The photographers of the Magnum Agency—Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Gilden, Depardon, Barbey, Riboud, Parr—all appear in Paris Magnum, published by Flammarion and distributed in the US by Rizzoli, as well as the major exhibition at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. Together, the photographers document the evolution of the capital from 1940 to 2000 almost more effectively than a history textbook.
These black-and-white photographs, especially those of Capa, Cartier-Bresson and David Seymour, aka Chim, remind us of the working-class side of Paris, the “little people” working “little jobs” in neighborhoods with peeling walls, as in Seymour’s 1936 portrait of a coalman, or Cartier-Bresson’s 1932 portrait of plaster-covered packers on the Quai de Javel.
Images from the Liberation are among the most remarkable. They illustrate the jubilation of the moment, and the final battles against German soldiers, with Wehrmacht prisoners seen walking down the street, their hands up. After the war begins the “Glorious Thirty” years during which the city still experienced regular shortages. En 1954, Marc Riboud photographed Abbé Pierre in his first campaign to raise money for the poor. Seymour photographed two young “Zazous” looking like tame rockers in 1952. The first reporters for Magnum also told the story of an angry, united, militant Paris, with demonstrations in support of the Communist Party, a picket line of strikers distributing cans of sardines to workers in 1936, and speculators panicking outside of the Paris Stock Exchange photographed by Capa in 1937. Viewers will smile at Herbert List’s 1936 photograph of a strongman on the Boulevard Clichy.
In the midst of these humanist photographs, even the rich look modest. Wealth, luxury, glitter: these become Magnum photographers’ subjects when the period of color arrives: models, runways, stars of the stage and screen. Then come the suggestive and abstract street photographs of Gueorgui Pinkhassov, a far cry from the postwar classics. The mini-skirt, May ‘68, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Louvre pyramid, Jacques Chirac with a cigaret, Valery Giscard d’Estaing giving a tour of the Elysée, Gainsbourg standing in front of his own wax figure, the construction of La Défense. The final exploration the photographers make is of the margins of society, prostitutes, rough neighborhoods and la vie bohème along the Seine. This sizable publication combines indoor and outdoor scenes, portraits and landscapes showing the architectural, sociological and cultural changes as the city become, as seen in one strange image of different souvenirs of the Eiffel Tower, a metropolis of tourism.
BOOK
Paris Magnum
Edited by Eric Hazan
Flammarion and Rizzoli
45€ / $65
ISBN: 978-2-08-030152-9
http://editions.flammarion.com
EXHIBITION
Paris Magnum, la capitale par les plus grands photoreporters
Through March 28th 2015
Hôtel de Ville de Paris
Place de l’Hôtel de Ville
75004 Paris
