Bair, Nadya. The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market

The Great Unseen. Photojournalism and the archive: from analogue to digital

“…In her recent work on the Magnum, reviewed in this special issue, Bair studies these questions to explain the continued notoriety of the agency and its members. 19 Studying patterns in metadata, scholars of photojournalism can move past the traditional focus on the work of a small number of photographers and their pictures. In their overview of photojournalism, Thierry Gervais and Gaëlle Morel rightly emphasise the pivotal role of the picture editor.…”

Spaarnestad: Biography of an Analogue Press Photo Archive

“…In recent studies the importance of analogue press photo archives for the historiography of photojournalism has been highlighted. 2 Press photo archives are, as Alison Nordström writes in relation to the Magnum Archive, 'simple repositories of visual reference materials that had been produced as part of doing business and preserved so that they could be used again.' 3 They originated from the interaction between publishers, (photo) editors, journalists, photographers and photo agencies and thus represent both the complex practice of photojournalism and the image industry in the twentieth century.…”

“…Photographs in the Spaarnestad archive bear traces of use: the image sides have sometimes been retouched, while the back sides reveal detailed information about the origin and publication history, including technical, aesthetic and sometimes ethical instructions. 6 The prints, in fact, reveal the path that the images take from the camera to the printed page [ Figures 1,2,3,4,5 and 6]. As Frido Troost remarked about the photographs in the Spaarnestad archive back in 1986, readers rarely doubt the truthfulness of published photos, but the publication practice should in fact make them doubt this truthfulness: 'The published photograph has passed through many hands, has been selected from many others and has probably not been printed unchanged (...) The context in which a photograph is finally published sometimes no longer has much to do with the event recorded or with the photographer's intention.'…”