Inspiration Friday – Magnum Photos

This post is part of a series about photographers whose work has inspired me and helped to shape my own vision. The two previous posts in the Inspiration series: Galen Rowell and James Nachtwey. Today I cover the work of two photographers from Magnum Photos.

According to Wikipedia,

War photographers Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymour, William Vandivert, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and George Rodger founded Magnum in 1947, responding to their World War II experiences. Magnum is one of the first photographic cooperatives, owned and administered entirely by members. The staff serve a support role for the photographers who retain all copyrights to their own work.
The Magnum cooperative has included photojournalists from across the world and has covered many historical events of the 20th century. The cooperative’s archive includes photographs depicting family life, drugs, religion, war, poverty, famine, crime, government and celebrities.

Robert Capa (Magnum portfolio, Wikipedia entry) was the first Magnum photographer I discovered. When I first started learning photography in high school, I was absolutely taken with war photography. I spent a lot of time in the library just looking at book after book of war photographs. Out of all that I looked at, Capa’s images are still the ones that stick out in my mind. He is famously quoted as saying, “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” and his work embodied that ethos. He landed on Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion, and made his most famous image of a soldier crawling through the water (number 32 in the Magnum portfolio). Grainy and blurred a bit from motion, that picture has an intense emotional impact and it remains one of the most iconic images from World War II. Capa died with a camera in his hand after he stepped on a landmine in French Indochina – now Vietnam.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (Magnum gallery, Foundation H.C.B., Wikipedia entry)was a documentary photographer who influenced me most through his street photography, impacting my style of wedding photography and street photography. He coined the term “the decisive moment” – according to him, “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression.” I’m not sure what else I can write about the man other than to encourage you to spend some time looking through his body of work. You’ll be rewarded.

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13 February 2009 | Other Photographers, Photos | Comments