawn to the symbolic potential of the story and its
ability to be communicated through photography in the mode of other effective projects,

121
Barbara Miller to Erich Hartmann, “Our Daily Bread,” n.d. (circa 1962), EHE.
280
from Magnum’s well-paying global human interest essays in the illustrated press to the
Museum of Modern Art’s blockbuster The Family of Man exhibition and catalog from
1955, which arranged a decade of press photographs to illustrate the universal themes
(birth, death, love, eating) that united all of humanity. Media historian Fred Turner has
aptly noted that especially among photography critics and postmodernist scholars, the
exhibit become a “whipping boy for middlebrow midcentury aesthetics and for an
oppressive view of the public that it ostensibly encoded,” while its influence in
subsequent decades was ignored or more likely, buried with some embarrassment.
122
Yet
corporate leaders saw and loved The Family of Man in the same way that they were
drawn to the style and topicality of Life’s photojournalism. Within two years of the
MOMA show, companies began asking Magnum for “Family of Man type pictures” by
name and certain Magnum photographers responded to that call from the market.
123

Hartmann saw and evidently drew upon The Family of Man in designing Our
Daily Bread. Rather than demonstrate how bread was made or consumed according to
geographic region, Hartmann followed The Family of Man example by arranging his
photographs according to such themes as growing, selling, and packaging grain as well as
eating bread at home and in ceremonial settings. The two catalogs follow the same layout
principles, presenting images in a variety of sizes on a white background, and
occasionally pairing them with short, tautological statements about human fate. For
instance, Hartmann’s “Each man bears a different burden, hoes a different row” echoed

122
Fred Turner, “The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America” Public Culture
24:1 (2012), 55. The lasting critiques of The Family of Man include Hilton Kramer, “Exhibiting the Family
of Man: The World’s Most Talked About Photographs,” Commentary 20:5 (October 1955), 364-367;
Roland Barthes, “The Great Family of Man;” Christopher Phillips, “Judgment Seat of Photography;” and
Alan Sekula, “Traffic in Photographs.”
123
Trudy Feliu, Magnum European Distribution Report, December 1956, AJGM.
281
Steichen’s use of “If I did not work, these worlds would perish,” from the Bhagavad
Gita.”
124
Moreover, certain juxtapositions in Our Daily Bread appear to be directly
inspired by The Family of Man catalog. Hartmann’s photographs of farmers juxtaposed
with the symbolic fist of earth [Figure 4.38] echo a similar layout arranged by Steichen
and Carlo Sandburg [Figure 4.40], in which Robert Capa’s photograph of a kolkhoz
(collective) farmer gathering up hay appears next to a birds-eye view of a wheat field,
and is followed by a large-scale photograph of two men’s muscular arms. Likewise, both
exhibitions asked viewers to find their own way through the space of the show and to
piece together photographic fragments into their own narratives, albeit within certain
limits dictated by the shows’ conceptual underpinnings.
125

But Our Daily Bread did not just employ the right template to the middlebrow
tastes of corporate leaders, or merely offer, in the words of Roland Barthes’ critique of
the MOMA exhibit, “an eternal aesthetics of laborious gestures” that did not pay attention
to cultural and historical specificities. On a symbolic level, Hartmann presented
Pillsbury’s activities as part of a global story about feeding the world, providing work
and sustaining the global economy. At the same time, his photographs of the company’s
employees and operations reflected the business’ expansion without directly referencing
its new role as an international corporation.
In the early Cold War, trade shows and other international expos such as the one
in which Our Daily Bread debuted offered American companies the opportunity to sell

124
Carlo Sandburg, The Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 75.
125
As Fred Turner has provokingly argued, The Family of Man surrounded viewers with photographs so
they would recognize the humanity of others while providing enough psychological space for them to
construct their own greater narratives and thereby “choose” to become democratic citizens. Turner,
Democratic Surround, 4-8, 181-212. Hartmann explained that the second half of the exhibition was meant
to “involve the viewer, to lead him to make his own conclusions on mankind and his daily bread.” Barbara
Miller to Erich Hartmann, “Our Daily Bread” n.d. circa 1962, EHE.
282
American goods and American ideals, often under the guise of universalism.
126
This
particular expo even republished Hartmann’s photographs in the exhibition guide to
explain the goals of the convention, which were to demonstrate that “under the system of
free enterprise and free competition…the most basic need of humanity – FOOD [sic] –
can be brought to the people efficiently, conveniently, and abundantly.”
127
[Figure 4.41]
Departing from the narrative photo essay format of Pillsbury’s annual report and the
exhibition catalog, the FIFCO guide reproduced too many of Hartmann’s images in small
scale over just three pages with captions that stressed the images’ informational content
(plowing techniques, sales strategies) rather than allowing the images speak to each other
or for themselves. It appears as a clumsy effort on the part of a trade publication not used
to dealing with photography or laying out essays. There is no particular relationship
between the content of the photographs and the scale of their reproduction, and no
particular sequence or order in their arrangement. Yet from the perspective of the
photographer and the photographic agency, this was also a success in freelancing. The
setting of the expo increased the visibility of Hartmann’s images and acquainted many
people, including potential clients, with his work, while the exhibition guide meant that
such visitors could take the pictures home with them as a record and reference.
Contemporary audiences and other photographers did not critique Hartmann for his
involvement with corporate interests. The journal of the American Society of Magazine
Photographers placed one of Hartmann’s photographs on its cover and reviewed his
exhibition with the headline, “How a Photographer Realized a Free-Lancer’s Ideal.”
128

126
Turner, The Democratic Surround, 215-217.
127
FIFCO Exhibition Guide, NY Coliseum, September 8-16, 1962, EHE.
128
“Our Daily Bread, an exhibit by Erich Hartmann. How a photographer realized the free-lancer’s ideal,”
Infinity: American Society of Magazine Photographers 12:1 (January 1963), 5-11, 25.
283
[Figure 4.42] The author not only praised the thoughtfulness of the exhibit and the
exceptional quality of Hartmann’s photographs, but also wondered with amazement at
how “an American corporation pays him well for carrying out his wishes in exactly his
own way.” Back at Magnum, staff and photographers agreed that Hartmann’s project was
unprecedented for its independent production and corporate support, and they praised
Pillsbury for displaying Hartmann’s photographs “in place of a commercially or product-
oriented exhibit.”
129

Afterlives
Soon after the exhibition closed, Hartmann began working on a standalone photo
book of the same title. A few publishers took interest but the photographer had a difficult
time deciding on the text that should accompany the book and which main ideas should
steer the visual narrative once Pillsbury was taken out of the story.
130
One publisher
suggested that Hartmann should include more photographs about the production of bread
– “more hands kneading dough, more mixing of giant barrels of it” – and he expressed
confusion about the overall message: was it about labor on the land, or was it about the
consumption of daily bread?
131
A market for such photo books did exist, publishers
seemed to tell Hartmann, but if he wanted to show more than Pillsbury’s operations on a
global scale, he would need to focus his scope to make the project stand on its own.
Instead of spending more time and money to prove that his photographic project could
function autonomously, Hartmann soon abandoned “Our Daily Bread” altogether to focus

129
Magnum Weekly Report, September 6, 1962, CCP and Magnum Distro “Our Daily Bread,” n.d. (circa
late summer 1962), EHE.
130
Peter Rosenwald to Erich Hartmann, July 28, 1966, EHE.
131
Ben Shaktman to Erich Hartmann, July 15, 1967, EHE.
284
on his regular industrial clients. He cultivated that niche, going on to lecture about
industrial photography to young photographers and advising companies such as Ford and
IBM on their internal and external publicity while also producing their annual reports.
132

Hartmann’s efforts became a model for Magnum photojournalists making their own daily
bread in public relations and eventually in advertising – a direction that was equally
important for, even though largely treated separately from, histories of
photojournalism.
133
As if looking to Hartmann’s “New World for Nancy!” but now with
an eye to selling consumer products and not a company’s public image, the advertising
executive David Ogilvy instructed budding ad men to make their advertisements “look
like [the] editorial pages” in Life by relying on “great photographs” that had “story
appeal,” and by presenting the sales pitch in the form of a photographic caption.
134

Hartmann’s Pillsbury-inspired work remained buried until recently, when his
widow Ruth Hartmann returned to the photographer’s files and published Our Daily
Bread in 2013 with the German publisher Kehrer. [Figure 4.43] Sequenced formally and
thematically, the photographs are printed close to the edges of the book’s large, glossy
pages, and they are accompanied by lyrical texts about farming and labor written again
by Ruth Hartmann. Today, the lavish photo book offers a posthumous tribute to the
photographer’s life’s work, reinterpreting Hartmann as an independent photographer in
much the same way that many of Magnum’s early members are now known – through
collections of singular photographs which call attention to image content rather than
revealing the business interests and financial motivations underpinning their

132
Erich Hartmann Story Log, n.d., EHE.
133
My aim in revising this dissertation is to include a new chapter on Magnum’s advertising photography
after this chapter in order to show how public relations photography informed Magnum’s progression into
straight advertising, albeit again with the aesthetic of photojournalism.
134
Ogilvy, Confessions, 131-137.
285
photography. There are a number of other ways to understand “Our Daily Bread,”
however: as a quest to find employment through personally satisfying relationships with
sponsors; as a way to expand the human interest story to global dimensions; and as a way
to bring the human interest photo essay out of the press and into public relations
campaigns, annual reports, and exhibitions. Hartmann’s project is also a testament to the
networked and collaborative nature of not only press photography but also public
relations campaigns. “Nobody can commit photography alone,” wrote the media critic
Marshal McLuhan just as Hartmann was composing his first introduction to the
unrealized “Our Daily Bread” book and making a list of all the people – the darkroom
assistants, curators, archivists, farmers, government officials, Pillsbury leaders, Magnum
photographers and office staff – who had helped him along the way.
135

