The Persistent Conscience of Magnum Photojournalists | The New Yorker

Since its formation, in 1947, the Magnum photo agency, or, more accurately, the work of its photographers, has contributed to the formation of a shared visual consciousness. Many of the definitive images of the past half century were taken by Magnum photographers, even if we never knew their names: W. Eugene Smith’s photos of an exhausted country doctor, taken in 1948; Raymond Depardon’s picture of Lee Evans raising a black power salute, at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics; the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, chronicled by Mark Power; Paolo Pellegrin’s harrowing portraits of refugees making a desperate crossing from Libya to Europe, in 2015. Magnum photographers, it seems, have always been there to document a moment of crisis, a moment for change.