Up Close and Personal

At a dinner party in Washington not long ago, the eminent classicist Bernard Knox told the story of how in the Spanish Civil War he had been left for dead in a pool of his own blood. He was wounded while serving with the Commune de Paris, the 2nd battalion of the 11th International Brigade, and as his strength ebbed away, his will to live was miraculously restored by the appearance of my father-in-law, journalist Claud Cockburn, with a bottle of good scotch.

The image of the young Knox lying among the dead brings to mind the haunting pictures of that war, like Robert Capa’s dying Loyalist soldier on the Cordoba Front, an image captured in 1936, at the instant he is knocked off his feet by the impact of a bullet in the head. Knox understood that part of the enduring legacy of that war, in the grand sweep of 20th-century conflict, was that it was so well-documented in photographs. In his essay “The Spanish Tragedy,” he quotes a Catalan official telling Claud, “this is the most photogenic war anyone has ever seen.”

The Spanish Civil War and modern photojournalism broke out in the same year. The photographers who flocked to the front with small portable cameras and more light-sensitive film than was available during the Great War filled the pages of the newly launched Life magazine. They were equipped, as British journalist Russell Miller tells us in his rich history of the remarkable photo agency Magnum, to “bear witness at the front line.” Those who clamored into the trenches, with mud as “thick as chewing gum” to borrow war correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s image, helped define photojournalism. Capa set the death-defying standard that would ensure that, for 60 years to come, photojournalists, far more often than their colleagues in print and television journalism, would take the big risks, courting death for a picture. “If your pictures aren’t good enough,” Capa told his colleagues, “you’re not close enough.”

The seed for the unruly cooperative of gifted photojournalists that in 1947 would become Magnum was planted as Gen. Francisco Franco ravaged Spain. The Hungarian exile Capa, who had shed his identity as Andre Friedmann, the son of a Budapest tailor, talked to his friend Henri Cartier-Bresson about organizing a “brotherhood” of colleagues who owned their pictures and controlled how they were marketed. Scion of a wealthy French family, Cartier-Bresson was taken with the idea. Together they shared a fifth-floor walk-up studio in Paris with Capa’s friend, the Polish emigre photographer David Seymour, better known as Chim, and all, committed leftists and supporters of the anti-fascist Popular Front, were partial to the idea of a commune. They talked politics at the Cafe du Dome in Montparnasse and worked for Ce Soir, a popular French paper controlled by the Communist Party. Soon they were photographing the searing images of World War II, Cartier-Bresson working underground with the Resistance in Paris and Capa storming the beaches. After an amphibious landing at Salerno in Italy with the 82nd Airborne and a British tank division, Capa was met in Naples by rows of dead children’s feet. They stuck out of crude coffins, too small for the bodies stuffed inside, dead boys who had fought the Nazis with stolen rifles and bullets.

It was in the booby-trapped ruins of Naples that Capa met George Rodger, who would become a founding member of Magnum. The English photographer had chronicled the London Blitz with images like that of a man sitting in his bath after the wall had been blown off by a bomb. The unflappable Rodger sported a cravat and survived the retreat from Burma, escaping on foot through headhunter country, living on peanut butter and cocktail cherries.

This was an extraordinary collection of men. It grew to include equally extraordinary women like Eve Arnold and Susan Meiselas. Their collective war stories told in “Magnum” are so good that they more than make up for the pitfalls of writing about the deliberately free-form, chaotic agency the founders created over drinks at the Museum of Modern Art in the spring of 1947. The Magnum office was, after all, far from the trenches where the drama of its members’ lives was played out. It was a place to dump gear, pick up cash and grumble about the debilitating debt of an agency where everyone and no one was boss and no professional business manager was allowed near the books. Magnum was often so strapped for funds, in spite of the hefty percentage it took from each member’s fees, that if one photographer needed a cash advance in the field, another would have to go without. “We love Magnum,” Cartier-Bresson told Miller, “and it doesn’t break up. Why? In my opinion, it is the mechanism of being co-opted by a kind of invitation. It is surely as stupid as any form of initiation, but at the same time it verifies the wish of people to participate in an enterprise, a myth, a community of men, a place where one does things.”