Conclusion
Those who embraced public relations photography at Magnum and were willing
to apply their skills in photojournalism to the corporate sector demonstrated their
understanding of photography’s future. Already in 1952, Pat Hagan told Magnum
shareholders: “…editorial photography has become a luxury which, in order to make
money, one can ill afford unless this is backed up by industry and advertising.”
136
When
Magnum photographers embraced industrial assignments they did so without necessarily
forfeiting the journalistic mode of production. Beginning with its public relations
assignments for film productions around the world, Magnum photographers helped to
promote the activities of certain industries in the press using the visual elements of an

135
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 189.
136
Pat Hagan quoted in Manchester, In Our Time, 433.
286
editorial feature: documenting real rather than posed events, and creating photo essays
focused on the human interest element. Magnum’s film work helped the cooperative to
establish specific parameters for how it would deal with corporate clients – retaining
distribution rights and negatives, for instance – which created further connections
between Magnum’s editorial and industrial work. In both the cases of the Standard Oil
Company of New Jersey and the Pillsbury Company, we saw Magnum photographers
taking on industrial assignments with enthusiasm for the time and financial support the
contracts enabled, while companies benefited from Magnum’s high-quality documentary
images and journalistic mode, which would make their activities look current,
newsworthy, and more like the other great photographs by Magnum that appeared in
editorial contexts. Although debates about “selling out” took place at Magnum especially
among European photographers and continue to inflect Magnum scholarship, this chapter
has helped to demonstrate that all photojournalism was already commercial. As Elliott
Erwitt had to explain in 1966, “Magnum has not gone over to commercial photography.
Commercial photography has gone to Magnum. Photography is a commodity – and thus
saleable.”
137
In the aftermath of World War II, Magnum’s photography was “saleable” to
editorial clients including Ladies’ Home Journal and Life, and it was later “saleable” to
Holiday before it moved into corporate campaigns and house publications. By appearing
in the latter contexts, Magnum’s photography continued to participate in and shape the
saturated visual economy of postwar America, in which multiple publications were vying
for attention and using popular platforms – including the photo essay developed in the
illustrated press – to communicate their messages.

137
Elliott Erwitt, “Magnum Photos,” September 1966, CCP.
287
This chapter has also demonstrated that much of Magnum’s public relations work
depended on Magnum’s own publicity. Rodger’s reputation as an adventurer stemming
back to his experiences in WWII fit the interests of SONJ, which was invested in the
visual and textual narrative of exploration and discovery in Africa. Hartmann expertly
built relationships with company executives and brought the mode of human interest
photojournalism – and increasingly, the humanism for which Magnum was becoming
well known – to shed light on Pillsbury’s concerns for its employees and such universal
human experiences as eating. Pillsbury in turn supported his work for well over a decade,
providing him with funding, connections, and sites for displaying and publishing his
images. Clients had to know about Magnum photographers to begin with in order to want
to work with them, and when their work appeared in print, companies often pointed to
photographers’ and Magnum’s reputation in order to show the company’s own
importance, prestige, and modernity by association. The next chapter therefore looks at
Magnum’s own public relations efforts over the course of its first twenty years, especially
through photo books and museum exhibitions. Both of these settings propagated what
have now become central Magnum mythologies, and both contributed to Magnum’s
economic success to this day. But by elevating individual photographers over the network
of the agency, these mythologies undermined what previous chapters have shown about
the variety of Magnum’s markets and the significance of collaborations to Magnum’s
success.

288
Chapter 5

Magnum Mythologies:
Between the Concerned Photographer and the Decisive Moment

By the time it celebrated its ten-year anniversary, Magnum Photos had become a
reputable and internationally known organization whose photographers had created a slew
of award-winning reports, participated in a number of important group and solo
exhibitions, and published influential photography books. The cooperative had also
received ample attention from publications targeting professional and amateur
photographers. In late 1957, Magnum President Cornell Capa was even in touch with a
screenwriter who wished to develop a limited-release film about Magnum, which
promised to offer great publicity. But when he saw the first treatment of the movie,
Cornell was alarmed at how much attention the writer devoted to his late brother Robert
Capa, and he wrote to John Morris expressing his concern about conflating Magnum with
one of its founders. The film, he explained,

…is a quite good, but quite obvious “Bob Capa” story. It goes back to 1937
and spends the first half of the story on Bob’s personality and actions.
During the second half, it is strongly running on a similar track. I question
the wisdom of a “Magnum” story being a “Bob” story, from Magnum’s
point of view… Bob and Magnum were inseparable. If the movie were
made from 1947 on and Magnum and Bob were shown in their respective
positions and the movie would show strongly “Magnum at Work”… I
would have absolutely no objection to it from the family’s side, as long as
Magnum were satisfied…
1

Cornell Capa’s objections touched upon crucial points for anyone wishing to understand
the history and significance of the photo agency, whether in 1957 or today. Would it be

1
Cornell Capa to John Morris, Notes for Magnum’s Executive Meeting to take place in January 1958, n.d.
(late 1957 or early 1958), AJGM.

289
legitimate to locate the seeds of Magnum in the Spanish Civil War, when Capa first met
his future co-founders Henri Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour, or should the agency be
understood as a quintessentially postwar phenomenon? Even if Robert Capa was the
mastermind behind the early operation, would it be fair or wise to overemphasize his role,
since Magnum relied on the efforts of so many people? Cornell Capa was concerned about
conflating Magnum with one photographer and personality, but he also worried that
looking back on Magnum’s past – and especially the deaths of its founders Robert Capa
and Chim, as well as the photographer Werner Bischof – would get in the way of
promoting Magnum as a stable enterprise that could cover the world, financially sustain its
members, and deal effectively with its clients in the present. Magnum did not have the
money to produce such a film anyway, so Cornell suggested tabling the whole thing. “The
losses of Chim and Bob are too fresh…and it is not the best propaganda for Magnum to be
featured through the great losses we have suffered.”
2

While Cornell Capa suggested that Magnum should not be overly associated with a
few mythical figures and the tragic events of the recent past, Magnum in fact was
increasingly promoting, and becoming sustained by, the mythologies that surrounded its
individual members. This chapter examines the emergence of key Magnum mythologies,
arguing that these narratives buried the network in favor of the individual photographer.
While the agency actively promoted the efficacy of its organization and its network of
photographers and staff, it also relied on the founding photographers to represent
Magnum’s essential qualities, which included itinerancy, heroism, empathy for the human
condition, artistry and subjective vision. Two labels in particular emerged between the
early 1950s and 1960s that encompassed these latter qualities while simultaneously

2
Ibid.

290
challenging the importance of Magnum as a collective and a business. The “decisive
moment,” associated with Cartier-Bresson, and “concerned photography,” associated
predominantly with Robert Capa but also Bischof and Chim, both deemphasized the
collaborative nature of the agency as well as the financial and practical considerations that
shaped its operations. At the same time, Magnum relied on these labels and the
photographers they represented to sell its prestige not only to magazine editors but also
museums, curators, and book publishers.
I begin the chapter by examining Magnum’s promotional efforts, including
publications (aimed at industry people and amateurs) and exhibitions (aimed at the general
public) that emphasized the importance of Magnum as a collective and its relationship to
photojournalism. The chapter then turns to competing projects in which individual vision
and personalities won out over Magnum and the context of photojournalism – in the
production and popularization of Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the decisive moment and
through the creation of the “concerned photographer” label, which was the culmination of
a series of commemorative exhibitions and books dedicated to Robert Capa, Bischof and
Chim. While historicizing these Magnum mythologies, this chapter also contributes to our
understanding of Magnum’s position within a broader context of exhibitions and books
that framed the public’s understanding of photography after World War II.

Promoting Magnum within a Maturing Photographic Community
Of Magnum’s founders, Robert Capa in particular recognized that self-promotion
would be necessary for generating more business and establishing Magnum as a
professional enterprise. In his 1952 report to stockholders, Capa instructed: “During the

291
coming year we should try to hit the magazines with outstanding material. We should try
to plan on books, exhibitions, participating contests [sic], prepare representative
scrapbooks, and try to establish the reputation of this outfit beyond any question of
competition.”
3
The organization’s publicity efforts happened on multiple fronts as Capa
suggested, and as they became more sophisticated – often outsourced to camera
periodicals and museum curators – critics and historians began to treat the statements
surrounding such projects as fact rather than promotion. The narratives that Magnum
generated about itself became repeated verbatim in order to explain the cooperative’s
essential qualities, and it is worth analyzing what purpose these tropes had when they
emerged and to recover other narratives that were later minimized or forgotten altogether.
In the United States, Magnum used all possible platforms in order to promote its
name. This included the camera magazines US Camera and Popular Photography, which
since the late 1930s served as standard bearers of the latest and best in photography and
which targeted amateurs and enthusiasts; Infinity, the magazine of the Association of
Magazine photographers; and the few mostly East coast institutions that displayed
photography after World War II, including the Photo League, Museum of Modern Art,
and Library of Congress.
4
As John Raeburn notes, the 1930s ended with a splintered but
vibrant photography environment and at least two competing photographic canons.
MOMA’s Photography department, established in 1940, upheld Beaumont Newhall’s
formalist approach to the medium and his preference for the “straight” photography of
Ansel Adams and Paul Strand. Camera periodicals and popular exhibitions and camera

3
Robert Capa, Report to Magnum shareholders, February 15, 1952, AJGM
4
Magnum’s group exhibition at the Photo League, “Magnum Reports the World” took place between March
1 and April 14, 1949 and may have been the first group show that the agency produced. I have not been able
to find any further details about the show other than the exhibition announcement, which lists “Cartier-
Bresson, Seymour, Capa, Perutz, Rodger and Gullers,” in AJGM.

