Scholar Discuss with Nadya Bair: Photography Exhibitions and the Magnum Model – Information and Occasions

Founded as a photographic cooperative in 1947, Magnum Photos aimed to promote the work of its photographers to as many markets as attainable. Already within the late Forties, its photos appeared in illustrated magazines as information, but additionally as promotion for worldwide journey. Magnum photographers labored on movie units, and so they shot public relations campaigns for the United Nations and Standard Oil alike. In order to additional promote the work of its photographers, Magnum additionally started organizing reveals of prints that traveled world wide, familiarizing worldwide audiences Magnum’s identify. In these contexts, the which means of Magnum’s photos started to vary. Exhibitions usually celebrated photographers’ particular person prints because the expression photographers’ concern for humanity, and of their potential to seize what Henri Cartier-Bresson known as “decisive moments.”

This speak appears to be like on the creation of a few of  the primary exhibitions and tasks of the Magnum company within the Nineteen Fifties—together with Magnum’s First: The Face of Time and Chim’s Children of Europe—to show how such endeavours helped consolidate the concept of Magnum as a gaggle of worldwide, humanist photographers who adopted their instincts and values fairly than catering to the work of its purchasers. By wanting on the community of curators, publishers, and editors who had been formative to the creation of Magnum’s model, this speak will contemplate the infrastructure for exhibiting images at mid-century.

Speaker Bio

A historian of images, the press, and mass visible tradition, Nadya Bair is assistant professor of Art History at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. Bair’s first monograph, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press, 2020), gained the 2021 PROSE Award for Media and Cultural Studies. Bair’s articles on the historical past of photojournalism have appeared within the journals American Art, History of Photography, Fotogeschichte, and several other edited volumes together with Facing Black Star (MIT Press, 2023) and Life Magazine and the Power of Photography (Yale, 2020). Bair’s present ebook challenge, on the International Center of Photography and its founder Cornell Capa, was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for 2023-2024 and a fellowship on the Frankel Institute of Jewish Studies on the University of Michigan, the place Bair is in residence in 2025-2026.