The Decisive Network
Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market
by Nadya Bair
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Jul 07 2020 | Archive Date Oct 08 2020
Talking about this book? Use #TheDecisiveNetwork #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
Since its founding in 1947, the legendary Magnum Photos agency has been telling its own story about photographers who were witnesses to history and artists on the hunt for decisive moments. Based on unprecedented archival research, The Decisive Network unravels Magnum’s mythologies to offer a new history of what it meant to shoot, edit, and sell news images after World War II.
Nadya Bair shows that between the 1940s and 1960s, Magnum expanded the human-interest story to global dimensions while bringing the aesthetic of news pictures into new markets. Working with a vast range of editorial and corporate clients, Magnum made photojournalism integral to postwar visual culture. But its photographers could not have done this alone. By unpacking the collaborative nature of photojournalism, this book shows how picture editors, sales agents, spouses, and publishers helped Magnum photographers succeed in their assignments and achieve fame. Bair concludes in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when changing market conditions led Magnum to consolidate its brand. In that moment, Magnum’s photojournalists became artists and their assignments oeuvres. Bridging art history, media studies, cultural history, and the history of communication, The Decisive Network transforms our understanding of the photographic profession and the global circulation of images in the predigital world.
Advance Praise
"This wonderfully rich, archival study reveals the long-forgotten impacts of the marketplace and mid-century humanism on the Magnum vision. In the process, it helps reframe the history of the Magnum Agency and of Cold War American visual culture too."—Fred Turner, author of The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties
"An exemplary combination of enterprising archival research, methodological sophistication, and ambitious questioning. The importance of Bair's study stems from the cultural historical significance of its subject—Magnum Photos—the insights it brings to the imagery of global capitalism, and the methodological innovations it develops to treat the full network of agents involved in producing mass-market images, including art editors, printers, assistants, graphic designers, and promoters, in addition to the well-known photographers."—Michael Leja, James and Nan Wagner Farquhar Professor of History of Art, University of Pennsylvania
"Bair has written a fascinating behind-the-scenes history of the legendary photo agency Magnum. She destroys the myth of the lone genius photographer, revealing the important creative contributions of home office staff, magazine editors, curators, and other cultural professionals. Read this book to learn how great art is really made."—Rodney Benson, author of Shaping Immigration News
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780520300354 |
| PRICE | $49.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 336 |