292
shows, on the other hand, promoted contemporary documentary photography including
the work of Farm Security Administration photographers, whom Newhall initially
overlooked in his shows. The work of European photographers was mostly sequestered to
a few avant-garde circles and exhibition spaces – including the Julien Levy Gallery –
while critics and the public alike focused predominantly on the American scene.
5
These
poles were somewhat reconciled in 1947 when the photographer Edward Steichen, until
then a key contributor to U.S. Camera and vociferous supporter of American documentary
photographers, became the curator of photography at MOMA.
6
Hired in order to deal with
dwindling audiences and to boost the popularity of photography in the museum, Steichen
enthusiastically brought the work of magazine photographers into the museum and
became a long-time friend, supporter, and even advisor to Magnum.
7
He included
Magnum photographers in many of his exhibitions and often dropped by Magnum’s New
York offices to look at the photographers’ latest work, while Magnum invited him to
participate in its annual meetings.
8
Steichen endorsed Magnum and its members in print
and through exhibitions, as did others, including Beaumont Newhall, who initiated the
1947 show of Cartier-Bresson’s work at MOMA shortly before his departure, and Richard
Simon of Simon & Schuster, one of the leading publishers of photography books in
postwar America. Editors at camera periodicals and leaders of a growing number of
photography programs and workshops across the US (including Clifton Edom’s Missouri

5
John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2006), 1-18, 48-60, 80-113.
6
When Newhall left MOMA in 1947 to work at the Eastman House, the latter became the second main
institution for archiving, collecting, exhibiting, and publishing about photography. Stuart Alexander,
“Photographic Institutions and Practices,” in Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (Cologne:
Könemann, 1999), 695.
7
Raeburn, Staggering Revolution, 296-297.
8
John Morris, Report to Members on the State of Magnum, July 1, 1955, and Magnum Memo, January 12,
1957, AJGM.

293
Workshop and Wilson Hicks’ Miami Conference) were likewise part of Magnum’s
network of supporters while also serving as key figures in the changing landscape of
photography publishing, exhibitions, and education in the late 1940s and 1950s.
9

As Robert Capa’s call for more publicity noted, Magnum needed to establish its
name “beyond any question of competition,” i.e. from other agencies and freelance
photographers. This was the main goal of John Morris’ first profile on Magnum, which
took up forty pages of US Camera in 1954. [Figure 5.1] Second only to Popular
Photography, a given issue of the camera annual contained surveys of new equipment,
technical data, and many advertisements (saved for the end), but the extensive portfolio of
images made by leading contemporary photographers was its main feature.
10
U.S. Camera
broke up Morris’ narrative with photographs by Magnum members, including Chim’s
photographs of children, made for and previously reproduced in UNESCO publications,
and George Rodger’s photograph of a family walking in Equatorial Africa, which he
photographed for Ladies’ Home Journal’s “People are People the World Over.” [Figure
5.2] In 1949, the Journal had used a smaller version of this procession to emphasize the
shared problem of “getting around” for farming families around the world. In 1955,
Steichen would include the photograph from US Camera in The Family of Man exhibition
and catalog, where it would appear alongside other images of women transporting baskets
on their heads in Peru, Bali, and Egypt. There, it would make an even stronger visual
argument about the similarity of everyday life around the world. In the Magnum article,

9
On institutions for art photography after the 1950s see Alexander, “Photographic Institutions and
Practices,” 695-707.
10
In the 1930s, it was common for the portfolio to include up to 200 photographs by leading photographers
and to represent each contributor with a single image. Raeburn, Staggering Revolution, 93-95. During World
War II, the magazine began to publish war photographs and after the war, continued a thematic approach. In
1951, it devoted forty pages to coverage of the Korean War mostly by David Douglas Duncan; the following
year the theme was female nudes. Gary Saretzky, “U.S. Camera: A Thomas J. Maloney Chronology,” The
Photo Review 26:4/27:1 (2004), pagination unknown.

294
however, Rodger’s photograph was one of a kind. With its large-scale reproduction across
one and a half pages, it focused the reader’s attention on the image itself, including its
striking tonalities and composition – the recession into the far left and the vast sky above,
arid land below. In US Camera Rodger’s image asserted that Magnum made it possible for
magazines and museums to show the world in the first place, while Morris’ text convinced
readers that Magnum was also a functional organization. He emphasized its editorial
initiative and “usefulness” for editors because its internationally-based network of
photographers could minimize travel expenses for magazines. And because Magnum hired
office staff to process its photographs, editors could be sure that their pictures would be
“beautifully printed and often captioned.” He also pointed to “Youth and the World,”
recently purchased by Holiday, as proof that Magnum could “match the ingenuity of its
photographers in the field by developing its own editorial projects...”
11
In so many words,
Morris underscored that Magnum photographers were able to think and work like
magazine editors by producing entire stories that fit any magazine’s editorial agenda.
The latter message needed constant reiteration since a prevailing sentiment in the
photojournalism industry was that at best, photographers were only knowledgeable about
photography and knew little about journalism or the process of editing stories. At worst,
they were passionate artists or just quirky types with whom it was impossible to work. In
his pivotal text book on photojournalism from 1952, former Life editor Wilson Hicks
acknowledged that photographers have to combine many skills, such as technician, artist,
reporter, and stage director, but he also confirmed commonly held stereotypes about
photographers at the time, which included bad manners, mad dashing to very high or low

11
John Morris, “Magnum: An International Cooperative,” US Camera (1954), 110-152.

295
spots for the right shot, and incessant requests for “just one more” picture.
12
Clifton
Edom’s Picture Editing (1951) noted that photographers had long been ridiculed as
members of press teams and that their reputations were just beginning to improve, while
earlier texts by photo editors criticized photographers for their self-importance.
13
By the
1970s, some critics would acknowledge that Magnum was “a vital force in contemporary
photojournalism” while also calling the agency “a collection of prima donnas with a
grossly exaggerated sense of their own importance and abilities.”
14
In the attempt to mold
its own image, therefore, Magnum purposefully stressed its professionalism and
collaborative nature. For its ten-year anniversary brochure, Chim encouraged Morris to
once again
stress the independent quality of Magnum photographers, their editorial
initiative and journalistic training and the ability to produce without
research support accepting responsibility for story development. This is
probably one of our selling points, even if we are not always good at that.
The help of our offices, however, provides our clients ultimately with a
finished product.
15

Well into the 1960s, Magnum publicity devoted significant space to the roles of
administrative staff and editors so that existing and potential clients knew whom to call in
order to set up an assignment for one of Magnum’s star photographers, and whom to rely
on in the process of assigning, producing, and editing a Magnum photographer’s story.
Yet the figure of the Magnum photographer – as artist or as a brave war
correspondent – made for a more memorable public relations campaign and for a more
colorful story than ongoing claims about Magnum’s professionalism and the hard work of

12
Wilson Hicks, Words and Pictures (New York: Harper & Row, 1952), 107-108.
13
Stanely E. Kalish and Clifton C. Edom, Picture Editing (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1951), 49-58;
Daniel D. Mich and Edwin Eberman, The Technique of the Picture Story (New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, 1945), 195.
14
Fondiller, “Image and Reality,” 58-102.
15
Chim to John Morris, June 9, 1956, AJGM.

296
its staff. Morris’ 1954 US Camera story also propagated a number of mythologies and
aphorisms about the founders that continued to be retold over decades, especially in
museum exhibitions and photo books featuring Magnum’s work. His highly contrived text
reads almost like a fairy tale, with its outlandish, essentializing descriptions of the
photographers and its naïve summation of the agency’s postwar aims:
The Magnum founders were, and are (despite one subtraction and
two additions to the group) a motley assortment. They now include:
An Englishman (George Rodger), formerly a driver of racing cars,
who has traveled about as widely as the British Empire permits; he is
married to an American girl born in Syria.
A Frenchman (Henri Cartier-Bresson), son of a businessman; he
wanted to become a painter, instead became one of the world’s great
photographers; married to a Javanese dancer.
A Swiss (Werner Bischof) who broke away from a career in
advertising to become a journalistic photographer; married to a Swiss girl
of Hungarian descent who looks very much Japanese.
A young Austrian (Ernst Haas) who learned photography in
wartime Vienna by diligently studying old copies of Life – and then
developed a new style of his own; married to a former Hungarian
countess.
And two Americans, one (Robert Capa) born in Budapest, the
other (David Seymour) born in Warsaw; both are bachelors (but both like
girls). These two – the former a confirmed optimist, the latter an
unregenerate pessimist, shared with Henri Cartier-Bresson the hungry
days of prewar Paris journalism. Their hope was to eat more regularly in
the postwar world.
16

On the one hand, these bits of biographical details showed that each Magnum
photographer had a unique background and set of professional skills and experiences. Yet
they were also united by their cosmopolitanism, adventuring spirit, and masculinity – a
rugged individualism that set them apart from the “lonely crowd” of the 1950s, made up
of people who looked to others for motivation and validation.
17
Amidst the rapid

16
Morris, “Magnum: An International Cooperative,” 110.
17
Riesman, Lonely Crowd, 18-21. Certainly Riesman’s work and terminology is itself a product of 1950s
sociology that subsequently fell out of favor. But given its popularity and circulation in the fifties, it is

297
globalization of the postwar era – including the accelerating pace of international travel
and the American media’s increasing interest in all things beyond U.S. borders – Morris
insisted that Magnum’s diversity could help magazine clients grasp the world with the
help of this multi-lingual and multi-cultural group of “reporter-photographers,” who had a
“peculiarly human point of view.”
18
Morris used this kind of formulation frequently
beginning with his work at Ladies’ Home Journal, emphasizing that Magnum’s record of
humanity opposed the media manipulation of World War II, especially in Germany. Yet
he coupled Magnum’s photographic humanism with an emphasis on the agency’s
usefulness to magazine editors, showing that Magnum’s photography was embedded
within a functional business and network. Nevertheless, generalizations about the essential
qualities of Magnum’s work ultimately trumped the editorial and business contexts that
the agency promoted with vigor throughout the 1950s.

