IT IS May 1947 and two years on from the end of a war that saw more than 60 million people killed, the world rolls on. In Nuremberg, 12 German generals are indicted on war crime charges. In the US, the House Un-American Activities Committee convenes in Hollywood for the first time; Chinese Communist forces launch an offensive in the north-east of the country; the British government agrees to the partition of India and on May 22 Magnum Photos Inc is registered as a company in the state of New York. The first co-operative agency for worldwide freelance photographers, Magnum started as the story of a Frenchman, a Pole, a Hungarian, an American and a Briton – Henri-Cartier Bresson, David Seymour, Robert Capa, William Vandivert and George Rodger respectively. They were five of the most respected photographers of their time, keen to find a new way to work in the post-war world. All had been active during the war. Cartier-Bresson had been a French prisoner of war, William Vandivert was the first western photographer to gain access to Hitler’s bunker and Capa accompanied Allied troops on to the Normandy Beaches during D-Day in 1944. (“For a war correspondent to miss an invasion is like refusing a dateAll had been marked by the conflict. Rodger gave up war photography after shooting photographs in the German concentration camps when he realised he was “getting the dead into nice photographic compositions”.
All of them saw Magnum as a new way of working and a escape from the editorial straitjackets imposed upon them by the magazines which employed them. They were a combative, argumentative co-operative and despite early coups (including Capa accompanying John Steinbeck behind the Iron Curtain) it was a hand-to-mouth existence at times.
There were also setbacks. Vandivert left the agency after a year. Capa, at one point the lover of Ingrid Bergman, was killed in 1954, aged 41, when he stepped on a landmine in Indochina, a bitter coda for a man who was famous for saying: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.”
But soon more photographers were joining the agency, including the likes of Eve Arnold, Elliott Erwitt and Marc Riboud, and 70 years later it is still growing strong. Some photographers fell out and moved on (Cartier-Bresson himself took a step back to contributor status in 1966, saying “I shall go and see what is happening in the street …”). But many stayed and more and more joined.
They still are. It can take four years to be accepted for full membership. It’s only in recent years that it has begun addressing a gender imbalance; between 1983 and 2009 only one woman, Lise Sarfati, was admitted as a full member.
There is no more prestigious photo agency. But Magnum is a collective and as such the work it has put out to the world has been as singular, quirky and unique as the photographers who make up its numbers.
That said, Magnum photographers have always been found at those places where the wheels of history are turning, as can be seen in these images drawn from a new photographic history of the agency entitled Magnum Manifesto. From the wake of the war, through the Cuban revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, the history of Magnum is the history of our world. Here are the images to prove it.

Image 1: In May 1947, the same month that Magnum came into being, the photographer David Seymour visited the beaches that had seen the Normandy landings. He was on his way to Germany, following the route taken by Allied soldiers just a few years before. This image of children playing, literally, in the shadow of the war was featured on the cover of This Week magazine.

Image 2: In 1963, four years after the Cuban revolution had seen the Communists seize power, Rene Burri accompanied the American journalist Laura Bergquist to Cuba on assignment for Look magazine. They met Che Guevara, then minister of industry for Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government, and during a heated two-anda-half-hour interview Burri was free to take photographs of the revolutionary. “It was an incredible opportunity to shoot Che in all kinds of situations: smiling, furious, from the back, from the front,” he said in 2010. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 and was killed two years later while fighting with guerrillas in Bolivia.

Image 3: A young man sits on the wall between East and West Berlin, November 11, 1989, pictured by Raymond Depardon. In 1989 the Berlin wall came tumbling down. East Germans had been demanding an end to Communist control. Two days before this picture was taken a spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party announced that from midnight citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country’s borders. Soon, the wall was under attack. “Mauerspechte” (“wallpeckers”) began to take hammers and picks to the wall. Before long cranes and bulldozers were pressed into service. Berlin was finally unified again.

Image 4: Gilles Peress’s photograph centres on a woman using clothing to prevent the dust from entering her lungs after the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In 1992 the historian Francis Fukuyama published an essay entitled The End of History? Fukuyama argued that with the collapse of the Soviet Union the year before the ideological battles of the 20th century had come to an end and western liberal democracy had triumphed. A decade later, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the emergence of a new political divide, this time between the west and Islamic fundamentalism, the idea seemed at the very least a little premature

Image 5: Refugees and migrants arriving on Lesbos in 2015 photographed by Alex Majoli as they are transferred to a camp to register with authorities. By the end of that year it was estimated there were more than 65 million people who had been forcibly displaced from their homes. The migrant crisis has been a destabilising factor in the politics of Europe and America, but in the end what is the migrant crisis but people? Like those in this picture. In a way they are the lucky ones. Last year more than 5000 people drowned in the Mediterranean trying to reach the West. This year already there have been a further 1096.

Magnum Photos 70th Anniversary will be celebrated with a global programme of events throughout 2017, including an official anniversary exhibition & book Magnum Manifesto published by Thames & Hudson. Visit www.magnumphotos.com/magnum-photos-70 or to follow the celebrations search #MagnumPhotos70