Three posts on the Magnum blog let you take a look at three sample chapters from the incredibly weighty recently published “Magnum Magnum” in which Magnum members write about other Magnum members and half a dozen of their photographs. The book weighs in at 6.5 kilograms, almost a stone for those who still think in old money.
The samples on line are Chien-Chi Chang by Bruce Davidson, Eve Arnold by Elliott Erwitt and, to me the most interesting, Antoine d’Agata by Patrick Zachmann.
Chien-Chi Chang’s work is great, but perhaps I find it a little too pretty – but I also respond that way to some of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work.
I have to admit to a blind spot so far as Eve Arnold is concerned. Of course her work is very professional photojournalism, but it seldom makes me sit up and take notice. Her portrait of Francis Bacon – one of the six – is fine, very recognisable, tightly framed, nice colour, but really pales beside Bill Brandt‘s photo or the artists’s own self-portraits or those head shots by John Deakin and Dmitri Kasterine or… And I wonder what Brian Griffin would have made of him (I was pleased to be at Space in Hackney yesterday on the last day of his show there to hear him talk about his career, and about making many of the portraits.) Don’t get me wrong, I would certainly have been pleased to have taken a picture like hers, but it just seems to lack the spark of the others. The only picture among her six that strikes me as a little special is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which could so easily have been extremely boring.
What I like about d’Agata‘s work is the element of surprise or even shock. Zachman writes about this very well, and I won’t attempt to repeat or better him. Where I don’t think he really does the photographer justice is in his choice of six images, with a couple that are surely not among his best images. Take a look at his Magnum portfolio and you will find it hard to avoid the same conclusion.
You can currently see d’Agata‘s work at the Photographers’ Gallery in London until 27 Jan, 2008. It is worth a visit, although I think the display is rather poor compared to seeing his work on screen. As well as large images from the series Insomnia (2003), the gallery has a montage of several hundred small images from other projects including Vortex (2003) and Stigma (2004), which for me are far too dominated by the way they have been put in frames and fixed to the wall. Many are also virtually impossible to see.
Magnum Magnum seems to me to be a volume making a great case for the death of the book and its replacement by some more convenient viewing method. Or else trying to be both book and trouser-press or exercise equipment. Surely it can’t be long before we can have a lightweight device with a large, paper-quality viewing screen, given that small and slightly primitive versions such as Amazon’s Kindle have appeared.