Magnum Book Publishing and the Unresolved Problem of Overproduction
In 1955 Magnum hired an independent consultant to assess whether the agency
should begin publishing a Magnum Annual, akin to US Camera’s annual, filled with the
best photographs made by Magnum photographers in the previous year. The project
proved too unfocused because Magnum’s annual files were so extensive thematically and
geographically, but it showed Magnum that it had the potential to develop photographic
books drawn from stories that existed in its growing picture archive. Thematic photo
books, John Morris explained, would have more lasting impact than the illustrated press,

possible to read the elevation of the individual Magnum photographer in U.S. Camera within that
framework.
18
Magnum reprint of “The First Ten Years” Popular Photography (September 1957), SA.

298
would allow for good stories, would sell, and would contribute to Magnum’s prestige.
19

Publishing them would also show that the agency could function as a commercial picture
library by making new meaning out of (and money from) its non-current photographic
archive.
20
Yet the pressure to produce new material for Magnum’s editorial and industrial
markets, coupled with photographers’ lack of interest in editing their own files, meant that
Magnum staff barely had the time to focus on stock sales – i.e. reselling single images
from its files for illustrative purposes in textbooks, encyclopedias, magazines,
advertisements, and even record album covers – let alone produce entire photo books.
21

In fact, the Magnum offices were so inundated with new rolls of film that in the
spring of 1958, John Morris frantically proposed that all photographers stop shooting for
one month to give staff the time to caption and edit the pictures stories that already
existed. “Cornell [Capa] is busily lining up some future scoops … but leaving behind
material good enough to make a color book on Peru and a black and white one on
Argentina,” explained Morris, and he went on to name other photographers who had
contributed to Magnum’s problem of overproduction. “Henri is busily planning his
summer, and to my knowledge ignoring the fabulous material from his US trip last year –
material which cries for proper synthesis. … Just before [Ernst Haas] left for Europe he
produced a whole big box full of color – most of it good – from “The Big Country” – and
just dumped it on [Magnum’s recently hired New York editor] Lee [Jones].”
22
The intense
pace of production enabled by the camera had been an issue for photographers at least

19
John Morris, “Creating a Magnum Annual,” April 1, 1955, AJGM.
20
On the distinction between an agency and a picture library see Blaschke, “Bettman Archive to Corbis,”
10-12.
21
Magnum memos regularly note its low stock sales, including Magnum Memo, June 29, 1957 and Magnum
Memo, March 22, 1958, AJGM.
22
John Morris to Magnum Photographers, April 30, 1958, CCP.

299
since the twenties, and as Olivier Lugon has noted, the history of photography can be seen
as a series of attempts to contain and manage photographic output, including through
exhibitions, series, archives, and storage systems.
23
Morris’ complaint was therefore not
unique to Magnum. But it did raise the question of whether the cooperative would ever
find the time to put more images into circulation than the select few chosen for magazine
photo essays. He likewise posed a bigger question about the role of the picture agency in
managing vast archives of images beyond primary sales and storage, which became
important almost immediately after World War II. But Magnum never found an agency-
wide solution to the issue of overproduction though it attempted to do so. In 1959, Morris
assigned Sam Holmes, who had worked in the New York office for a number of years, to
focus exclusively on second – i.e. stock – sales, and Holmes even solicited the advice of
the picture collection manager at the New York Public Library on how to cross-index their
photographs for ease of retrieval.
24
Yet there would always be a large gap between the
quantity of possible projects and what staff and photographers could feasibly manage.
Thus Magnum’s early photo books resulted from efforts by individual photographers to
promote their own work, as in the case of Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment and The
Europeans (1955), or the work of relatives to honor deceased Magnum members, as in the
case of Cornell Capa and Rosellina Bischof, who used their own time and resources to

23
Olivier Lugon, “Photo-Inflation: Image Profusion in German Photography, 1925-1945,” History of
Photography 32:3 (Autumn 2008), 219-234.
24
Magnum Memo, January 31, 1959, AJGM. Morris does not name the NYPL staff member but it was very
likely Romana Javitz, whom Mary Panzer has called “a visionary in the field of documentary photography,
devoted to the mission of improving visual literacy” and who led the Picture Collection at the NYPL from
1931 to 1968. Mary Panzer, “A Literacy Lesson: Romana Javitz and the Picture Collection of the New York
Public Library,” (paper presented at Getting the Picture, University of Southern California, May 4-5, 2014).

300
create books and exhibitions dedicated to Robert Capa, Werner Bischof and David
Seymour.
25

Magnum Exhibitions: MOMA and the Met

Photography exhibitions proved to be a better setting in which to promote
Magnum’s name and take part in broader conversations about the press, the photo essay,
and contemporary photography. They became one of the main responsibilities of Inge
Bondi, one of the first Magnum staff members in the New York office who made her way
up from secretary in 1950 to become the Editor of Exhibitions, Special Projects, and
Advertising by 1958. In this capacity, Bondi worked with Magnum president Cornell
Capa and Executive Editor John Morris to ensure that Magnum photographers participated
in exhibitions hosted by prestigious institutions, and in which Magnum’s photographs
would be printed well and displayed alongside other great photographers with whom
Magnum wished to be associated.
26

In 1950s New York City, the Museum of Modern Art led the way in collecting and
displaying photography, yet Magnum’s appearance in dozens of MOMA shows –
including but not limited to The Family of Man – did not mean that the agency’s
photography was being shown as purely as art or photojournalism. When Edward Steichen
was hired to take over the Photography Department at MOMA, he was tasked with
showing photography as a popular medium that could draw in large audiences, which is
something that Beaumont Newhall mostly failed to do through the shows he organized in

25
Cornell Capa to JGM, n.d., (late 1957 or early 1958) and Minutes of the Executive Committee, January
12, 1958, AJGM.
26
Magnum Memo, May 30, 1957, AJGM.

301
the thirties and forties.
27
Scholars have explained that Steichen solved the problem by
bringing Life’s photo essays – i.e. the most popular site and format for seeing photographs
at the time – into the museum, turning galleries into “oversized magazine layouts.”
28

Relying predominantly on installation views of Steichen’s blockbuster thematic shows,
including The Road to Victory and The Family of Man, postmodern critics used the notion
of bringing photojournalism into the museum to critique the disappearance of the author
and the fine print under Steichen. In the words of Christopher Philips, Steichen was
“MOMA’s glorified picture editor, sifting through thousands of images from different
sources and recombining them in forms reflecting the familiar mass-cultural mingling of
popular entertainment and moral edification.”
29
Yet as Fred Turner has methodically
demonstrated, The Family of Man cannot be understood apart from MOMA’s museum-
wide attempts to democratize Americans after World War II through art therapy programs,
aimed especially at children and war veterans. Nor should one ignore that Herbert Bayer’s
Bauhaus-inspired designs for such exhibits – with their emphasis on immersing and
overwhelming the senses, and guiding viewers towards embracing diversity – were quite
unlike the experience of reading magazines.
30

27
Raeburn, Staggering Revolution, 296-297; Philips, “Judgment Seat of Photography,” 23.
28
Philips, “Judgment Seat of Photography,” 31.
29
Ibid., 28 These attacks also map onto a broader distaste for picture editors within much of the scholarship
on photojournalism and photo history, including Galassi, “The Modern Century” and Willumson, Smith and
the Photographic Essay. To the extent that David Campany’s recent work on Walker Evans at Fortune
redeems the role of the photo editor via Evans, Campany still wants to see Evans as an independent artist
who is able to rise above the market-driven, middle-brow practices of photojournalism (the “pacey design,
narrative flows, over-emotional tone and often trite messages”) and the optimistic spirit of Fortune by
creating photographic essays that included ambiguous images; which encouraged slow, contemplative
looking; and which functioned as artistic portfolios without a clear beginning, middle, or end. In other
words, Campany wants to see Evans both filling the role of photo editor and acting utterly unlike an editor.
See David Campany, “Recalcitrant Intervention: Walker Evans’ Pages” in Di Bello, The Photobook: From
Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2012), 83 and Campany, Walker Evans:
Magazine Work.
30
Turner, Democratic Surround, 184-212.

302
There are two additional oversights in the narrative about Steichen as picture editor
that help complicate his curatorial project and explain Magnum’s enthusiastic
participation in his MOMA shows. First, Steichen organized many lesser-known
exhibitions that focused on just a few photographers whose names were highly visible,
meaning that the blockbuster thematic exhibitions for which he is now remembered were
the exceptions rather than the rule of his career. Second, Steichen’s purposeful appeal to
amateur photographers in a range of exhibitions is important for understanding his
relationship to photography, the museum, and Magnum.
When MOMA’s Photography department was created, amateur photographers had
until then been the most enthusiastic supporters of the medium, following its formal and
technical developments in such magazines as Popular Photography and U.S. Camera, and
taking part in camera clubs around the country. To this group, Newhall’s department
appeared snobbish and esoteric in its tastes and exhibition strategies.
31
By contrast,
Steichen claimed he would “gather under his wing the 200,000 of America’s
amateurs…and teach them something about making pictures.”
32
He did so not only
through the exhibitions that related to photographic technique – including shows on color
(1950) and abstract photography (1951) – but also through exhibitions that modeled a
specific, humanist way of seeing and representing the world. Steichen directed amateur
photographers towards democratic and universal values. In his opening to “Memorable
Life Photographs” (1951) – which showcased single photographs rather than photo essays,
allowing viewers to “study [the images] apart from the magazine” – Steichen called upon

31
Bruce Downes, “The Museum of Modern Art’s Photography Center,” Popular Photography (February
1944), 85.
32
Gilbert Bayley, “Photographer’s America,” New York Times Magazine (August 31, 1947), 39 quoted in
Philips, “Judgment Seat of Photography,” 32

