casualblasphemy's review against another edition
3.0
A vaguely interesting, highly romantic, not terribly granular, look at the world's premier photo agency (Hmmm, I think I may have been taken in by the author's unmitigated love of Magnum, dysfunctional though it may be). In the author's defense, any one of the photographers from Magnum's first 40 years of existence would rate biographies of their own; indeed Robert Capa has more than one, as does Cartier-Bresson (who does not always come off terribly well in this tale). A truly thorough-going history of Magnum would be a project the scale of Caro's LBJ opus and would have a decidedly limited audience. This gives a very quick overview of Magnum and the various periods in which it's existed. It leans far more heavily on the early years, indeed the 80s and 90s seem to unfold in something like 20 pages, leading one to think that work by Nachtwey, Steele-Perkins and Abbas got short shrift. Buy this book used like I did or, better still, buy books full of Magnum's photos, they're the better value.
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