Visual Culture Colloquium
Tuesday, October 26, 2021 at 4:45pm
Zoom Lecture
Nadya Bair
Corporate News Pictures at Magnum Photos
In her recently published book, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market, Nadya Bair draws on extensive archival research to unravel the mythologies surrounding the legendary Magnum Photos agency. This talk examines one of the least-known chapters in Magnum’s early history: the agency’s public relations and advertising photography. Shot for American corporations eager to associate with Magnum’s itinerant photojournalists and the agency’s “humanist” aesthetic, these assignments are invaluable for understanding both the business of freelancing and the inseparability between editorial and corporate photography.
Nadya Bair is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Hamilton College. The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market (University of California Press, 2020) won the PROSE Award for Media & Cultural Studies. Bair’s articles have appeared in American Art and History of Photography, and in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (2016); Visualizing Fascism (2020); and Life Magazine and the Power of Photography (2020). She is principal investigator of Inside the Decisive Network, a digital project accompanying her book.
