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 ABBAS, on the other hand, had
a dream from childhood. “As a boy I had a heroic image of the
journalist: you went to war, you covered historical events. I
dreamed of covering the Vietnam War.” He admits he wants to make a
statement. He wants, in his words, to get his point across. “My
statements are in my books. It’s more like the work of a writer than
a photojournalist. Now I don’t just make stories about what’s
happening, I’m making stories about my way of seeing what’s
happening. There’s a difference. I am interested in the world, sure,
but also in my vision of the world.”
 PETER MARLOW also carried with
him the idea of the photographer-as-hero. I wanted, he says, to say
something as a photographer. Moreover, he reveals, photography
“gives me a way of being nosy, an excuse to be there -- to be where
I want. You are very privileged as a photographer to be able to look
at things and explore.”
 PAUL FUSCO, too, is looking
for the photographer’s voice to be heard. He believes in the photo
essay because it “allows the photographer’s voice to sing.” He is
interested in using the photo essay to communicate -- and to
provoke. He says he is very careful of what “I choose to show you,
so that I show you what I WANT YOU to feel and to understand.”
Infuriated, for example, at police brutality, he admits, “A lot of
my work yells. I want my pictures to do that -- not all of them, but
I want people to be moved.” He wants, in other words, to be heard,
his way.
 INGE MORATH above all was a
traveler. She had no desire to visit war zones. But when she finally
started to shoot, she writes, “Finally I had found my language,
knowing I could express the things I wanted to say, giving them form
through my eyes.”
 MARTIN PARR sees making
pictures as a way to “express my view of the world. My experience of
my daily life overlaps with my subject matter, and I’m trying to
articulate in photographs how I experience the world.”
 PAOLO PELLEGRIN admits, “I have a
desire to take pictures to express things that I feel need to be
said.” For example, the Kosovo War. He felt that conflict was a part
of history. He had to be there. “Most of my career in photography,
I’ve worked on stories about issues that I choose. These have often
been about wounded places. I want the work I do to be a testimony of
things that happen, a record of events.” He is, he also admits, now
“more interested in photography’s potential to create a bridge to
the viewer and to create a dialogue. I think photography can achieve
that.”
The connection, that’s what’s important—that through this medium we
can, perhaps, understand and touch each other.
And so we arrive at social justice.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
 CORNELL CAPA said, “The goal,
more than taking the photograph, was making a home for photography
that champions human concerns.” Certainly that had been a goal
Magnum photographs have achieved.
EUGENE RICHARDS (now a member
of the agency VII) wanted to do social photography…when he started,
in particular, to make people in the South understand the white
power structure. “When I was young, photojournalism was about social
change. I started photographing actively in the late 1960s when I
began a little newspaper with some friends, a bunch of volunteer
social workers in the South. We weren’t expecting to elicit change
in a direct sense—we knew better than that—but we were commenting on
the society we were living in.” They wanted to empower people in
what was a very impoverished black area, the delta of the
Mississippi in Arkansas.
 IAN BERRY was drawn into the
injustice of life in South Africa under apartheid. He felt it was an
issue he had to pursue. Not just to take good pictures, but to get
into situations that were in themselves interesting. “It’s not
enough to make a beautiful photograph…but for what?” He can see no
reason for just playing with photography when there are serious
issues to deal with. Berry looks for the moment, the defining
moment, that works as a shape AND has impact.
In the end, he feels, “there are two things that give you a real
buzz.” There’s the photograph that you take on the street, where
everything works and you’re delighted with the image. It may not be
published, but you are happy. Then there’s the situation where you
are involved in a news event, and you get a photograph that sums up
the event totally and it gets published -- and makes a difference.
He cites pictures he shot of an orphanage, about to close for lack
of funds, which, because of his work, was flooded with donations.
 WERNER BISCHOF
focused on the
face of human suffering. He was “haunted by the hundred thousand
suffering people whose senses have been dulled by their daily fears
and who need help.” Bischof cites India hungry from famine. Moved to
lift his camera without inhibition at the sight of skeletal,
near-death old women, dying of thirst and hunger, he writes, “The
only reason I could convey this wretched misery is because I knew I
must convey it to the world. This work means a lot to me,” he
explains, “because it has to do with life.” With a sense of moral
obligation, he argues, “We are the enlighteners, the stimulating
force that opens the eyes of our fellow man.“
 SUSAN MEISELAS
felt obliged to see and show the troubles in El Salvador and
Nicaragua. She admits she needs to be witness to society’s problems.
She sees the camera as an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t
belong, and cares about exploring both the power of the camera and
her relationship to the people she photographs. “It gives me both a
point of connection and a point of separation.”
 WAYNE MILLER thought if he
could make photographs in the black area of Chicago, “I might be
able to get some insight into it, the world of the Negro—not as some
sort of crusade on my part, but as a way of sharing how they
thought, how they lived, how they felt, their viewpoint on the world
around them. I felt that ignorance had made wars, and if I could use
photography to help dispel ignorance, the future might be a little
brighter. I had no idea what I was going to do; which way I was
going to point my camera. I just had the desire to know the people
that I saw and to try to express how they were feeling about their
daily lives and their families. And my goal -- my unobtainable goal
-- was to really get inside that other person’s mind. It’s just
empathy, that’s what it boils down to.”
 JOHN VINK is interested in the
survival of identity. He makes photos of the poor and the powerless,
and he doesn’t want to be where all the other photographers are. His
work called him to people in remote cultures, often landless
peasants on the margins of global society, cultures which are
disappearing, in places he wants to go to shine a light … and where
the photographs may be more of a record of what the world is losing
… something not being addressed that he thinks should be. He decides
what country he wants to work in, either because he’s really upset
or very at ease there. “What it’s all about in the end, is that I
want to give a voice, albeit only a tiny voice, to those who don’t
have one. I’ve decided it’s my job to do what I can as a
photographer to be their advocate. I can’t think of a way I would
rather live my life.”
 LARRY TOWELL indicates as a
young man he might have chosen to be a human rights activist instead
of a photographer. “Photography is an extension of who I am as a
storyteller. I look at things that are personally of interest to me
and I photograph them". Towell takes photos for history, not the news
of the day, but to reflect on it. He, like many other Magnum
photographers, may work on a subject for years, compelled to do it
because he loves the work.
“There’s an energy I continue to get from engaging with human rights
issues, so it becomes a focus in my work. All the projects I do are
about people and issues that I care about.” Though he admits, “the
other side of me is more domestic, and very quiet, where I’m
figuring out what makes individuals who are close to me tick. I
guess it is all a way of figuring out one’s place in the world.”
For some, figuring out their place in the world with a camera in
their hands is very much a personal quest, and a moving one, at
that. They want human contact, or to avoid it, or an escape, a
ticket to a bigger world and a better life, or a better self.
We will look at those thoughts next month in Magnum Photographers:
What Makes Them Click, Part Two.
.............................................................................................................................
Eileen Douglas is
a broadcast journalist-turned-independent documentary filmmaker.
Former 1010 WINS New York anchor/reporter and correspondent for ABC
TV's "Lifetime Magazine," she is the author of "Rachel and the
Upside Down Heart," and co-producer of the films "My Grandfather's
House" and "Luboml: My Heart Remembers." She can be reached at
www.douglas-steinman.com.
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And having done so, now, in this anniversary year, my tribute to
GEORGE RODGER