Miller’s history soars when he lets us hear from the photographers themselves, giving us their thoughts on war, on journalism versus art and on the ties that bind such anarchists. The stories from the field are riveting: the breathtaking risks, the disillusionment as television screens displaced the glossy pages of Life and Look, the serial flirting with danger that took the lives of Capa, stepping on a land mine in Vietnam; Werner Bischof, driving off a 1,500-foot cliff on a slick mountain road in the Andes; and Seymour, running an Egyptian army road block at Suez in 1956 only to be cut down by a burst of machine-gun fire.

Miller’s peculiar convention of tacking raw interviews onto chapters sometimes slows the narrative by repeating anecdotes or losing direction. Still, his rendering of Capa and Co., forever glamorous and nearly always broke, is forceful enough to drive the story over the bumps. Capa is rakishly handsome, invited to every party in Paris and L.A., a friend of Ernest Hemingway, veteran of Omaha Beach, with the energy to keep his career burning brightly and ignite everyone around him. Operating from his command post at the pinball machine in the cafe downstairs from Magnum’s Paris office, cigarette dangling from his full lips, Capa is irresistible.

So is the huge volume of anecdotes culled by Miller for history buffs and news junkies: Arnold tells us that Joan Crawford was a lush who stripped at the least provocation to be photographed naked well into her 50s. When Arnold photographed the Nixons during the 1960 campaign, she tripped over their famous dog Checkers, looking “old, ill, and moth-eaten.”

But the real urgency of the Magnum story is always at the front. There is a terrible irony in the fact that Capa took on the assignment covering the French war against the Viet Minh, the job that killed him, at a time when he was weary and depressed about the future of photojournalism. Before leaving for Japan and ultimately Saigon, Capa saw fellow Magnum member Marc Riboud in London. As Riboud recalls, “I was summoned to his hotel room. I found him having a bath. He seemed very depressed and talked alot about the death of photography. Television, he said, was the medium of the future.”

On top of his black mood, Capa had the bad luck to arrive in Hanoi the day after Dien Bien Phu had fallen. “The story is over,” he wrote to the Magnum office, “before I could have touched my cameras.” By the time Capa was on patrol with a French platoon in the tall grass near Nam Dinh, the Time correspondent with him described Capa as “exquisitely bored.” He had missed the story. He was taking unnecessary risks, climbing a dike for another angle, when the mine blew him apart.

As it happened, his worries about the death of photojournalism at the hands of the television networks’ combat cameramen were unfounded. Even if television broke the glossy picture magazines the way they in turn had eclipsed Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post, it did not stop the photojournalists. A Leica with a 50-millimeter lens, equipment of choice for Cartier-Bresson, can simply go places where television cameras are forbidden or stolen and hidden cameras are often clumsy. South African photographer Peter Mugubane happily covered a trial by stuffing his Leica into a loaf of bread.

Some of the most brilliant work that has come out of Magnum in the last two decades belongs to Jim Nachtwey. When I first met him across a long table at a French bistro in Managua in 1985, he seemed so grave and self-possessed compared with the rest of the press corps there that it was almost spooky. He had Capa’s good looks and Cartier-Bresson’s intensity, and he liked to work alone. Nachtwey moved from war to war, traveling for months on end, without the usual break in New York or London. He was driven and clear about his mission. “I have never gone out there with sheer abandon and put myself in danger for the sake of it,” he tells Miller. “It was always for the sake of trying to communicate something.” There is much to admire in this collection of photojournalists.

Miller saves some of the most chilling stories from the field for the very end, like the unforgettable scene from Chechnya recounted by Paul Lowe. Lowe was crouched in the wreckage of a Chechen housing estate in Micro Rayun, photographing men digging out a body. When the jets screamed overhead, “there was a huge bang and the world went orange from brick dust.” His friend Cynthia Elbaum, an American photographer on her first big story, was outside talking with a group of 30 women and children. Lowe staggers outside, sees the carnage and has three thoughts: These are important pictures; I am scared of another bombing run; and where is Cynthia? “We were screaming out her name, desperately searching for her. People would come up and drag us to a body, cruelly disfigured, asking if this was our friend.” They found her crumpled body covered in debris. The story is a vivid reminder of the price of a picture.

