Listen to the whole story here:
The fall season of the Image Centre launched with a photojournalism exhibition as a way of honouring its history, according to Gaëlle Morel, the curator of the exhibition. The Centre was founded in 2012 when the university received and mounted a collection of photographs, called the Black Star Collection.
“When you have an event, or a war, a catastrophe, you’re still waiting for the images produced by photojournalists and people who are sent there to do their job, which is to document what is happening, right?” said Morel.
The new exhibit consists of a series of photographs that capture life in the postwar period, and according to Morel, serves as a reminder for people of photojournalism’s enduring importance throughout history.
The “Magnum’s First” exhibit opened on Wednesday at TMU’s Image Centre, its first showing in North America. It features a series of black and white photographs taken by eight different photographers, including Werner Bischof’s “On the road to Cusco, Peru” and
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru announces Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination, Delhi, India,” which was originally showcased in 1955 by the Magnum Photos agency.
As Morel explains it, the exhibition is being presented now as a way of showing viewers that although society may be moving away from the physical media outlets that traditionally published the work of photojournalists, photojournalism still plays an essential role in the world today.
“[This collection is] the reason why we exist. So, we do pay a lot of attention to the history of photojournalism because it’s kind of at the root of what we do and how we think about photography,” she said.
The photographs on display were first shown as part of Magnum Photos’ “Gesicht der Zeit” (Face of Time) exhibition in 1955, according to The Image Centre. After that exhibit, the photos were thought to be lost for over fifty years until they were rediscovered in a basement in Austria in 2006.
The story of their loss and rediscovery is what adds to the photographs’ importance for the agency, says Isabella Howard, the cultural manager at Magnum Photos.
“I think the significance of these photos is that they could have easily been lost in time and so, they’re really this unique opportunity to view a very specific point in [Magnum’s] history and in photojournalism’s history, as well,” she said.
“Gesicht der Zeit” is also believed to have been the agency’s first exhibition, says Howard, hence why this exhibit is titled “Magnum’s First.”
Beyond the exhibit’s history, it’s interesting to look at what and how people were photographing at the time, says Morel, so the exhibition is not only for photojournalism enthusiasts.
Elyse Jeffrey, a second-year film student at TMU, says she didn’t know much about the exhibit before coming to see it.
“I’ve never actually been to The Image Centre before [and] haven’t really been keeping up to date with the events that are happening here, but now I think I’m going to change that,” she said.
Some of the photos on display weren’t necessarily taken by the photographers as a “chosen creative pursuit,” according to Howard, rather, they were shot as part of an assignment – sending students a valuable message.
“I think that can really show to photojournalists and students of photography how you can create really excellent work with what might not at first appear to be the most interesting subject matter,” she said.
“Magnum’s First” is on display and open to the public until December 13.
No AI tools were used in the production of this piece.
