Some people ask me why I make books, in my case illustrated volumes of photography and the photographic image. To some, I say "We're stupid and don't know any better," and to others I lament it's the only thing we know how to do, and such is our lot. But then, truth be told, thinking about it, it's our native human desire to tell stories, or more precisely help others tell them, and our medium is the photographic image, and few have become literate in appreciating it (hence the minute audience), and even fewer in constructing it well, even among the highly regarded publishers.

So how do those of us with such limited practical aptitude or even intelligence about smarter things to do with our lives and scarce monies continue to persevere, both in surviving and in looking for ways to tell yet more illustrated stories, despite apparent lack of even token consumer appeal?

We get lucky.

John Szarkowski was a wickedly intelligent funny person and a great dinner companion. And he was surely the best and clearest thinker on the subject of photography whether one agreed or not with his muses. Quite apart from his writing talents and intellectual pursuits John had a profound knowledge of apples (the sort that grow on trees) and also was an accomplished classical clarinetist.

John's 29 year tenure at the Museum of Modern Art firmly established him as the worlds most important arbiter on photography and by current standards a conservative guru.
Then upon retiring from his commanding position in the art world John had the great courage to go back to his own photography that he had put on hold for so many years but never abandoned where he would be vulnerable and judged by the very people that he had previously judged.

As one of the many photographers who have been encouraged and supported and who have enjoyed his warm friendship I fully expect to meet him in photography heaven one day around a good dinner table with a fine bottle of Bordeaux. In the meantime I shall very much miss him.

» "John Szarkowski, Curator of Photography, Dies at 81" from The New York Times
» "John Szarkowski 1925 - 2007" from 5B4
» "John Szarkowski, Photographer, Curator, and Critic, Dies at 81" from Shane Lavalette

Cape Town, South Africa. Feb. 11, 1990. Magnum photographer Patrick Zachmann was wounded by a rubber bullet when taking this picture during a police altercation with a crowd awaiting the liberation of Nelson Mandela. Patrick Zachmann/Magnum Photos

It's an unconventional memorial. A heavy slab of gray rock sits outside the elevators in the foyer of Reuters' Washington bureau. Propped up against a polished wooden stand, the face of the granite is hand etched with white letters to read:

In memory of Roberto Navas Alvarez
Reuter [sic] Photographer
Born 12 December 1960
Died March 18 1989
Shot while covering Presidential elections in El Salvador.

The small Central American nation was packed with foreign journalists. At least a dozen of them lived in San Salvador at the time, while a few dozen more had just parachuted in to cover national elections to be held the following day. Many foreign news organizations, especially the wires, hired locals to help report and take pictures.

Navas was a newly hired photo-stringer for Reuters, and he was giving his more established Reuters colleague, Luis Galdámez, a ride home on his motorcycle after a long day’s work. Things were tense, as leftist guerrillas were boycotting the elections being organized by the Salvadoran government and backed by the United States. Many Salvadoran Army officers complained that the foreign press in particular gave the Marxist rebels too much ink.

New York City. 2000. Women In Mourning anti-police brutality rally. Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos

It's unreasonable to think that they are gonna get exactly what we want and what we got from the situation but we hope we can bring them close so they can feel and think more or less the way we do about that situation. Very often it's an important issue to us. It’s not just trying to make something look beautiful; we're usually photographing issues for a lot of reasons, most of them subjective, and with intent.

Robert Capa shooting film during the Spanish Civil War in October 1938. Gerda Taro.

I arrived in Berlin Friday afternoon. In the evening, my film “Magnum Photos: The Changing of a Myth“ was going to be shown at the Berlin Film Festival 2007. I expected no big event, no big movie theatre and no crowds because the film is almost 10 years old. The only advantages that I saw in this late screening were an invitation to Berlin, a nice hotel room and a festival pass, which would give me access to free tickets.

