NY exhibition fetes 70 yrs of Magnum Photos
Warsaw museum spotlights remains of destroyed city
NEW YORK, May 27, (Agencies): An exhibition spanning the second half of the 20th century and celebrating the last 70 years of the oldest photographic cooperative in the world opened in New York Friday.
James Dean striding through Times Square, Pablo Picasso holding a parasol for French painter Francoise Gilot and Marilyn Monroe on “The Misfits” set — just three of the iconic Magnum photographs that capture the spirit of the 20th century.
More than 240 prints and 300 projected photographs are on display in “Magnum Manifesto” exhibition at Manhattan’s International Center of Photography until Sept 3.
Magnum Photos was created by Robert Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and two other photographers on Feb 6, 1947 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Cartier-Bresson intended it as a “photographic utopia” or “construction of observers.”
The New York exhibition has been divided into three chronological and thematic categories.
Photographs from 1949-68 focus on postwar ideals of commonality and utopianism; the 1970s and 1980s on a fragmenting world, subcultures and minorities; and 1990-2017 a world under threat, such as Thomas Dworzak’s images of the Taleban and Alessandra Sanguinetti’s from the aftermath of the 2016 Nice bombing that killed 86 people.
Other topics are mental illness or drugs, says Clement Cheroux, one of the exhibition’s two curators. Celebrating 70 years in the business, Magnum’s 49 photographers continue to chronicle the world.
Along the way there have been sources of tension, such moving into the realm of commercial commissions — something disliked by traditionalists but seen as a way of bringing in revenue at a time when the media industry is increasingly starved of resources.
Survived
Magnum has survived as others have fallen by the wayside: Gamma, for example, filed for bankruptcy in 2009 before being bought by photographer Francois Lochon, while Sygma and Sipa went into liquidation in 2010 and 2012 respectively.
Neither was commercial photography the only savior — Magnum has diversified further with exhibitions, book publishing and art photography.
“It remains precarious,” says exhibition co-curator Clara Bouveresse. “It’s a huge challenge to find a viable economic model for photographers today,” she says.
After closing on Sept 3, the exhibition will travel on to Rome and Berlin.
Hatfields and McCoys mingle peacefully in the mountainous region where their families waged one of America’s most famous feuds. Now a museum near the Kentucky-West Virginia border is showcasing artifacts bringing the struggle back to life.
The Hatfield McCoy Country Museum opened Friday in Williamson, West Virginia.
Items on display include bullets fired by the warring families, a gun found at a battle site and fragments of Randolph McCoy’s cabin, destroyed by the Hatfield clan in an infamous 1888 New Year’s attack, said the museum’s curator, Bill Richardson.
The museum houses the largest collection of Hatfield and McCoy relics anywhere, he said.
“People who have heard about this story or seen it on television or read a book about it, they can actually see the real artifacts and documents,” Richardson said. “If you want to go from fiction to fact, this is where you can do that.”
Courtney Quick McCoy said she’ll probably have goosebumps when she looks at relics from her family’s feud with the Hatfields.
“You know that you are as close to your family as you ever could be,” she said.
The museum, in a former schoolhouse, is a short drive from many of the tragic events from the long feud, including the site of the McCoy cabin on the Kentucky side that was burned and two McCoys were gunned down in the New Year’s day ambush. Hatfield family members and supporters were thrown in jail after the attack, and the hostilities soon ended.
“We’re at ground zero,” Richardson said. “Everything you could possibly want to see and do and learn about this story, you can get it right here and get it in a day.”
Many believe the backwoods blood feud was rooted in the Civil War, but the bitterness was perpetuated by disputes over timber rights and even a pig.
Historical markers on both sides of the state line describe many of the pivotal events. Summer bus tours take visitors to some of the key feud sites in both states.
This much everyone can agree on: A small Civil War museum, nestled in an old farmhouse at the site of a purported battlefield, has closed its doors and boxed up its Confederate and Union artifacts.
The leaders of a volunteer group that runs the Nash Farm Battlefield Museum said they preferred to close rather than fight a county commissioner’s request to remove all Confederate flags from the museum. But the commissioner says she never made such a request.
Whomever you believe, the closure has rankled residents as cities across the South — most recently New Orleans — wrestle with whether to remove Confederate symbols seen by some as vestiges of racism and others as icons of heritage. The issue has been especially sensitive since Dylann Roof, an avowed white supremacist who posed in photos with the Confederate flag, gunned down nine people at a South Carolina church in 2015.
Spot
The museum sat on a 204-acre, countyowned park that’s about 30 miles south of Atlanta in Hampton and is a popular spot for weddings and other events. The curator gave the final tour May 18, and nearly every artifact — most of them loaned by private owners — had been removed by Thursday.
“It was a wonderful museum and a great educational facility,” Henry County historian Gene Morris said. “It’s really a sad thing to see it gone.” No official county action led to the museum’s closure, spokeswoman Melissa Robinson said. The county board of commissioners said in a statement Thursday that commissioners needed to explore the facts more thoroughly but that the closure has caused “much divisiveness and controversy.”
The museum was open Fridays and Saturdays and saw visitors from all 50 states and 15 countries in its seven-year run, said volunteer curator Bill Dodd.
“I think kids ought to have the ability to touch and hold history,” he said. “They learn more from touching it, feeling it, smelling it than they do from reading it in a book or looking at it on a stupid computer screen.”
Also:
WARSAW: Curator Jaroslaw Trybus points to a glass display case with an ornate brass door handle inside. Seemingly banal, the 19th-century curio is one of the few things that remains of Warsaw’s old city hall, which like 90 percent of the Polish capital, was destroyed during World War II.
“The door handle was ripped out by force, which you can see by the trim plate, by the city hall janitor during the Warsaw Uprising,” Trybus told reporters at the Museum of Warsaw, which reopened Friday after four years of renovation and redesign.
He “recognised that something had to be saved from city hall” as tens of thousands of Poles fought the occupying German Nazis in the ill-fated 1944 uprising. It was one of the war’s bloodiest episodes, taking the lives of some 200,000 Warsaw residents.
The failed two-month rebellion would go on to spark reprisals by the Nazis, who exacted their revenge by razing the city house by house, street by street, until it was just a pile of rubble.
“I think this story tells us more than a lot of articles,” Trybus said, adding that the janitor also salvaged 11 spoons and a chunk of the floor.
“It shows how dramatic the uprising was, during which it was necessary to save such seemingly everyday objects as a door handle or a spoon.”