Scholar Talk with Nadya Bair: Photography Exhibitions and the Magnum Brand

Founded as a photographic cooperative in 1947, Magnum Photos aimed to sell the work of its photographers to as many markets as possible. Already in the late 1940s, its pictures appeared in illustrated magazines as news, but also as promotion for international travel. Magnum photographers worked on film sets, and they shot public relations campaigns for the United Nations and Standard Oil alike. In order to further promote the work of its photographers, Magnum also began organizing exhibits of prints that traveled around the world, familiarizing international audiences Magnum’s name. In those contexts, the meaning of Magnum’s pictures began to change. Exhibitions often celebrated photographers’ individual prints as the expression photographers’ concern for humanity, and of their ability to capture what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “decisive moments.”

This talk looks at the creation of some of  the first exhibitions and projects of the Magnum agency in the 1950s—including Magnum’s First: The Face of Time and Chim’s Children of Europe—to demonstrate how such endeavours helped consolidate the idea of Magnum as a group of international, humanist photographers who followed their instincts and values rather than catering to the work of its clients. By looking at the network of curators, publishers, and editors who were formative to the creation of Magnum’s brand, this talk will consider the infrastructure for exhibiting photography at mid-century.

Speaker Bio

A historian of photography, the press, and mass visual culture, Nadya Bair is assistant professor of Art History at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY. Bair’s first monograph, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press, 2020), won the 2021 PROSE Award for Media and Cultural Studies. Bair’s articles on the history of photojournalism have appeared in the journals American Art, History of Photography, Fotogeschichte, and several edited volumes including Facing Black Star (MIT Press, 2023) and Life Magazine and the Power of Photography (Yale, 2020). Bair’s current book project, on the International Center of Photography and its founder Cornell Capa, was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship for 2023-2024 and a fellowship at the Frankel Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan, where Bair is in residence in 2025-2026.