All that jazz and much more in Magnum photographs exhibition (2024)

‘The photographic decision, like the jazz decision, must be instantaneous,” said the music fan — and Magnum photographer — Dennis Stock about his 1958 photograph of a jazz band in San Francisco. His picture, above, of Earl Hines (piano), Jimmy Archey (trombone), Francis Joseph “Muggsy” Spanier (cornet) and Earl Watkins (drums) is one of the prints available in a new exhibition of the agency’s work.

Now in its ninth year, the Magnum Square Print Sale, which runs until this weekend, will for the first time include work by invited photographers and estates, including the photojournalists Weegee and Hannah Reyes Morales, the cinematographer Roger Deakins and the film-maker Judd Apatow.

The photos are on view at the Magnum Gallery, central London, until April 22. More than 100 signed or estate-stamped, museum-quality, 6in square prints will be available until April 23, priced £110.

For more details see magnumphotos.com

“She was surprisingly unattractive; the beauty was manufactured. But she was extremely intelligent and sensitive. And likeable.”
Personal Exposures by Elliott Erwitt (1988)

“A network of lanes and by-lanes seem to sprout from the Jama Masjid mosque in Old Delhi. It is my favorite part of the historic city. Photographing the bazaar opposite Jama Masjid gave me a strange feeling — the shops with tyres and wheels creating strange patterns, young ones waiting for customers. To take in the whole experience, I stepped back and bumped into the road divider, turned and saw a man in deep sleep in the middle of the road. The scene compelled me to create a new perspective.”
Raghu Rai

“My father and his forebears were all born and lived in Wales. By a quirk of timing I was born in England. Although quickly reinstated to our south Wales family home, the spectre of ‘born in England’ has permanently hung over me. The exploration of this dichotomy has been a driving stimulation in trying to understand my culture. I have wanted to discover my place in Wales and explore my contact with my fellow Welsh.”
Edited extract from Wales: Land of My Father by David Hurn (2000)

“This ten-year-old Afghan refugee girl living in Peshawar, Pakistan, had never seen her homeland. I photographed her at the same time I was in Peshawar trying to find Sharbat Gula seventeen years after I first photographed her in Nasir Bagh refugee camp.”
Steve McCurry

“Of all the photographs Paul Fusco made from that train, very few depict what seem to be disinterested spectators. They don’t look much like mourners, either, in their sundresses, shirtsleeves and swimsuits. They are more like friends, dropping by on a Saturday to pay respects. They hold in their hands and above their heads not signs, but enlarged personal notes.”
From an article by Charles Desmarais, art critic and former president of the San Francisco Art Institute

“I remember a line written on the façade of a Protestant church in Belfast: ‘Time is Short.’ The reverend who wrote it was probably thinking of the afterlife and the divine commandment to prepare for it. But he is right, time is running out”
Abbas

“The flow of people in a setting, their changing relationships with each other and their environment, and their constantly changing expressions and movements, all combine to create dynamic situations that provide the photographer with limitless choices of when to push the button. By choosing a precise intersection between subject and time, the photographer may transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, and the real into the surreal.”
Edited extract from the preface to American Color by Constantine Manos (1995)

“Protesters against the Dakota Access Pipeline left Standing Rock one morning in 2016 and drove to Mandan where they tried to enter a ‘man camp’ of oil workers, which carries a history of abuse of Native women. It was Mother’s Day. As the police blocked the entrance, one protester extended his hand.”
Larry Towell

“What is next for me as a photographer? Due to my age and poor health, I hope for my photographs to continue as an archive. I now search through my earlier work looking for the images that are still worth attention, and this is one of them. In Belfast, during the so-called Troubles, an Irish youth confronts the ‘British State’. You could say that history is the future for me through the Magnum archive.”
Chris Steele-Perkins

“Ernst Haas was an early pioneer of colour photography at a time when it was considered inferior to black and white as a creative medium. He, however, believed the opposite. Haas was fascinated by New York City, and after joining Magnum in 1949, with encouragement from Robert Capa, he set out to discover the city he had always dreamed about and wanted to photograph since he was a teen.

“New York City was first to embrace Haas’s colour photography and in 1962, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work — the first colour photography exhibition held at the museum.”
Ernst Haas Estate

“Rosa Parks took a stand on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, when she refused to give up her seat on a bus after the driver, James F Blake, demanded she move to the back of the bus to make way for white passengers. Racial problems have improved since but the struggle for equality continues.

“I made this photograph on assignment for the Washington Post Sunday Magazine while Miss Parks spent a week travelling on a bus with young people, on the Civil Rights trail, sharing her knowledge and experiences.”
Eli Reed

“I took this photo during the third session with the Band for their Music from Big Pink album. We already had several beautiful photographs but they felt none were right for the album.

