Magnum Photos, the cooperative photography agency established in 1947, has a blue-chip pedigree (founders included Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson) and a gigantic scope (a photojournalism collection amassed from across the globe in the 20th century). The archive comprises more than 180,000 images known as press prints, physical copies once circulated to newspapers and magazines before the digital age. Now the organization is moving forward with a one-two punch: after selling its entire photo archive to a collector, Magnum is recreating itself as an authoritative media entity online. After the jump, view an exclusive slideshow of eight photos from the archive.
Click through for our image gallery courtesy of Magnum Photos.
So, what’s to love about Magnum online? The agency’s digitized image archive includes over 400,000 images online, and multimedia section In Motion contains over 100 photoessays by Magnum photographers, like the recent essay on Haiti before the earthquake and a feature on BBC news program The Shipping Forecast by Mark Power. Photographer Spotlight profiles one of the agency’s professional lensmen at work, and the robust Magnum Store specializes in rare and limited-edition photography books.
Read more about the sale of Magnum’s historical archive to Texas computer tycoon Michael Dell at The New York Times, plus details on the first public exhibition of hundreds of thousands of photo prints.