303
“the vast and growing fraternity of amateur photographers” to learn from the
accomplishments of Life photographers. Implicitly, he asked them to use their own
photographic efforts to “explain man to man” and work in this humanist tradition he saw
uniting a range of professional photographers, including Magnum’s Capa, Cartier-
Bresson, and Ernst Haas, whose work appeared in the show. Steichen likewise appealed to
amateurs in “Five French Photographers” (1952-1953) and “Postwar European
Photography” (1953). In the press release to the latter, Steichen explained that “European
camera workers had to overcome economic problems bordering on the impossible” during
the war but despite their “lack of materials and equipment,” they had produced
exceptional photographs that had much in common with the photographic experimentation
happening in the U.S.
33
To the extent that Steichen, like the publisher and photography
enthusiast Richard Simon, understood that “even the amateur with very small means
manages always to save money to buy expensive equipment or gadgets that he thinks will
help him to make better pictures,” such a framing was meant to appeal to amateurs
wishing to learn from European photographers’ technical and formal achievements.
34
In
his introduction to “Five French Photographers,” Steichen underscored the photographers’
humanism and their ability to portray “the everydayness of the familiar” with warmth.
Cartier-Bresson, who helped Steichen conceptualize the show and brought the work of
Brassai, Doisenau, Izis, and Ronis to the curator’s attention, wanted their images to

33
“Postwar European Photography to be Shown at the Museum, ” Museum of Modern Art Press Release
530522-45, May 27, 1953, accessed March 3, 2016,
https://www.moma.org/docs/press_archives/1720/releases/MOMA_1953_0050_45.pdf?2010.
34
Henri Cartier-Bresson to Richard Simon, September 17, 1952, Richard L. Simon Papers, Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Columbia University (RBML). All of these French photographers were members of
Rapho-Guillumette Pictures and Steichen credited both Rapho and Magnum for their help in arranging the
exhibition.

304
represent a specifically French “temoignage humain.”
35
Yet Steichen interpreted their
humanism as a universal language that had something to teach American amateurs: “[This
show] offers a new sphere of influence and inspiration in photography, particularly to
amateur photographers. It supplies a threshold leading to the first universal folk art which
could be created by the millions of amateurs practicing photography throughout the
world.”
36
However far-fetched and ambitious the statement seemed to critics then or
readers today, it warrants noting that Steichen was invested in photography becoming the
folk art of the postwar period. He recognized that millions of practitioners existed and he
saw MOMA as the place to teach them how to photograph everyday life. For Steichen,
Cartier-Bresson’s images were not expressions of the “decisive moment,” discussed
below, but rather lessons in using the camera to underscore the humanity of the world and
a model for making photography a unifying, global folk art.
Expanding our view towards Magnum’s participation in Steichen’s shows, one
finds that its photographers regularly submitted work for display at MOMA, where their
images appeared in a range of thematic and group exhibitions. Sometimes they were
shown in an essay format that emulated how they were seen in the press, but other times
they were shown as individual images. Through Steichen’s intervention, their work was
meant to be appreciated not only for its humanism and global reach but also for its
technical skills and what it could teach practitioners. Through Steichen and MOMA, but
also through their regular partnerships with magazines including US Camera and Popular
Photography, Magnum participated in democratizing photography as a practice and

35
Edward Steichen to Henri Cartier-Bresson, May 21, 1951 and Henri Cartier-Bresson to Edward Steichen,
June 24, 1951, Museum of Modern Art Archive, Collection CUR, Series Folder 497 (MOMA).
36
Edward Steichen, Introductory label to “Five French Photographers,” (December 18, 1951 – February 24,
1952), MOMA.

305
acquainting large publics with contemporary efforts in the medium. It also benefited
through the ample publicity Steichen’s shows generated, citing their inclusion in MOMA
shows in their own publicity mailings.
By contrast, in its work with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Photography in
the Fine Arts (PFA) exhibition series, Magnum helped to popularize photography by
targeting museum professionals and collectors rather than amateur photographers. The
PFA exhibitions were the result of a collaboration between Ivan Dmitri, an established
color photographer and printmaker who drove the project until his death in 1968; The
Saturday Review, published by Jack Cominsky; and the Met, under the direction of James
Rorimer. Based on his research into photography acquisition and exhibition strategies at
leading U.S. institutions, Dmitri concluded that in 1958 “the decisions pertinent to and
methods of furthering photography as an art were in the hands of one small, tightly knit
group determined to maintain their hold and standards at all costs, interested only in
furthering the reputation of a few, rather than giving encouragement to the young and vital
adherents of the new art.”
37
Dmitri thus critiqued not only MOMA’s and Steichen’s
dominance of photography exhibitions, but also the continued interest in turn of the
century masters of photography, including Eugene Atget and Alfred Stieglitz, despite the
diversity of styles and applications that photography had experienced since the twenties.
In a Saturday Review article published on August 2, 1958, Dmitri called upon leading
museums in America to collect and exhibit photographs as enthusiastically as those
institutions were purchasing and displaying paintings, prints, and sculpture.
38

37
Miles Barth, “Ivan Dmitri and the History of PFA” in Barth, et. al. Master Photographs From PFA
Exhibitions, 1959-67 (New York: International Center of Photography, 1988), 20.
38
Barth, Master Photographs From PFA, 16.

306
Dmitri did not just want to expand the definition of what constituted “Art” (that
debate began immediately after photography’s invention); he wanted to create an art
market for a wide range of photographs, including abstract work, portraits, documentary,
and advertising images. As he saw it, museums were best suited to shape the market for
reselling photographs that had appeared in magazines, were commissioned by advertising
agencies and industries, and had been produced by photo agencies.
39
At Magnum, John
Morris was thinking about just this issue when he worked with photographers and staff to
develop a print price schedule and told members that Magnum needed “to gradually
stimulate public interest in buying photographic prints as prints – to develop ‘collectors’
as for paintings.”
40
Magnum and Dmitri were therefore well suited to work together, and
Inge Bondi developed a close collaborative relationship with the PFA director,
contributing Magnum work to every PFA exhibit.
41
The images that appeared in the PFA
shows, the first of which opened at the Met on May 8, 1959, were selected by a jury that
initially included Newhall and Steichen as well as museum curators and art critics without
deep knowledge of photography. Photographers were represented by a single print and the
work of professionals and amateurs appeared side-by-side, displayed in alphabetical
order.
42
These details caused consternation among some professional photographers and
curators. As an established institution of fine art and arbiter of artistic taste, the

39
These were also the very groups he solicited for submissions. The magazines included Life, Look,
Saturday Evening Post, Holiday, Vogue and National Geographic. In addition to Magnum, Dmitri solicited
work from Black Star, Pix, and Rapho; the Pulitzer Prize Collection of Photographs at Columbia University;
and industrial photography libraries (likely including Standard Oil’s library). Barth, Master Photographs
From PFA, 20. On the critique of Dmitri, particularly by Steichen and a group of non-magazine
photographers including Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander, see Nathan Lyons, “PFA and Its Controversy”
in Barth, Master Photographs From PFA, 26-29.
40
Magnum Memo, July 13, 1957, AJGM.
41
Inge Bondi to Magnum Photographers, “Exhibition News,” May 15, 1959, AJGM.
42
Evan H. Turner, “Ivan Dmitri’s Dream: A Juror’s View of the PFA” in Barth, Master Photographs From
PFA, 12-15.

307
Metropolitan was a latecomer to the photography conversation, and critics at Popular
Photography were angered that the institution claimed to break ground by labeling
photography an art (thereby ignoring MOMA’s efforts, for one) and that it did so by
displaying a single “great” photograph per photographer.
43

Yet the public and the press hailed the shows a huge success: half a million people
saw the first show at the Met, and a total of two million people saw the show when it
toured over two dozen museums and galleries in the next two years.
44
Magnum made up
close to a quarter of the first exhibition’s content, which included a portrait of Henri
Matisse by Cartier-Bresson (the PFA juries had a predilection for portrait photography) as
well as a color photograph by Elliott Erwitt, originally made for Ogilvy, Benson &
Mather’s tourism campaign for Puerto Rico.
45
Within days of the exhibition’s opening,
Magnum began receiving requests for prints through the Metropolitan, while the Museum
of Modern Art had already began to sell Magnum exhibition prints almost a decade
prior.
46
Upon visiting the photography show at the Met, Elliott Erwitt told his colleagues
that he was happy with the excellent reproduction quality of the museum prints, which
was far superior to the illustrated press, and that he was pleased to see the images

43
Andy Grundberg, “A Quest that Now Seems Quaint,” New York Times (November 6, 1988), accessed
April 12, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/06/arts/photography-view-a-quest-that-now-seems-
quaint.html.
44
Barth, Master Photographs From PFA, 23. Beginning in 1960, each subsequent PFA exhibit toured
domestically and internationally under the auspices of the American Federation of the Arts.
45
This was the first advertising assignment that Inge Bondi worked on at Magnum. Because Bondi was also
in charge of exhibitions, it is likely that she selected Erwitt’s advertising print to be put before the PFA jury.
Inge Bondi, interview with the author, February 15, 2015.
46
MOMA began selling prints by Cartier-Bresson after his one-man show in 1947. After The Family of Man
and the inclusion of Magnum photographers in other exhibitions, Nancy Newhall grew the museum’s
collection of Magnum exhibition prints, buying them from Magnum for $25 per black and white print and
$100 for color. The Met sold Magnum prints at $25 a piece. Magnum Memo, August 3, 1957; Inge Bondi to
Magnum Photographers, “Exhibition News,” May 15, 1959; Inge Bondi to Magnum Photographers,
“Metropolitan Museum,” January 15, 1960; Ivan Dmitri to Inge Bondi, March 23, 1969, all AJGM.

