Magnum Magnum
edited by Brigitte Lardinois
568pp, Thames & Hudson, £95
Look at Robert Capa's picture "Loyalist troops in action near Fraga on the Aragon front, Spain", taken on September 7 1938. The isolated central figure, a soldier whose outline and personality are blurred by the heat of the moment, is stepping forwards into a middle distance that's milky with battle-smoke. To his right, and occupying one whole side of the picture, is an even less sharply-focused sequence of rocky overhang and uncertain human movement: a pointing hand maybe, the side of a face, a cartridge-belt? The whole impression (and impressionism is what the picture approaches) is extremely ambiguous, at once definite and vague, forceful and forlorn. Although these combinations give it a visionary intensity, they never break Capa's contract with actuality. Like his other five brilliant pictures in Magnum Magnum, they "witness" in a way that would have made Wilfred Owen proud.
Magnum was founded by Capa and others in 1947, and Magnum Magnum celebrates the achievements of the co-operative by collecting photographs that members have chosen by other members they especially admire - six pictures in each case. This suits the original spirit of the enterprise, and creates a pleasing sense of connection between past and present. Although famous individuals have died, fashions have changed, colour photography has become ubiquitous, and the arrival of the internet has profoundly altered the ways in which the organisation operates (400,000 images are presently available for downloading), the founding principles are still intact. Magnum is an agency that allows photographers to work independent of the commissioning processes of magazines and so on, it enables them to keep the copyright in their work, and it pretty well guarantees that clients will receive work of exceptional quality. This book may be the size of a tombstone, but actually it's a proof of great and enduring liveliness.
Arguments about what makes a classic Magnum photograph are notoriously difficult to resolve, especially when considering as large a stretch of work as this. But it's fair to say that the early emphasis on "the decisive moment" has never entirely faded: these pictures are high-end photojournalism, they're reportage of one kind or another (sometimes domestic and intimate, more often political and graphic), they're "masculine" (and in the great majority of cases taken by men), and they're generally keen to subordinate trickery to lucidity, self to subject, arrangement to actuality. In all these respects, the work of Capa and Cartier-Bresson is exemplary: they manifest the fundamental desire of Magnum photographers "to look at life, to witness our times".
The Cartier-Bresson pictures, chosen by Eve Arnold, have the same kind of authenticity as Capa's work, but are characteristically quieter in mood, less manifestly sudden in their seizure of a moment, more modest. (Arnold remembers Cartier-Bresson telling her: "Eve, when we are good, we are maybe little better than the watchmaker.") But their subtlety has a kind of grandeur all the same. "Women praying at sunrise in the Himalayas, Srinagar" (1948), for instance, shows from the back two robed figures standing, and two or three crouching, as they stare across a river valley to the mountains in the distance. One of these standing women has her hands lifted and open in a gesture which is part-supplication and part-blessing - and as if to endorse both aspects of this, a little broth of white cloud appears to perch on her finger-tips. The image is several worlds away from Capa's frightening haste, but it has the same truth to things-in-themselves. It pays homage to the familiar.
Contemporaries of these two great picture-makers, and most subsequent Magnum photographers, build on their foundation and legacy. And although none of them "fixes" reality to suit their ultimate intentions, several have benefited from happenstance in the way that Cartier-Bresson might be said to have done by those clouds coming to hand. In Rene Burri's "São Paulo, Brazil, 1960" (selected by David Hurn) a shot from what appears to be the top of a high-rise block looks down, on the left of the picture, at a miniature city street filled with pedestrians and traffic, while on the righthand side four blackly silhouetted figures march in a sinister group across the sunlit roof of a lower building. Looked at from one point of view, this coincidence of scenes is a lucky break - the relationship in the picture between what is ordinary and what is menacing, between what is meant to be seen and what is meant to be concealed, is extraordinarily gripping. Looking from a different perspective, one could say that the ability to snatch this moment from the flux is the reward for a whole lifetime's vigilance. And proof of the same, as well.
Although Magnum's reputation for reportage has tended to concentrate attention on these sorts of scenes - battle zones, poverty-stricken cities, exotic (to western eyes) locations - this selection usefully reminds us how often and how well the cooperative dealt with portraits. "Alberto Giacometti in his studio, Paris, 1960", also by Burri, sets a high standard early in the alphabetical sequence. As the sculptor's lean, tweed-jacketed body sways to the right of our gaze, his face furrowed as he sucks the life out of a cigarette-stub and considers a freshly modelled figure, a more nearly finished creation stalks through the studio-jumble behind him, heading left and out of frame. It's a marvellous mixture of stillness and animation, of suggested inwardness and outwardly visible form, and implies the process of creation with beautiful tact.
So, in a different way, does Philippe Halsman's iconic portrait "Albert Einstein, Princeton, New Jersey, 1947". Here the great man's face is close to the camera, eyes fixing on our own, mouth concealed by moustache, white hair-shock pushed back, and pen-clip (this is the killer touch) gripping the collar of his jersey. Once again, it is the mixture of things that seems so especially striking: it is an image of great knowingness but also of sadness (the picture wants us to ask why that might be), of intellectual procedure but also of untidiness, of sheer otherness (nobody looks like Einstein except Einstein) and also of lovable human details. The lessons that Capa and Cartier-Bresson learned in the wide outdoors are here rediscovered under artificial light.
The serious concerns of these portraits - and similarly weighty matters are addressed, even when the subject is Mae West or Marilyn Monroe - might make the characteristic mood of a Magnum picture sound grim. Especially when we remember how many of the images have to do with conflicts of the past 60 years (from the Blitz to Darfur), with social tragedies (of deprivation), with the loneliness of individuals in crowds (in New York especially) - and how few of them show anything like a healing landscape. Yet grimness is not the prevailing tone.
Elliot Erwitt actually specialises in pictures that catch the funny/sad oddity of things (a flamingo in Florida unwittingly copying a stand-pipe, a Christ Crucified adjacent to a giant Pepsi hoarding). But even with picture-makers who have a less palpable design on comedy, the gravity of purpose is generally leavened by a relish for experience which is intrinsically celebratory. Look at us human beings, the pictures say. Look how stupid, cruel, greedy and unjust we are, but also look at how we make beauty in adversity, nobility in wretchedness, grace in mundanity. For all these reasons, Thames & Hudson has done well to publish Magnum Magnum for Christmas. Given its size, people buying it might also want to strengthen the legs of their coffee tables at the same time.
· Andrew Motion's memoir In the Blood is published by Faber