70 Years of Correspondences: MAGNUM PHOTOS and PICTO 1950-2020

Published

October 26, 2020

NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / October 26, 2020 / RICHARD TAITTINGER GALLERY is pleased to announce the exhibition 70 YEARS OF CORRESPONDENCES: MAGNUM PHOTOS AND PICTO 1950-2020, curated by Photography historian Carole Naggar. A collaborative partnership with MAGNUM PHOTOS and PICTO, this exhibition is a celebration of the seventy-year partnership between two powerhouse institutions in the photography world. Conceived in three parts – YESTERDAY, TODAY, and TOMORROW – this exhibition is a survey of this continuous collaboration since 1950 and will be presented through the work of nineteen photographers, and more than 100 prints (vintage and modern).

Curated by Carole Naggar
Oct. 29 – Dec. 20, 2020
Opening: October 29, 2020, 2 – 9 PM

MAGNUM PHOTOS was founded in 1947 in Paris by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David 'Chim' Seymour, in response to the Second World War and the need to observe and report the state of the world in its wake. Today, their agency counts 89 international members (past and present).

PICTO was established in 1950 by Pierre and France Gassmann, and they produced works for Magnum's founders such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Chim, and other notable artists including William Klein, Willy Ronis, Robert Doisneau, and Edouard Boubat.

Photography is an innovative medium that both records and engages with history and change. This exhibition celebrates leaders in the field and offers a journey through the medium over the past 70 years, inviting us to imagine its future. 70 YEARS OF CORRESPONDENCES: MAGNUM PHOTOS AND PICTO 1950-2020 will be on view at RICHARD TAITTINGER GALLERY, 154 Ludlow Street, from October 29th through December 20, 2020.

YESTERDAY

This section will consist of a collection of vintage, estate, and modern prints by a group of Magnum Photos photographers who worked with Picto between the 1950s and the 1970s, and even before those dates used Pierre Gassmann and his team as printers.

Werner Bischof, René Burri, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, Ernst Haas, George Rodger, and Chim will be part of this section with topics ranging from Jean Marquis's sensitive photographs of Liverpool and Budapest to René Burri's famous photographs of Che Guevara with beret and cigar to Capa's Spanish Civil War and Normandy D-Day to early prints from Paris and New York by Cartier-Bresson to elegant, streamlined pictures from Japan by Bischof, prints from the famous Children of Europe series by Chim, photographs from life during the 1939-1940 London Blitz by Rodger and portraits of Einstein and Martin Luther King, Jr. by Haas.

TODAY

In her section focused on Today Naggar has selected captivating images by contemporary French photographers with a special focus on Raymond Depardon, showcasing his prints from his 1981 New York Correspondence series, and his contemporary images of New York in color, and Antoine d'Agata with a mosaic wallpaper series and striking portraits and nudes.

Also included are well-known works by Josef Koudelka, documenting the invasion of Soviet tanks of the Warsaw Pact in his native Prague in 1968, color and black and white prints by Bruno Barbey, a color series on Sudan by Thomas Dworzak; and recent works by Jean Gaumy, documenting climate change in abstracted Antarctica landscapes, highlighting the continued relevance of the photographic medium for documenting contemporary historical events and phenomena. Additionally, there will be several prints of Paris by Martine Franck, black and white street photographs from Paris and New York by Richard Kalvar, Tiananmen Square images and a recent series on the reconstruction of Notre Dame by Patrick Zachmann.

TOMORROW

Finally, in a nod to the idea that "the future is female," Naggar has selected three young women photographers to begin to explore what photography might be and mean Tomorrow. Works by Alessandra Sanguinetti, Carolyn Drake, and Sim Chi Yin present colorful works created in experimentation with Picto Labs for the first time. Sanguinetti's series On the Sixth Day pictures the life and death of animals in Argentina, Drake's series California on Fire deals with the recent Californian disasters and depicts the landscapes a few weeks after the fires, and Sim Chi Yin's Most People Were Silent is a visual investigation of nuclear sites ranging from North Korea to the USA. They explore life and death, and natural and manmade disasters.

An imaginative interrogation of the future of photography, this section of the exhibition points both forward and back to the works and artists that preceded it.