Documenting the U.S. struggle for ‘something better,’ from postwar to present

What is the dream of America? Is it specific to a time and place, or to race and social standing? What is the reality of America? 

An extraordinary new collection of more than 600 photos, “Magnum America: The United States” (Thames and Hudson), invites readers to ponder these questions as a way of understanding America’s past and present. The photos were taken over the past eight decades by photographers for the esteemed Magnum agency, a cooperative launched in 1947 in New York City. 

“The Magnum photographers are probably best known through the monumental work of Robert Capa, a war photojournalist, and the artist Henri Cartier-Bresson, although there is a great deal more to be explored,” said Yale’s Laura Wexler, a historian of photography who wrote and edited text for the book and helped create its structure. “The founders were young people who had photographed the anti-fascist war in Spain. Many of them were fleeing the Nazi takeover of Europe. They were part of that feeling that this was the line in the sand for Western civilization, that what happened in Spain was going to determine what happened after.” 

The book is organized by decade, beginning with World War II in the 1940s, with additional thematic portfolios and individual photographer portfolios throughout. It chronicles the issues, icons, conflicts, achievements, myths, traditions, and tragedies that form the messy makeup of U.S. history. Peter van Agtmael ’03, an award-winning Magnum photographer, selected the photos from the agency’s vast archive of nearly one million images. 

“What the book shows us is a decade-by-decade fight for something better,” Wexler, the Charles H. Farnam Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale, said. “And the insistence of the Magnum photographers to show that struggle.”

Wexler is also founding director of the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale. Her scholarship focuses on how race, gender, sexuality, and class are represented in film and photography in the United States, from the 19th century to the present.

Wexler wrote the book’s introduction and invited leading scholars to write additional commentary throughout. Those contributors include Yale’s Daphne Brooks, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music, and Matthew Jacobson, Sterling Professor of American Studies and History. 

Wexler sat down with Yale News to offer her commentary on some of the book’s photographers and their images, shown below from oldest to most recent. 

Wexler: Robert Capa was one of the original founders of Magnum. He went to the front lines during the Spanish Civil War as a very young man, photographing for left-wing, independent journals. His experience in Spain led him to feel committed to independent photojournalism and he kept going when World War II broke out. Here he’s at the landing on Omaha Beach. It’s an incredible picture. It’s grainy, it’s out of focus, and it conveys the inner anxiety of the soldiers, as well as Capa. The picture portrays some emotional reality about what these men faced and what they were feeling as they landed on the beach. Structurally, the dark spots, the harmony of it, the sense of order as well as disarray, convey an image of courage as well of death. It’s a dialectical image in that sense.

Wexler: My thesis in my introduction to the book is that World War II acts as a historical hub — the United States is one thing before the war and another thing after it. Fighting in the war and then entering the post-war period seems to have meant powerful and specific things from the perspective of the early Magnum photographers. This photograph, a famous one, represents coming home from the war to a segregated United States. Here we see how Black men, and some women, who had fought for liberty in the war abroad now faced extreme prejudice at home, even at the site of a racial massacre 50 years earlier.

Wexler: This is Eve Arnold on the set of “The Misfits.” We are lucky to have that archive here at Yale. This is very much a post-war moment. Marilyn Monroe to me symbolizes a kind of stereotypical ideal of femininity. One of the ways of organizing the troops had been to give them that idea about the home front and the women they were fighting for. Arnold caught how Monroe is so deliberate in embodying it in her movements and expressions. If you watch her, you see how she’s performing these codes that by the later years of the decade would be met by a feminist challenge.

Wexler: I don’t think anybody knew that the American people would come in great numbers simply to see this funeral train as it traveled from New York to Arlington National Cemetery. It gives me chills now to think about it. This is not orchestrated — the photographer looked out the window and he saw all these people. There are several of these photos in our book. What you’re looking at is not just the American people but their post-war dreams that have again and again been challenged and shattered. This train goes past peoples’ backyards and through small towns, and you can’t not see this private life, the familiarity in that sign — Bobby — and the sense of intimacy and grief.

Wexler: Jim Goldberg grew up in New Haven. He followed homeless, addicted, abused kids and young people in California for years. He got involved with their lives and documented the seediness and the cruelty of their worlds. It’s like that photo of the post-war drinking fountains — it asks what the U.S. did with the years of battle and war and heroism. What did the war bring to us? This is part of Jim’s embeddedness in the cultural washback. But at the same time, there’s an innocence to the young woman’s face, a hopefulness, a beauty. Escaping from who knows what to the West coast to look for a life that doesn’t happen.

Wexler: The baby is starting his life, and his mother is tending to him. This could be a classic scene on its own, of how we think an American childhood begins. But the question the rest of the photograph raises is, what is the future? There’s this sense of young life and of death, of tenderness and of brutality. One reason we have so many amazing 9/11 photographs, like this one, is because the Magnum photographers were having their annual meeting in New York City that day.

Wexler: Bieke is a Belgian photographer. For her first book, she went to Russia and went around by herself and met people and asked if they would take her in for a night. For her second book, she did the same thing in the United States. And that part of the project is what this photograph is from. A lot of the photos from this series show her views of people’s personal spaces. She calls it the intimate chaos of family life. It’s the other side of the wars — the opposite of men landing with guns on Omaha Beach, trying to free the world from fascism. It’s about the similarity of intimacy of people all over. Here, it looks like the family is out looking at holiday lights, and they were willing to bring her along. 

Wexler: They want to be seen. They want to be recorded. And the photograph brings us very close to that desire. That closeness is one of the trademarks of Bruce Gilden’s work. The protestors are saying, “Come with us. We need to stop this. We need you to be here. You need to be with us.” And as a historian, I would say the image also surfaces the continuity and insistence of this demand within the Magnum archive. It’s so many years since the drinking fountain photograph. There have been so many protests against police violence since then. Yet here it is surging up again. To me, this photograph asks the question, “Where are you?”