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. […]
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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. […] It is now about 57 years since Bob admitted to me that he had “taken a swing” at the guy [John Morris], so I am really hazy about this. Bob never went into details and although this loss [of his D-Day film] was obviously an event he would never forget, his philosophy was that “Life is too short to hate anyone or bear a grudge.” […] |
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Guest Post 23: Robert Dannin on Steve McCurry
I am uncomfortable watching an interrogation that is misguided if related to some elusive standard of photojournalism. … Pressing Steve McCurry for explanations when one already knows the reasons he used Photoshop — to create a more saleable, viewable image — evades more serious issues about who controls photography, and when and how to liberate it. […]