ABSTRACT
After the war, photography acquired new prestige and a new dynamism, for the public was thirsty for images that bore the marks of authenticity; photographers now considered their primary function to be to document the world for those who could not witness it first hand. In 1945, the Rapho agency grouped together many photographers such as Doisneau and Ronis, whose work was informed by a humanist approach to the witnessing of world events. Then, in 1947, Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa set up the Magnum agency, an international co-operative of photographers who felt concerned with the human suffering and misery caused by war, and with social and racial injustice, and who expressed their concern through their cameras and pictures. Convinced that much postwar political history would be decided in the developing countries,
the Magnum photographers travelled the world, sending back their candid shots to be developed in Paris and then distributed throughout the world. The influence of Magnum can be seen in the vast 1955-6 ‘Family of Man’ exhibition of 503 photos by 273 photographers, put on in Paris and New York. In the 1950s, Life and Paris-Match functioned as a sort of conscience of the world, presenting the last images of the war, of the subsequent activities of reconstruction and then of the traumas of decolonization. Throughout this period, photography was seen as the capturing of a ‘decisive moment’ of reality-as CartierBresson famously defined it in the preface to his 1952 book, Images à la sauvette (Stolen Images).
