Magnum Landscape Hardcover First Edition

Magnum Landscape

Hardcover

First Edition 2005

Ian Jeffrey

Phaidon Press -publisher

Dimensions: 21cm X 16cm

Landscape, says Henri Peretz, is the photographic genre which above all others "sets in competition the simple viewer, the painter, the amateur and professional photographer." This book, which marks the 50th anniversary of the Magnum Photo Agency, collects images by some of the most imaginative photographers of the century.by Ian Jeffrey

Many have the eye of great painters: Henri Cartier-Bresson's study of picnickers on the bank of the River Marne is like a Renoir brought to life, while Bruno Barbey's exquisite color image of soldiers descending the hills of Kurdistan has the quality of an Albert Bierstadt canvas.

There are some wonderfully surreal visions here too, such as Bruce Davidson's shot of the Statue of Liberty with a New Jersey junkyard in the foreground, and Richard Kalvar's image of a naked man on the Brooklyn Bridge

In the tradition of great Magnum books this publication brings together work by the finest photographers of our time. For fifty years Magnum photographers, through commissions and their personal work, have produced images that comment on the state of the world. In photographing the landscape they are not just spectators but participants, aware that the land itself has been shaped by man, and that the very notion of a landscape depends on a human viewpoint. As each photographer records, interprets and finds a unique personal style, the variations on a theme are endless - landscapes of war, of agriculture, of industry, of cities and motorways, of desolation, celebration and tranquillity. The photographs gathered in this book invite us to rediscover landscape, and urge us to think more profoundly about the planet earth.