I was not nervous at all when I entered the Berlinale International Film Festival office. Caroline Walke, the assistant for the special screenings series, said “Hello, good to see you! I have great news. The screening tonight is sold out and all the Magnum photographers, who are in town, will come to see the show. Elliott Erwitt is here, Dennis Stock, Martine Franck, Thomas Höpker, Raymond Depardon (the Oscar winner!) and Donovan Wylie. Your film will be the opening of the Magnum in Motion series.“ Now I became nervous, when I left the office.

I remembered the pressure that I felt when I was shooting the film in 1998 and the sickness that came along with the long editing process.

England. 1963. Eve Arnold on the set of Becket. Photo: Robert Penn.

Today, on International Women's Day, we turn a complicated and multi-faceted topic over to the Magnum Blog's readers to discuss. Click on the post's title to comment.

What has been the greatest female contribution to photography?

View the Magnum In Motion multimedia essay Women’s Day with photographs by Eve Arnold, Martine Frank, Inge Morath, Susan Meiselas, Lise Sarfati and Marilyn Silverstone, produced by Tia Dunn.

New York City. 1962. Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

The above photograph is part of a current Bruce Davidson exhibition at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris. The International Herald Tribune published an interview with Davidson in February.

Street photography is part of Magnum's heritage. This example, by Thomas Dworzak, was taken at Ground Zero in New York in 2004.

Julie Gauthier, who left the comment on Martin Parr's post, wrote that if people stopped photographing on the street, there would only be left "a faked portrait of my generation."

The core issue in Aubry v. Vice Versa was the right of a photographed subject to control how he or she is represented. The case went on for years until the Quebec Supreme Court ruled in favor of the portrayed subject, in essence indicating that it is illegal to publish a photograph of someone without written consent. These laws differ from country to country.

It's an old case, concluded in 1998, but for anyone interested in street photography, the debate it provoked is still pertinent. For Canadian photographers reading this, what's happened since then? Please add comments at the end of this post.

Christie's sold Henri Cartier-Bresson's 1938 "On the banks of the Marne" for $110,000 on Oct. 10, 2005 (€90,827).

Collective memory and photography
The photojournalism market is booming. Turnover at auction has risen by more than 500 percent in 10 years and the trend is strong in the USA, France and the UK.

For many years, photojournalism was considered a secondary form of art, much like scientific or ethnographic photography, because photojournalism's original goal is to disseminate information. Since the 1950s, however, photojournalism has built a reputation on its aesthetics and techniques as well as on its testimonial values partly thanks to World Press Photo with its annual contest celebrating the year's best journalistic photographs, and due to a number of exhibitions in museums underlining the news photo's dual role as documentary testimony and aesthetic artifact.

Bethlehem, West Bank. 2000. Young Palestinian man loading stone into home made catapult during clash with Israeli Army. Larry Towell/Magnum Photos

What were the factors behind wanting to exhibit photojournalistic work?
I rely on photographs to inform me about the world at large. Given that the work of photojournalists is created to illustrate important events and personalities, I often look at their work for educational purposes.

Why Larry Towell? Were you attracted to his entire body of work, or were you looking for particular content or a specific topic?
I think he is a great photographer. In terms of his viewpoint, I admire the fact that he provides a voice for those who are landless, as I believe this to be a core problem in many areas around the world. I am intrigued by his ability to record the day to day life of people living in a conflict situation in a manner that gets close to his subjects without any seeming interference on his part.

Athens, Greece. 2003. The New Europeans. The different communities of immigrants living and working around Athens. Jim Goldberg/Magnum Photos

Treaties are signed, armies retreat and borders are redrawn. Weapons, if not abandoned, are indefinitely put aside. For many spectators of war, an end is reached. Yet the ramifications of conflict are not easy to erase. Limbs do not regrow, nor do buildings spontaneously rebuild themselves. Traces of distrust and fear linger. For curator Kirsten Rian and photographer Sara Terry, dissatisfaction with the short attention span of mainstream media inspired their organization The Aftermath Project which awards grants to support post-conflict photography.