308
exhibited as art, for a change.
47
Yet Erwitt and others who were pleased with the PFA’s
display did not propose that their images really were art, i.e. that this was the intrinsic
meaning or function of their work. Rather, they were happy to see their images displayed
in a museum setting and seen by a different kind of audience for photography. As the only
Magnum photographer to have an advertising image shown in the exhibit, Erwitt may
have been especially pleased that commissioned photographs were permitted in the
judges’ pool and that attendees, who soon began buying up PFA photographs, would build
their own photography collections without bias towards original market contexts. If some
photographers criticized Dmitri for creating “a ‘bazaar’ rather than an exhibition,” for
Magnum, the hybrid bazaar-exhibition mode of the PFA was well suited for the agency’s
dual goals of selling work and presenting itself as a leader in contemporary photography.
48

Exhibitions Curated by Magnum
Magnum likewise produced its own exhibitions, curating the contents of the
shows, securing where they would be displayed, and to which locations they would tour.
But unlike photography shows at New York’s art institutions, Magnum’s own exhibitions
in the 1950s insisted on the journalistic context and origins of their work by displaying
sequences of pictures that Magnum members, including founders and younger
photographers, had made on recent assignments. Their shows all premiered outside of the
United States in part to drum up business on the other side of the Atlantic (which lagged
behind the American market), and they appeared in a range of venues, from galleries to

47
Regarding the Met exhibit, Bondi wrote to Magnum that the show “opened with a big fanfare and people
are talking about it. Everybody says it is a great precedent – some say they have seen all the pictures before
– and a few say it is marvelous to see the pictures hung as pictures (notably Elliott says this) and not as
editorial comments.” Inge Bondi to Magnum, “All Kinds of Things,” May 15, 1959, AJGM.
48
Barth, Master Photographs From PFA, 27.

309
camera expositions. The Face of Time exhibition premiered in Austria in 1955, the
Magnum show at Photokina took place in Cologne in 1956, and The World as Seen by
Magnum Photographers from 1959-1960 opened in Tokyo.
49

Magnum’s very first group exhibition Gesicht der Zeit (The Face of Time) toured a
circuit of galleries in five cities in Austria between June 1955 and February 1956 and
introduced the Austrian public to eight Magnum photographers, three of whom (Erich
Lessing, Inge Morath, and Ernst Haas) were, fittingly, Austrian.
50
It is still unclear who
exactly organized the show, selected the images, and curated its display, but the efforts
most likely came from the Paris office, which had contributed Magnum photographs to the
Biennale Photo Cinema Optique at the Grand Palais des Champs-Elysees in May 1955.
51

The Face of Time introduced all of the photographers in one single prologue, while
standalone series of images pasted onto different color panels represented each Magnum
member.
52
The Face of Time aimed to give audiences the impression of reading a photo
report in the illustrated press, and many of the mini-series were in fact representative of
the photographers’ recent journalistic assignments. The instructions on how to mount the
show explained: “The panels in a series must be hung one over the other, with edges flush,

49
Installation shots from these exhibitions do not exist or are not readily available, and therefore my analysis
relies heavily on textual evidence: exhibition checklists, introductions to the show, explanatory labels, press
releases and correspondence about the shows’ production and reception, which circulated among Magnum
photographers and staff. These texts warrant analysis especially since the press, critics, and historians cited
from them at length while spending less time on the exhibitions’ design and photographic content.
50
The other photographers were Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Werner Bischof, Marc Riboud, and
Jean Marquis.
51
The Face of Time exhibition failed to be recorded in Magnum histories until the twenty-first century, when
two crates of materials were discovered in the French Cultural Institute in Innsbruck.

See Christoph
Schaden, “Face of Time: Notes on a Rediscovered Exhibition,” in Peter Coeln, et. al., Magnum’s First
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2008), 10-16. This volume resulted from the archival discovery, which
consisted of two crates containing 83 black and white prints by the eight photographers, mounted on colored
fiberboard, accompanied by an introductory text and exhibition poster.
52
Color fiber boards and walls often served as backdrops to photography exhibitions at this time, including
the Memorable Life Photographs, which opened at MOMA in 1951 and was then shown at Photokina,
mounted on red panels, which were indicative of Life magazine. Schaden, “Face of Time,” 14n24.

310
otherwise the impression of a reportage, of a continuing report, will not be strong enough,
and this is very important for the exhibition.”
53
In retrospect, the range of work also
represented the range of Magnum’s markets elaborated upon in the previous chapters.
While Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photo story on the last days of Gandhi’s life and funeral
were produced for Life, Inge Morath’s images offered an intimate view of the faces and
fashions of London high society, which she had photographed for Holiday in 1953. Ernst
Haas contributed a 1954 film publicity essay, which he produced on the Hollywood
production of Land of the Pharaohs. At the same time, Magnum showcased the work of
new photographers who had recently become Magnum members, including Marc Riboud
(who joined Magnum in 1954 and contributed a photo essay from Yugoslavia) and Erich
Lessing (admitted in 1955 and who contributed a sentimental essay on Viennese children,
which was likely deemed fitting for the show’s Austrian circuit).
Subsequent exhibits adhered to many of the organizational principles and ideas
established in The Face of Time. In 1956, Photokina’s Leo Fritz Gruber invited Magnum
to show its work at the commercial exposition of camera equipment in Cologne and
thereby promote its name among European amateur and professional photographers.
54

Gruber was a collector and publicist with a deep interest in the history of photography as
well as contemporary developments in the medium. Since his involvement in Photokina
from its founding in 1950, the expo featured the latest imaging technologies (including
lenses, films, and cameras from dozens of countries around the world) while also devoting

53
Ulrich Pohlman, Kultur, Technik und Kommerz. Die photokina Bilderschauen 1950-1980 (Cologne,
1990), 82.
54
Bruno Uhl organized the first Photokina but it was through Fritz Gruber’s involvement that the trade fair
began to include galleries devoted to the work of international photographers. Schaden, “Face of Time,” 15-
16. Industrial settings were primary sites for photography displays since the 19
th
century, including in the
U.S., France, and England. See the essays by Ulrich Pohlman and François Cheval in Olivier Lugon,
Exposition et Médias: Photographie, Cinéma, Television (Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’Homme, 2012), 29-
62 and 143-176.

311
gallery spaces to display what master photographers had achieved using their own
cameras.
55
[Figure 5.3] As one of the biggest expos of its kind, Photokina represented an
unprecedented opportunity for increasing Magnum’s visibility and introducing its work to
an international group of photography critics and fans. David Seymour wrote to John
Morris from Europe a few days before Photokina opened: “A full Magnum delegation is
going to Cologne with Trudy [Feliu, the Paris bureau chief at the time], HCB [Cartier-
Bresson], and Inge [Morath]. A full plane-load of photographic critics from New York is
arriving with Bruce Downs, Jacob Deshin, Bob Schwalberg [of Popular Photography],
etc…”
56

Chim’s introduction to the Magnum gallery rooted Magnum in the history of
modern journalism, including the technological developments of cameras and the printing
press.
57
He portrayed Magnum as a community of photographers who combined creative
expression with human interest reporting, who mentored younger photographers and
accepted them to their ranks, and who worked with top picture magazines and picture
agents around the world in order to publish its work. Chim also declared that Robert Capa
had been central to Magnum’s development and its conception of photojournalism, and he
was one of the first people to make such a strong connection between Robert Capa and

55
Before and after Magnum’s exhibit in 1956, Photokina visitors could also see the work of established
photographers such as Erich Salomon, August Sander, Irving Penn and Ansel Adams, which Gruber curated
for the exposition in the form of solo exhibitions. In the case of Magnum, however, it appears that Gruber
showed the images similarly to a collection of Life photographs in 1952, in a separate gallery space devoted
to photography as a mode of communication. German Photographic Association, review of “Photokina –
The Early Years 1950-1956, Documents form L. Fritz Gruber and Charles E. Fraser,” accessed on June 19,
2015, dgph.de/presse/html. On the history of photokina expositions including gallery themes see
http://www.photoindustrie-verband.de/artikel/175-years-of-photography-history-of-photokina accessed June
21, 2015.
56
Chim to John Morris, September 25, 1956, AJGM.
57
“The future of our photography is related to the technical progress of the photographic industry” Chim
wrote. “We need better and faster cameras and lenses, faster and better black and white and color films. We
are sure that the photographic industry will help us in our desire to show impressively to others what we see
ourselves.” David Seymour, “Magnum,” Photokina catalog text, AJGM.

