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Michael Dell, the US magnate of the homonymous computer and hardware company founded by him in a college dormitory in 1983, has bought, for 100 million dollars (through his investment fund, MDS Capital), part of the archive of New York’s Magnum Photos, one of the most important photo agencies in the world. About 185 thousand images, an economic heritage and mainly a cultural monument which is not going to be locked up in some private property or vault, but is going to be given to the University of Austin in Texas.
The agreement entails that, at least for the next five years, the photos will be kept by the prestigious institution Harry Ransom Center located in the Texan university, the same foundation which houses the collection of Helmut Gernsheim, historian of proto-photography, and which includes the View of Gras by Nicèphore Nièpce, considered the first photographic image of history.
Furthermore, the Ramson Center is going to complete the scanning of the photos, only half of which was carried out by Magnum, and it will make all the material available for scholars of the sector, as well as showing these masterpieces to the general public with exhibitions and publications. It is right to point out that this operation is not a case of private subjects taking away an artistic asset nor is it a commercial appropriation, which was what happened previously to other photographic agencies like the Sygma bought by Corbis, but it is only a consignment to posterity. Although the news spread by international papers does not point this out, it is important to say that the sale concerns only the physical materiality of the photos and not their reproduction rights, which are still owned by Magnum Photos.
Magnum was founded in Paris in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David “Chim” Seymour and George Rodger. Their project was based on the wish to protect royalties and transparency of information. Images were meant to be property of the photographer and not of the magazines where they were published, allowing authors to choose subjects and themes according to their style.
In recent years, even Magnum, like other famous agencies, has experienced an unrelenting decline and, probably, this financial agreement not only protects it from a definite end, but also gives it access, with the “title” of historical archive, to the Olympus of photography.
Dell’s collection, which from now on will be available to the public for a number of exhibitions and seminars, includes the images, which then became legendary, of all the main events which characterised twentieth-century history: from the famous photos of Robert Capa of the Spanish Civil War to the those of the landing in Normandy. Without mentioning the portraits of the great characters of the century, from Gandhi to Marilyn Monroe, from John Kennedy to Mohammed Ali.
The agreement between Magnum Photos and Michael Dell does not jeopardise anything in the current activity of the New York agency. In fact, it is only a relocation of photographic material that allows to preserve images full of notes on the back of them, often by their authors, which bear the marks of their “life” and are creased, essential source of information for historians and researchers. A source which bears the marks of an entire age, the one in which photography experienced its highest period of splendour.
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