![“We all work on Macs.... When I saw how perfect [Final Cut Pro] was for our content and logistics, we integrated the software into our editing process.”](http://images.apple.com/pro/profiles/magnum/images/header.jpg)
Magnum in Motion:
Photography Finds a Voice
The first thing you think when you watch the Magnum in Motion photo essays is that you won’t find these on the six o’clock news.
It’s not just that the essays combine unforgettable documentary photography with video, text, music, narration, and animation. It’s that they address issues and events other news media can’t squeeze into sound bites.
For instance, in “The Aesthetic Hunter” Steve McCurry’s masterful color photography gives insight into the human struggle and joy in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, India, and Tibet. In “Chernobyl Legacy,” Paul Fusco shows the disaster’s grim effects with searing portraits of children disfigured by nuclear fallout. And in “Tour de France,” Danish filmmaker and journalist Joergen Leth presents Magnum Photos’ 60-year coverage of the biggest event in cycling.
These photo essays appear on the Magnum in Motion website, where Magnum Photos, the prestigious, 60-year-old cooperative, offers them as podcasts and syndicates them to partners such as Slate.com and Nokia. They’ve also been featured on the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, and MSN websites. These online venues give the legendary photojournalists from Magnum Photos a new way to tell their stories.
Continuing the Magnum Legacy
“In the last twenty years, the paper press has become less and less willing to feature photo essays, so stories Magnum photographers built were cut in pieces,” says Magnum in Motion’s creative director Claudine Boeglin, known simply as CB. “Their images began to be used more as illustrations.”
Since Magnum Photos — created by iconic image makers Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David “Chim” Seymour — began in 1947, its photographers have chronicled most of the world’s major events from the Spanish Civil War to the present day. Their images have appeared in every major magazine, on every television station, and in every museum and gallery across the world. They’ve also been gathered into hundreds of photography books — often limited, signed editions.
Multimedia Magna
And now Magnum photographers can tell stories online. Boeglin and executive editor Bjarke (BJ) Myrthu launched the fledgling Magnum in Motion in 2004 and developed the first multimedia essays on their personal PowerBooks. They’ve since acquired three Power Mac G5s, a four-person production team, and a handful of freelance video editors who mostly work in the startup’s new studio — a long table in the archive room at Magnum’s New York office.
“We all work on Macs,” Boeglin says. “When Adrian Kelterborn came to Magnum in Motion for an internship — he had studied for four years at the School of Art and Design in Zurich — he naturally edited in Final Cut Pro.”
“When I saw how perfect it was for our content and logistics, we integrated the software into our editing process.” Boeglin says her team also uses Pro Tools for sound mixing, iPhoto for sequencing, GarageBand and Soundtrack to pool comments, iMovie to produce podcasts and Photoshop.
But content is the point. “When we designed the template for the web, BJ and I both wanted something as simple and essential as the iPod,” she says. “Apple has solid technology implemented in a very simple, visual environment, and our visual direction is like that. We believe the content is as important as the way you present it and the technology you use.”
A Template for Web Essays
Boeglin thinks Magnum in Motion became “solid in a short period of time” because, unlike traditional media that often repeats printed content on the web, Magnum in Motion created a template that allows editors and producers to work in a timeline and display images, video, and sound in a format that doesn’t require them to program Flash.
To produce the first essay, “Viet Nam at Peace” by Philip Jones Griffiths, Boeglin’s team simply went to the photographer’s apartment, recorded an interview, and edited his comments in GarageBand. The first xml-based web template, CB says, was easy for the editor, but it “forced us to join an image to a sound, one comment per image.” After Pascal Leroy of the Belgian web design company group94 built a new template, Magnum in Motion moved up.
Stepping Up to “The Aesthetic Hunter”
By the time Boeglin and Myrthu began work on “The Aesthetic Hunter” with Steve McCurry — who had just finished work on his new book, “Looking East” — they were ready to tackle a complex mix of stills, video, Flash animation, and multiple sound files. “The integration of video for the web is extremely challenging technically in terms of access and loading times,” Boeglin points out. “But our template allows us to work with it like any other medium.”
While reviewing books of McCurry’s exquisite, uplifting portraits of children, monks, pilgrims, and travelers in Southeast Asia, Boeglin caught the phrase “aesthetic hunter” in one of the forewords. “With the title, I tried to find a narration that would explain how Steve’s work began and why he is known for his extraordinary ability to capture color.”
Working with Boeglin, film and sound editor Magela Crosignani spent a few days shooting original digital video and interviewing McCurry in New York. McCurry also gave Boeglin full access to his archives so she could gather self-portraits that weren’t in the Magnum database.