“I didn’t invent this persona or create an illusion; rather, I managed to capture the essence of who they were — whatever past lives, experiences, dreams or proclivities they embodied — and distilled it into a picture of them.”
Elliott Landy

“We can imagine a future far from now in paradise, but we should always be reminded that the tiny blue marble on which we live is already a Garden of Eden, light years away from any other possible habitable worlds.”
Sabiha Cimen

“Back in Paris early in 1948, Capa took more interest in Monsieur Dior, master of the New Look, and his star models, Bettina Graziani and Suzy Parker, than in existentialism, political tensions or even the genius of bebopper Charlie Parker. Spending his time on the Right Bank between the Bar des Théâtres, the Hôtel Lancaster (where he was staying) and Magnum’s offices on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré (where he worked), Capa was on the lookout for assignments from American magazines (This Week, Holiday, Harper’s Bazaar) and threw himself into fashion photography.”
Robert Capa: The Paris Years 1933–1954 by Bernard Lebrun and Michel Lefebvre (2012)

“While Leonard Freed made pictures of important events in the civil rights struggle, including the 1963 March on Washington, he quickly found that his interests lay not in recording the progress of the Civil Rights movement per se but in exploring the diverse, everyday lives of a community that had been marginalised for so long.

“His sensitive and empathetic approach sought not to stimulate outrage but to foster understanding and bridge cultural divides as a means of transcending racial antipathy.”
From Brett Abbott’s foreword to Black in White America by Leonard Freed (2010)

“After seeing what human beings can do to each other, I decided to dedicate more time to nature and animals. With this in mind, I hit the road with a nomad family and in 2021 joined their seasonal transhumance — a tradition that goes back centuries. In this picture, twelve-year-old Cetin is facing his goat during our journey. He said, ‘I love animals, especially the young ones.’”
Emin Ozmen

Marilyn Silverstone had begun photographing professionally in 1955. In 1959 she went to India for four months but ended up staying for 14 years. She accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy during the first lady’s trip to the country in 1962 when eager photographers followed her every move.
Magnum Stories/Estate of Marilyn Silverstone

“This place is located in Phola Park, a section of Thokoza township. It is a place our parents described as a bloody battle place during the rival political wars in the 1990s, marking its historical significance.”
Lindokuhle Sobekwa

“Since the early 2000s, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, independent Georgia has been striving to become part of Europe — the West. Looking for protection from its overbearing neighbour in the north — Russia — this also led to eager participation in the American-led war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan. The brutal invasion of Ukraine keeps Georgians, who don’t want to return to the imperial Russian yoke, in fear.”
Thomas Dworzak

“After serving in the US Army as a photo interpreter during the Second World War, Chim picked up his camera to take compelling photos of the orphans of war for Unesco. These photos showed his capacity to empathetically engage with children, while he also was able to connect with Hollywood stars such as Sophia Loren, Ingrid Bergman, and Kirk Douglas.

“By 1951, Chim was visiting Israel most years to capture the photos of the hard-working immigrants who were building a new country. He wrote to his sister: ‘It was like coming home again. It was like picking up the living threads of my life, for which I had been searching in vain on the heaps of rubble and ash in the ruins of Warsaw.’”
Ben Shneiderman, David ‘Chim’ Seymour’s nephew”

“I was wandering along the banks of the Nile near Edfu looking for pictures for my upcoming book on water. I was mainly interested in the dhows loading and unloading but came across a couple of guys washing down their horses.

“Looking to make a shape with emphasis on the guy in the water, I had the good fortune that one of the horses reared up and made what would otherwise have been a fairly banal picture into a pretty good shape.”
Ian Berry

“Bob Henriques was known for candid snapshots that laid bare some of the 20th century’s most famous events and figures. Pictured here is John F Kennedy during the 1960 election campaign, only months before becoming the youngest man ever to be elected president of the United States.”
Estate of Bob Henriques

“Music makes life feel full of colour and joy that we can experience, enjoy and share.”
Cristina García Rodero

“The Chao Phraya River is the lifeblood of Thailand. It is born as the Ping and Nan rivers become one. From there, its waters flow south to Bangkok. These pictures are a recording of what I saw, and the people I met, along ‘the River of Kings’ in Bangkok.”
By the River of Kings by Jacob Aue Sobol (2016)

“‘Purple hat,’ as we sometimes call the character in this picture, reflects the astonishing Technicolor world of New York street life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike the ill-fitting sportswear or the inoffensive colours of the 21st century that seem to be saying ‘nothing to see here’, the people in Ernest Cole’s colour photography seem to be celebrating their escape from the monochrome social strictures of the 1950s. This colour style revolution seems particularly intense among the black subjects of Cole’s photography. Revolt into style, indeed.”
Ernest Cole Estate

“The Jérissa open-pit iron mine, according to legend, would have provided the raw materials needed to build the Eiffel Tower and the rails of the Paris Metro. Today, the villages are empty. The youth go to the capital to look for work, and the bravest work in the cactus fields — the only agriculture possible in an arid land.”
Zied Ben Romdhane

“In the fall of 1963, we drove our Oldsmobile Cutlass to the west coast. I had two Leicas, a laundry bag full of Tri-X film and a lot of time. Rolf Winter had his writing pad and his pipe. We ate burgers, ribs and coleslaw, drank Dr Pepper and Budweiser, and stayed at whichever motel showed up at the day’s end.

“We found a country that had little to do with my childhood dreams, but despite that discovery, this trip changed my life and my future as a photographer. I fell in love with North America and in 1967 moved to New York.”
Thomas Hoepker

“China and America now have a love/hate relationship. But the youth of China are still in love with American iconography, food, clothing and all items associated with growing up and being young.”
Martin Parr