The Magnum Archive Sale

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Fascinating account of the background to Magnum’s sale of its press prints archive to Michael Dell.

Last week, one of the most important photojournalism archives in history, the Magnum Photo Agency’s press prints collection, was sold to Michael Dell of Dell computers. Specifically, to Dell’s private investment firm, MSD Capital LP.

The collection will be housed by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin.

“Right place, right time, right people.” That’s how Eli Reed, Magnum photographer and photojournalism professor at the school, summed up the deal. “It was a long time coming; it didn’t just happen quickly,” he said.

Impressively keeping with Magnum’s cooperative policies, the deal ensures the photographers still retain total ownership of their works. Only the prints used by Magnum through 2003 for publication were sold, not the rights to the images themselves.

Though the price remains undisclosed, the collection of photographs had been insured for a value of $100 million. Industry insider Paul Melcher speculated the price at around $30 million.

The press prints collection comprises of over 185,000 images by over 100 renowned photographers, including seminal talent such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Elliott Erwitt, Ernst Haas and Eve Arnold. Magnum was established in 1947 to wrest control from publishers back into the hands of the photographers by allowing shooters to keep the rights to their images. In so doing, Magnum pioneered a new business model for photojournalism.

This also explains why the putative deals with Corbis and Getty never went through. The Magnum photographers wanted to retain the rights. Now they appear to have got what they wanted: retention of rights, plus $30 million to invest in their upcoming online service. Neat.

Also: nice to know that the University of Texas will scan both front and back of each print. Those office scribbles can sometimes be interesting. For example,

B&W: it’s not a black-and-white issue

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The other day I happened to mention to Quentin that I found myself working more and more in B&W. “Pre- or post-processing?” he asked, clearly puzzled. As an uber-geek the idea that anyone would voluntarily throw away data seemed absurd to him. Why not capture all the colour data first and discard it later? And this does indeed seem to be the conventional wisdom in the trade.

Brooding on this later, it occurred to me that there are two separate issues here. One is technical — the irrationality of throwing away data. The other is aesthetic. My feeling is that if one is shooting ab initio in B&W it changes the whole way one looks at photographic opportunities. Some things just won’t work in monochrome (just as some scenes/subjects won’t work in colour), so if you restrict yourself to B&W then your approach to picture-taking changes. You have to make a judgement call in advance, whereas if you decide to de-saturate afterwards then you’re basically saying that colour doesn’t work for this particular image and you may as well ‘degrade’ to B&W.

LATER: Duncan Thomas pointed me at a Photoshop Tutorial which sets out one procedure for converting a colour image into B&W. About half-way through reading it, I lost the will to live (so it’s just as well that the author has produced an automated script that will do it). The tutorial begins with a quotation from Ansel Adams which suggests that the great man took the same view as I do:

“One sees differently with color photography than black and white…in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used”.

I met Adams once — in the V&A of all places. He was there for the opening of an exhibition of his work. I have a vivid recollection of him surrounded by London media luvvies, towering over them and dressed in a lumberjack shirt and a very large pair of LL Bean boots.

Mobile office, release 2.0

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Meet my new mobile office. Because I move around a lot, I’ve been using a (supposedly) 3G dongle from the 3 network, which is the only device I’ve used in years which makes me long for the good ol’days of 300 baud acoustic couplers. The other day it occurred to me that my cheapo T-mobile Android Pulse phone might make a good modem, and — lo! — thanks to PDAnet, it does. It’s a very elegant solution which doesn’t require any root hacking on the phone. Just download the App from the Android market and install it. Download the client from here and install on your Mac (and, in my case, also on my Dell Hackintosh). There are clients for BlackBerry, Palm, iPhone and Windows Mobile too. Hook up the phone via the USB cable, launch the App on both machines, click ‘Connect’ and away you go. The interesting thing for me is how quick and efficient it is compared to the 3 dongle. (Memo to self: cancel that £10/month direct debit.)

In addition to tethered USB mode, PDAnet can also handle bluetooth connections. But only on Android 2.0. Sigh. There’s always a catch somewhere. Still…

Chateau Ashcroft: the gigantic duck house

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L’affaire Ashcroft has had one useful side-effect: it’s provided a reminder that no matter how touchy-feely Dave Cameron might like to appear, his party hasn’t escaped from its sleazy background. Marina Hyde had a nice column about this.

Still, we love a tax exile in this country. We let them fund our political parties, and watch as they coincidentally obtain peerages. In the case of Lord Ashcroft, we watch as they become deputy chairman of the Conservative party, amass unquantified power over its leaders, and begin ploughing some of those very millions on which they don’t pay tax into intensely targeted campaigns designed to swing elections. David Cameron has honked loud and long about making trust and transparency an election issue, yet he and his lieutenants either misled the public deliberately as to his lordship’s status, or were too craven or venal to ask questions. They certainly refused to co-operate with the Electoral Commission’s investigation into the matter. Meanwhile, the BBC feel obliged to announce cuts effectively designed to appease that other unelected foreign billionaire, Rupert Murdoch, as though you can appease someone whose goal is your complete destruction.

The biggest problem — as Hyde points out later — is that public outrage over MPs’ expenses is disproportionate compared with what Ashcroft and the Tories are up to. The MPs have been mostly foolish, occasionally venal and in a few cases positively criminal: but Ashcroft is a tax exile who is effectively using his foreign wealth to buy an election. And who also appears to have obtained a peerage after giving assurances that he did not keep.