312
Magnum. “Capa guided Magnum through the hard beginnings. He animated and
stimulated Magnum’s development. His tragic death while on assignment covering the
war in Indochina is a permanent loss deeply felt by all of us.”
58
In Photokina, Capa was
elevated above the rest of the photographers, and Chim was explicit that younger Magnum
members would carry on Capa’s tradition. In fact, it appears that Magnum had included
many images by its members that were, like Capa’s acclaimed D-Day landing
photographs, grainy, blurred and visibly taken on the run, as if fetishizing the blurred,
“slightly out of focus” aesthetic in the wake of Capa’s death. A journalist from Popular
Photography picked up on this curatorial decision and blamed Magnum for displaying
prints that “showed completely needless grain. It is his feeling that many photographers
are using high-speed film when there is no real need for it.”
59

The curatorial preference for photo essays coupled with the legacy of Capa came
together in the most ambitious exhibition from Magnum’s founding era, The World as
Seen by Magnum Photographers. Produced mostly by Ernst Haas for the Mainichi
Newspaper Company, the commissioned exhibit premiered at the Takashimaya
department store in Tokyo in the fall of 1959. Mainichi was a large publishing enterprise
with which Magnum had contacts since the early 1950s, when it paid Robert Capa to work
in Japan for six weeks using only Japanese camera technology. Even though Magnum’s
New York and Paris offices struggled to distribute its pictures in Japan on a regular basis,
and only hired a Japanese agent in 1957, Magnum developed a significant following
among the Japanese public, including photography fans, amateurs, and professional
photographers employed by dozens of weekly illustrated magazines. Japanese

58
Ibid.
59
Magnum Memo, May 30, 1957, AJGM.

313
photographers followed American photojournalism through internationally distributed
magazines such as Life and through traveling exhibitions, which included The Family of
Man, Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive Moment show, and an exhibition of Life photographs that
had also been shown at Photokina in Cologne. They also came into direct contact with
some of the top American and European photographers who relocated to Japan after the
war (including Horace Bristol and David Douglas Duncan) or traveled there on
assignment, including Magnum’s own Robert Capa, Bischof, Cartier-Bresson and Marc
Riboud. Hiroshi Hamaya became Magnum’s first Japanese photographer in early 1959
and he served as an important local liaison during the show’s production. He also recorded
the Japanese public’s enthusiastic reception of the exhibition.
60
After touring Japan for a
number of months, the exhibit arrived in the United States and opened at the Library of
Congress on November 3, 1959 to much fanfare and publicity, including introductory
speeches by Magnum photographers and staff.
61

Ernst Haas’ exhibition design affirmed the importance of the photojournalistic
context. As Magnum’s press release for the show explained, “Haas conceived the format
in panels the proportion of magazine spreads – where most of Magnum’s work appears.
However, in making the layouts, he utilized graphic composition and dynamic opposition
to tell the story of each section instead of following a journalistic story line.”
62
Haas edited
a number of photographic stories by Magnum photographers that had recently appeared in

60
According to Magnum’s correspondence with Hamaya, thousands of people stood in line to see the show
in Tokyo and they were enthusiastic about what the Japanese called the show’s “humanities.” Meeting
Minutes from Magnum Board of Directors Meeting, February 22, 1957; John Morris to Magnum
Stockholders, “A Report on 1957 Operations,” March 15, 1958; and Hiroshi Hamaya to Magnum
photographers, March 28, 1960, AJGM all. An excerpt of a letter from Hiroshi Hamaya to John Morris,
explaining the landscape of the Japanese photography scene, was reprinted in a Magnum Memo dated
October 31, 1959, AJGM.
61
Magnum press release on The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, n.d., AJGM.
62
Ibid.

314
the illustrated press: Eve Arnold’s story on birthing conditions around the world, which
Magnum had distributed internationally to magazines in the United States, France, Italy
and Japan but which began as a commission from Mennen baby oil; Cartier-Bresson’s
photographs from his recent trip to China and Mongolia published in magazines such as
Paris Match; Inge Morath’s photographs from a recent trip to Iran published in Holiday;
and Erich Hartmann’s work, mostly for Fortune, on Israeli industrialization.
63
Like the
promotional material produced by and about Magnum, including its earlier exhibitions,
The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers “acknowledged its part in a network of
commercial exchange” – one that included the agency, a range of magazines, and growing
number of exhibition spaces that sold, distributed and printed photographs and contributed
to the medium’s popularity.
64

Magnum asked Edward Steichen to write the show’s introduction and the agency
displayed his statement at the opening of the exhibition. Reflecting Magnum’s own
publicity efforts, Steichen devoted an entire paragraph to commending the “extraordinarily
knowledgeable and dedicated administrative staff” that made Magnum into a highly
effective operation within the international system of press photography.
65
He noted that
Magnum dealt with magazines and published books on six continents, and he singled out
John Morris and Inge Bondi by name for their operational guidance. But the symbolic
language in Steichen’s introduction would become more important than his emphasis on
Magnum as a network, a business, and a leader in illustrated journalism.
66
Steichen called

63
Ibid.
64
Richard Meyer, What was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 215.
65
Edward Steichen, Introduction text for The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, n.d., AJGM.
66
Recent publications claiming Magnum’s photography resisted both editorial contexts and the
propagandistic uses of photography in World War II include Boot, Magnum Stories, 4-9 and Ignatieff,
Magnum Degrees, 52-62.

315
Magnum “a new kind of picture agency, a miniature United Nations of photographers,
owned and operated by the photographers themselves.” For Steichen, Magnum’s
international make-up proved the group’s global citizenship and its investment in people
rather than politics. When Steichen wrote that Magnum was at the forefront “in the
reporting and documenting of the human aspect of timely world events, which, tomorrow,
become timeless affirmations of history,” he insisted that audiences and critics pay
attention to the photographers’ concern for the human condition rather than any
ideological stance in a world dominated by the binary politics of the Cold War.
67
Steichen
also characterized Magnum as a wheel, whose spokes were its international members (the
French Henri Cartier-Bresson, the English George Rodger, the Austrian Ernst Haas and
the Swiss Werner Bischof) but whose hub was “Robert Capa (American).” Reiterating
Chim’s claim from 1956 about Capa’s centrality to the organization, Steichen’s statement
now further suggested that Magnum’s internationalism did not challenge, but could
progress the United States’ cultural, economic, and political leadership under the guise of
humanism.
68
While similar tropes appeared in his shows of European photography at
MOMA of which Magnum was just one part, they now encompassed the meaning of
Magnum’s photography without a clear explanation of how the agency’s humanist
impulse mapped onto its equally admirable business operations.
Steichen’s ruminations on Magnum as a miniature United Nations were paired
with three quotes by Magnum photographers, which were displayed at the beginning of
the exhibition and which for the first time distilled Magnum’s photography into a few
essential ideas. As the organizer of the exhibition, Haas included his own definition of

67
Edward Steichen, Introduction text for The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, n.d., AJGM.
68
On how the United States made humanism stand in for American capitalism and democracy after WWII,
see Turner, Democratic Surround, 217-251.

316
successful photography, which emphasized the subjective qualities of photojournalism:
“The photographer must work with his eye, with his brain, and with his heart.” The other
two came from Magnum’s co-founders. The one by Cartier-Bresson was slightly different
from the version that appeared in his 1952 photo book but still recognizable:
“Photography is for me the development of a plastic medium in a battle with time, a
medium based on the pleasure of observing and the ability to capture a decisive moment.”
The final quote, “If your pictures aren’t good, you aren’t close enough,” came from Robert
Capa.
69
To understand Magnum, this exhibition suggested, one needed to understand that
Magnum photographers’ work was always subjective even as it reported on world news;
and to acknowledge that all of the members were working to capture a decisive moment,
to get close to the action and human drama, or both.
Over the course of a decade, Magnum’s work with exhibitions promoted the
journalistic context of their photography while also helping to create a market for
photographs, which could be sold and displayed as individual works of art. They also
began to generate lasting texts that explained Magnum through two poles of its
organization, exemplified by Robert Capa (photography as journalism) and Henri Cartier-
Bresson (photography as art) – associations also generated through the individual efforts
of living photographers and relatives of deceased Magnum members. These proved more
influential for understanding Magnum than the agency’s efforts to underscore its
collective nature, its place within a commercial system, and its leadership for a cadre of
amateur photographers and enthusiasts.

69
Magnum press release on The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, n.d., AJGM.

317
The Mythology of the Concerned Photographer
At the same time that The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers began its
American tour, an alternative narrative emerged in the form of Robert Capa’s first
posthumous exhibition, which upheld the individual and his values over the photographic
cooperative and the collective values of photojournalism. War Photographs – Robert
Capa, curated by Cornell Capa with the help of three assistants, opened at the Time &
Life building in February 1960, with approximately 300 editors and friends of Robert
Capa in attendance.
70
After its New York premier, Cornell Capa secured a Smithsonian
Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) grant to circulate the show throughout
the United States, and it toured internationally (to countries such as Japan, Italy and Israel)
at the same time that The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers was also on the
road.
71
Rather than a Magnum project, the Robert Capa exhibit represented one of the first
initiatives of the Robert Capa-David Seymour Photographic Foundation, founded in 1958
and spearheaded by Cornell Capa, and which by 1966 would be renamed as the Capa-
Seymour-Bischof Photographic Memorial Fund. The war photography exhibition became
the seed for subsequent shows and culminated finally in The Concerned Photographer
exhibit, which opened on October 1, 1967 at the Riverside Museum in New York.
In 1939, the Riverside Museum had hosted the first retrospective exhibit of Lewis
Hine’s work, which was sponsored by leading figures in the photography world at the
time, including Steichen, Stryker, Newhall, and Elizabeth McCausland, who wrote the
exhibition catalog. Yet for decades, the museum represented the “minor league – far
uptown and distant from the city’s cultural district,” and its shows did not attract as many

70
Magnum Memo, February 6, 1960, AJGM.
71
List of photographers and panels for The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, n.d., (c. 1961-1962),
and Magnum press release on The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers, n.d., AJGM.

