Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest |

Chronicle of images

Timeless images In black and white and colour

Journalism, real journalism, is both hard work and high art, said Lance Mannion.

Being in the media and being creative, independent and true (whatever!) : Those in the grind know how elusive it can become amid the punishing excitement of deadlines and the tricky fun of retaining one’s job.

There must be exceptions? To do something like what the bunch of four, comprising Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour, did in the turbulent 1947 by launching a cooperative of photographers to cover and report the human condition all over the globe with the stamp and independence of an idiosyncratic author would be so invitingly snooty today. That the collective has gloriously survived into a vastly different world, saturated with images, and has steadfastly kept its core values, speaks of a rare order of professionalism and involved genius of its members.

Entry into Magnum is obviously not easy as it can only be through peer endorsement. There have been less than 90 members to date and only one Indian: Raghu Rai. The Magnum archives constitute a priceless photo-history of our times. How these photographers dig deeper than the apparent in the captured moment and “evoke a situation, a truth… the poetry of life’s reality” (Cartier-Bresson) speaks of an ethic greater than art.

In the initial years, when large parts of the world were still not photographically explored and a sense of people and cultures remote from one’s own was so meagre, the four founders generously divided the globe among themselves with Cartier-Bresson concentrating on India and the Far East. Images from India form a significant part of Cartier-Bresson’s sensational exposition of the “decisive moment”.

The 20-minute video, India by Magnum, which will be screened once again this weekend (Fri-Sat-Sun) twice each evening at Golconda Fort, features pictures by 14 Magnum photographers covering six decades. You can once again watch celebrated photographs of well-known figures like Cartier-Bresson, Raghu Rai, Bruce Gilden and Steve McCurry in full-blown size. You will also re-discover the kind of things visitors to India find so striking : poverty, nakedness of various kinds, the crowds, cattle and dogs and human beings living so harmoniously, the heat, the monsoons, Benaras, Kumbh mela, and all those modernities and contrasts.

It would have helped if the screenings were held in more hospitable conditions, introduced by an expert and some information provided on each of the photographers. Nevertheless, it’s well-worth visiting Golconda to discover a rare master like Werner Bischof (for those stark superbly crafted pictures of the great famine of 1951), or for the touching empathy in Martine Franck’s portrayals of the gentle life of the Buddhist lamas, for John Vink’s cathartic photo-essay on the hardly known dargah of Saeed Sultan Ibrahim Shahib near Calicut that is visited by hundreds of mentally challenged patients for cure, for the encapsulated evocative detail in Alex Majoli’s project on brothels, the fine use of flash as a searchlight by Carl De Keyzer and the rare explorative impressionism of Gueorgui Pinkhassov. And then you could always seek the virtual world for Magnum photos at www.magnumphotos.com.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail