Magnum’s biography is not just a narrative of funny anecdotes, personal heroism, or critical interventions aimed at the cognoscenti. To me there’s a real narrative, a true set of values behind the myth. It’s a frat-house given to sophomoric antics with members sometimes capable of making extraordinary pictures. […]
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One morning Magnum’s Paris bureau chief Natasha Chassagne walked into the office to discover that she had been officially locked out. Richard Kalvar appeared like a jack-in-the-box and gave her fifteen minutes to vacate her desk and leave the building. It must have been brutal for her; from a distance it looked awful. The prevailing atmosphere at the following annual meeting was a lot of people congratulating themselves for having done this dirty deed. And the way mobsters always eliminate eyewitnesses, they were already targeting Jimmy Fox. […] One of the first things they tried when they hired me at Magnum was to set me against the staff. They explained who they liked, and who they didn’t like, put me up to such plots as firing staff members, or conspiring against them. I admit to having participated in some of that out of my own inexperience. […] Magnum is a kind of party in the political, not the fun, sense, a bankrupt Communist party riddled with conspiracy, lack of resolve, cut-throat egotism, secrecy, character assassinations and rumor-mongering, teetering on the edge of collapse from inefficiency. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Getty Images Caught Red-Handed (Again)
It would certainly behoove public-domain image archives, such as the Library of Congress, to demand collectively a forensic inquiry into the inventory of Getty Images and other such aggregators. The Carol Highsmith and Daniel Morel cases, I’ll wager, represent only the tip of Getty Images’ deceptive and illegal traffic in copyright-free images. […]