318
visitors or as much attention from the press as mid-town institutions.
72
For Cornell Capa,
who was looking to organize an independent exhibition, there were few New York
museums that would host a photography show curated by an outsider, even if that museum
regularly displayed photography.
73
Fortuitously, a friend introduced Cornell to Oriole
Farb, who directed the Riverside Museum, at a memorial exhibit of Chim’s work titled
“Chim’s Times” at the Israel Museum, and Farb agreed to host a photography exhibit as
long as it was a thematic exhibit rather than a one-man show.
74
This fit Cornell Capa’s
aims perfectly. Though he did not yet have a specific theme in mind, he had started
planning an exhibit that would bring together images by Robert Capa, Chim, and Bischof,
three deceased Magnum photographers; Dan Weiner, a deceased non-Magnum
photographer; Andre Kertesz, a representative of an earlier generation of “candid
photography”; and Leonard Freed, a young photographer who had become known for his
documentation of Black life in America between 1964-1965, and who would become a
Magnum member in 1972.
75
When the show opened, it marked the first time that the
Riverside Museum devoted its space entirely to photography.
76

72
Raeburn, Staggering Revolution, 225-226.
73
Cornell Capa later explained that part-time galleries in New York, such as Underground and Exposure,
opened at night and only showed individual pictures. There was no place to “hang pictures of some
commentary value or to make a thematic exhibition and show it someplace.” Ellen C. Hicks, “The
Documentary Tradition at ICP,” Museum News 54:3 (February 1976), 13-19. In this interview he did not
mention the work of the Limelight Gallery, which also displayed photographs in these years, including the
Chim’s Children exhibit organized by Magnum. See Magnum Board Minutes, September 29, 1959, AJGM
and Helen Gee, Limelight: A Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997).
74
Hicks, “Documentary Tradition at ICP,” 14-15.
75
Robert Capa met Andre Kertesz during the Spanish Civil War and collaborated with him on Death in the
Making, which Kertesz laid out in New York. Lebrun and Lefebvre, Robert Capa, 63. In the same year of
The Concerned Photographer exhibition, Leonard Freed released his acclaimed photo book, Black in White
America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1967).
76
Richard F. Shepard, “Photo Exhibition Honors Six Witnesses to History” New York Times (September 30,
1967), C35.

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During the show’s production, Farb decided to make the Museum the Fund’s
permanent home and collaborator, explaining that “the goals of the Fund and the Museum
are the same. To conserve the visual records of the past and to present the work of
contemporary artists has been this institution’s program for forty-five years.”
77
The mode
of presentation that the Fund and Museum chose in The Concerned Photographer
consisted of six one-man shows, which on the one hand “stressed the importance of the
individual.”
78
As seen in installation photographs of the traveling exhibit, viewers entering
the show first saw the photographers’ portraits and learned about their individual
biographies, and proceeded to mini galleries of their images, which were displayed on
either a black or white background based on the photographer. [Figure 5.4] But more
importantly, the exhibit brought the photographers together under the label of “concern,”
and as one continued to meander through the exhibition space, the markers of authorship
seemed to dissipate until the viewer was immersed in images of humanity from a range of
cultures and time periods. [Figure 5.5]
Cornell Capa created the label but not the ideas underpinning “concerned
photography.”
79
He relied on the “early humanitarian-with-a-camera” Lewis Hine, who,
Cornell Capa said, had explained it best: “There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to
show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be
appreciated.”
80
Hine defined his own photography as a socially engaged practice meant to
affect change. Though he did not train as a photographer, he took up the camera in order
to reveal the dire conditions in which impoverished and unprotected workers, especially

77
Oriole Farb quoted in Cornell Capa, Concerned Photographer, n.p.
78
Ibid.
79
Cornell recalled coming up with the label while on vacation in Mexico as a result of Farb’s request. Hicks,
“Documentary Tradition at ICP,” 13-15.
80
Capa, Concerned Photographer, n.p.

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child laborers working in cotton mills, lived and worked.
81
Cornell explained that like
Hine, concerned photographers produced work that showed a “personal commitment and
concern for mankind” – a photographic practice with a social conscience that could not be
turned off and that engaged deeply with the world and its people.
Although Hine is now accepted as the founder of American documentary
photography, in some ways this lineage was enforced by Cornell Capa, who made an
important intervention when he claimed the photographer for the Fund and for concerned
photography. Following his first show at the Riverside in 1939, the New York Photo
League had embraced and “enshrined” Hine as the father of the socially engaged practice
that League members supported. His photographs of workers became the standard by
which to measure new members’ work and the League invited Hine to lecture on
photography and critique the League’s exhibitions, including their own version of “Men at
Work,” inspired by Hine’s documentation of the construction of the Empire State
Building.
82
When Hine died in 1940, the Photo League acquired and maintained his
archive but within a decade, the collective disbanded after being blacklisted as a
communist organization.
83
After MOMA turned down the archive, the collection finally
ended up at the George Eastman House in Rochester.
84
When Cornell resuscitated Hine’s
name in 1967, no contemporary group of photographers actively associated itself with the

81
Trained as a sociologist, Hine used his camera to document children for the national Child Labor
Committee – work that was instrumental to changing child labor laws in the United States. Lewis Hine was
also the first photographer that Beaumont Newhall named in his chapter on “Documentary Photography,”
which like Cornell Capa’s narrative drew an arc from Hine to the FSA. Newhall, History of Photography,
235. See also Vicki Goldberg, Lewis W. Hine, Children at Work (New York: Prestel Publishing, 1999) and
Kate Sampsell-Willmann, Lewis Hine as Social Critic (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2009).
82
Raeburn, Staggering Revolution, 225-227.
83
See Fiona M. Dejardin, “The Photo League: Left-wing Politics and the Popular Press,” History of
Photography 18:2 (Summer 1994), 159-173.
84
Raeburn, Staggering Revolution, 228; Naomi Rosenblum, “A Retrospective Look at the Acceptance of
Photography as Fine Art” in Barth, Master Photographs from PFA, 39n23.

321
early documentarian. Conveniently, Lewis Hine was also the last photographer whose
work the Riverside Museum had exhibited, so the association between Hine, the Fund, and
Riverside worked on an institutional level as well.
The Concerned Photographer marked a crucial turning point for Magnum and
photojournalism more broadly because it retroactively applied the label of concerned,
documentary photography onto Magnum’s founder, Robert Capa, as well as other
photographers working in Capa’s tradition. Magnum was part of but not central to the
show because, according to Cornell Capa, concerned photography could not be contained
by just one agency. In the photo book that resulted from the exhibit and which canonized
the term “concerned photography,” the Magnum name came up just once, when Capa
wrote: “This book is dedicated to the ideals of photojournalism, which in turn led to the
founding of Magnum in 1946 [sic] by Robert Capa and his friends, David Seymour, Henri
Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger.” In this version, “concerned photography”
underpinned Magnum’s origins and the spirit of its contemporary work but it was also
bigger than Magnum and photojournalism itself because it did not factor in the network of
commercial exchange. Notoriously, Hine died penniless and almost homeless, having
failed to make much money from his work or to establish a broad reputation in his lifetime
outside of the League. In the thirties and forties, the League worked primarily on the level
of expression and communication – including group shows and public critiques – rather
than sales and placement in the press or other publications.
85
Like photographers at the
League, Magnumites regularly edited each others’ work into stories, gave each other

85
Raeburn, Staggering Revolution, 229-232. See also Anne Wilkes Tucker, This Was the Photo League:
Compassion and the Camera from the Depression to the Cold War (Stephen Daiter Gallery, 2001) and
Bezner, Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal to the Cold War (Baltimore: The John
Hopkins University Press, 1999).

322
feedback on technique, and worked from strict shooting scripts, but they were especially
committed to seeing their photography appear in well-paying publication contexts.
Though modeled as a collective, Magnum was still a commercial organization that
represented the market-driven industry of photojournalism. By contrast, Hine, the League,
and “concerned photography” suggested an alternative narrative of documentary
photography that was untethered to market demands.
86
Documentary may have
represented “the ideals of photojournalism” after the war, but as magazines asked for more
color, glamor, and travel promotion, the market had created a splintering between the
photographers at Magnum and the photographers who were “concerned.”
While popularizing a new label for photography that broke with Magnum and
photojournalism, Cornell Capa also synthesized the narratives about Robert Capa, David
(Chim) Seymour, and Werner Bischof that had been circulating in commemorative
exhibitions and books since their deaths. As Cornell Capa’s note to Morris at the opening
of this chapter indicates, Magnum was not sure what to do about integrating the legacies
of its founders into its collective identity. For Magnum’s ten-year anniversary feature in
Popular Photography, Chim had asked Morris to keep the deaths of Capa and Werner out
of the Magnum story because these are “our own personal problem” and to focus instead
on the “excitement” of Magnum’s actual activities.
87
But their deaths also created

86
Bezner claims that social documentary photography was replaced by two genres: Expressionistic
photography, exemplified by the success of Robert Frank’s The Americans, which was a highly personalized
work in the guise of the documentary, and photojournalism, exemplified by The Family of Man. For Bezner,
Steichen’s exhibit acknowledged that “documentary photography now belonged more to the world of
commercial journalism than to individual, freelance photographers… documentary work came to be
understood as the province of photojournalists who were… often controlled by corporate, mass media forces
in ideological collusion with official cold war policies.” Bezner, Photography and Politics in America, 121.
I think Cornell Capa’s intervention in the late sixties shows another afterlife of documentary photography as
engaged or concerned photojournalism and it complicates Bezner’s narrative, which suggests that
documentary does not survive past the fifties.
87
Chim to John Morris, June 9, 1956, AJGM

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opportunities to commemorate the photographers and interpret their work through
exhibitions, books, and public statements. Like The Concerned Photographer exhibit a
decade later, these early tributes emphasized their individual vision, their compassion for
vulnerable subjects including children, and their distaste of war.
Unlike Bischof and Chim, who were mythologized after their deaths, Capa began
to mythologize himself during his lifetime. During the Spanish Civil War, he took on his
new name in order to transform the Hungarian-Jewish Andre Friedman into the
cosmopolitan Robert Capa.
88
Amidst the rise of fascism, during which Capa had to move
from Hungary to Berlin to Paris and then New York, he invented an identity that was free
of Jewish associations and, like the photographic medium in which he was working,
international and legible across language barriers.
89
As early as 1938, Britain’s Picture
Post called Robert Capa “The Greatest War Photographer in the World,” placing his
portrait, film camera in hand, on the cover of its December 3 issue. [Figure 3.15] Capa
took great pride in the war photography that had gained him his reputation, beginning with
his image of the “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War, which initiated his long
relationship with Life, to his photographs of the D-Day landing, published again in Life
during World War II.
90
His first exhibition in the United States, at the New School for
Social Research in 1938, consisted solely of his Spanish Civil War photography, taken to
build support for the Republican side and wh