John Morris’ remarkable memoirs, “Get the Picture,” the story of the legendary photo editor’s 50-year career, is one step removed from this kind of gut-wrenching detail from the front line. Morris, who edited pictures for Life, Ladies Home Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post, with a brief stint managing the unmanageable Magnum, is in his own words “a buffer” between the photojournalist and the executive suites. During the London Blitz, Morris was the man grabbing the film rolls dispatched from the front and rushing them into the lab. He tells one story that makes me break out in a cold sweat: Capa’s film from D-day, the priceless frames from E Company, in the first wave to hit Omaha Beach, arrived by messenger at Life’s London bureau and, with an order from Morris to “rush rush rush,’ the darkroom staff closed the doors to the drying cabinet and the film melted. Only 11 frames could be salvaged.

Morris calls himself a “voyeur’s voyeur,” a fixer of reality and history, the man who chose just the right image from the contact sheet that shapes how we see the century. In “Get the Picture,” we are treated to an extraordinary collection of photographs, arresting images like Eugene Smith’s nun, holding a teddy bear, waiting to hear the fate of a child aboard the passenger liner Andrea Doria, which sank off Nantucket in 1956, and candid moments like the dog listening politely to a Nelson Rockefeller stump speech in Albany, then retiring purposefully to a tree and lifting his leg. What appeals so much about Morris is his self-deprecating sense of humor and determination to survive. His best stories from the field are not tagging along in the field with Capa and Hemingway behind Allied lines in France or having drinks at the Ritz in Paris with Marlene Dietrich; they are his less flashy but moving description of the Japanese internment camps in California. When he signs up for the New York Times, one of his friends comments, “Becoming the picture editor of the New York Times is like becoming the recreation director at Forest Lawn.” Morris makes the best of it, the rate editor with a conscience, fighting tirelessly to put pictures like Eddie Adams’ now-classic 1968 photograph of a summary execution of a Vietnamese civilian by the chief of South Vietnam’s national police on the front page.

At Life magazine, he winces at the horrible blunders that other editors did not catch, such as the Aug. 28, 1944, issue of Life in which the story buried on Page 34 is “Lublin funeral,” illustrated by the first picture story of the Holocaust. The page facing the images of ovens full of bones and ash and the shoes left behind contains an ad for Campbell’s Soup headlined “How to make a meal out of a sandwich.”

Morris’ own life, touched on lightly, is laced with tragedy. A child dies in her cot, strangled by a jacket. His first wife, Dele, dies of multiple sclerosis. Morris soldiers on, ever offering a helping hand to photojournalists, whose genius is sometimes hampered by messy private lives. He tries to rescue his friend Gene Smith, a philandering alcoholic, whose image of a victim of the mercury pollution in Japan is a masterpiece: Tomoko, with withered hands and feet, bathed in her mother’s arms, is the Pieta of our time. Smith, who spent three years photographing Minamata disease, was dedicated, tortured and possessed. He collapsed on the floor of a convenience store trying to buy a beer and died soon after.

Photographers and writers always confided in Morris, poured out their frustrations at the dismal state of news coverage, whether it was 1952 or 1991. He was sickened by the Nintendo-style presentation of the Gulf War, “the enemy shown not as human being but as impersonal targets.”

“Get the Picture” applauds the breathtaking courage of those photojournalists who cover wars but never make the mistake of romanticizing what they see. Morris remembers that in 1970, he received a series of letters from New York Times Saigon-based war correspondent Gloria Emerson, whom Martha Gellhorn called her “comrade in anger.” The subject was Vietnam, but it is equally fitting for Kosovo. “I do wish we would run pictures that told the story,” wrote Emerson, “even if it makes people sick at breakfast.”