Magnum's First will present 83 original gelatin-silver prints from the agency's inaugural 1955-56 exhibition. The show includes work by founders and leading photojournalists such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger, David "Chim" Seymour, Werner Bischof, Inge Morath, Ernst Haas and others. Original installation materials, including a poster, hanging instructions and wooden crates, were rediscovered in an Innsbruck Institut Français basement in 2006 and will be used in the reconstruction. Curators will reproduce the original display while adding new contextualizing text to explain the discovery and Magnum's expansion into books and exhibitions in the 1950s.
Downtown Toronto's Image Centre is digging deep for a restaging of Magnum's First, the celebrated picture agency's long-forgotten inaugural exhibition. It was shown at several Austrian venues in 1955-56 but never seen on this side of the Atlantic-until now. On display will be 83 of the show's original gelatin-silver prints. Magnum's First features works by many of the 20th century's most celebrated photojournalists-among them Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, who co-founded Magnum in 1947 with George Rodger and David "Chim" Seymour.
The exhibition's materials had laid dormant for a half-century in the basement of the Institut Français in Innsbruck, Austria, before being rediscovered in 2006. Included were a poster and hanging instructions for the show. The installation, originally titled Gesicht der Zeit (face of time), will be meticulously reconstructed for its Toronto debut. "We are proposing a display respectful to the original," says Gaëlle Morel, the Image Centre's curator. "We are also including the original wooden crates, labels and introductory text."
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