Magnum Generation(s)
“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”
Robert Capa
To mark the 75th anniversary of Magnum Photos, the famous agency and Editions Caurette are publishing a graphic story combining comics and photography.
Magnum génération(s) is a book that tells the story of the genesis and early adventures of Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour, photojournalists who joined forces to do their part, freely and with dignity, in documenting and bearing witness to the present.
The 185 pages of comics illustrate the encounters and intense friendships between these powerfully evocative trajectories of the first half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, sublime and courageous impulses for freedom and justice; on the other, an old world bent on violent, authoritarian, totalitarian and genocidal regimes. The many reproductions of photographs show us this sequence, captured in the heat of the moment, in bodies, things and landscapes, as the pioneers of the Magnum agency looked at it, discussed it, confronted it and exposed it together to all those concerned with their time. The photographs chosen for this exhibition may be violent, tender, funny or intimate, but they are always necessary: they still capture, each in its own way and in its own register, the vibrations and texture of a world that still has so much to do with our own.
It’s not just a comic strip!
If there’s one thing that the portfolio of 73 photos that follows the comic book shows, it’s that from 1936, when Robert Capa’s lens captured for all eternity the dignity of a Republican mortally wounded by a bullet in revolutionary Spain, to 2022, when Emin Özmen photographed Turkish children playing on the roof of an almost submerged mosque, a secret complicity links bodies of all countries and all generations as they play, rebel, embrace, love and laugh. In short, when, from the here and now where they stand, they make and reveal the course of history.
The book concludes with a 14-page dossier in which Clara Bouveresse offers an enthusiastic but uncompromising history of the agency, from its creation to the present day. In it, we discover the agency’s constant attempts to overcome its limitations and major contradictions, the discussions and even conflicts that sometimes drive it, and the evolution of its principles and organisation.
About the authors
From left to right: Jean-Christophe Caurette (éditor), Hiroyuki Ooshima (colour), Éloïse de la Maison (documentation), Jean-David Morvan (scenario), Rafaël Ortiz (drawing), Steren (colour), Arnaud Locquet (drawing), ScieTronc (drawing).
Magnum Génération(s) is a project initiated by the scriptwriter Jean-David Morvan, who has already produced a number of books that skilfully blend comics and photography, working with big names such as photographers Steve McCurry and Abbas, and international artists such as Korean Kim Jung Gi and Argentine Rafaël Ortiz.
With his passion for photography, he has managed to capture all the intensity and emotion of the early years of the Magnum agency, while guiding readers at a steady pace (without ever falling into didacticism) through the upheavals of the twentieth century.
The drawings are by regulars Arnaud Locquet, ScieTronc and Rafaël Ortiz, and the colours by Hiroyuki Ooshima, assisted by Steren, Séverine Tréfouël, Bruno Furlani and Adèle Martin.
A whole host of other people worked on the project, all of whom are mentioned in the book (buy it, it’s very good!).
In bonus, if you want to see more about the authors, a short 5 minute video:
And in numbers ?
- 248 pages
- 218 x 280 mm
- Coulour, hardcover
- ISBN: 978-2-38289-028-8
- Launch date: 2 november 2022
- Price : 29,90 €
