In 2008, a spectacular discovery of photographs of a long-forgotten exhibition was rediscovered in the basement of the Institut Français in Innsbruck. Under the title Face of Time, the legendary photographers’ cooperative Magnum Photos Inc., founded in 1947 in New York by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David Seymour, and Bill Vandivert, organized one of its very first comprehensive group exhibitions in Austria. From June 1955 to February 1956, Face of Time was hosted in museums and cultural institutions across the cities of Innsbruck, Vienna, Bregenz, Graz, and Linz.

Magnum’s First presents 83 original vintage prints from the early days of the cooperative agency. Embedded within the authentic, color-coded hanging concept, the exhibition brings together eight renowned Magnum members- Werner Bischof, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Ernst Haas, Erich Lessing, Jean Marquis, Inge Morath, and Marc Riboud.

The scope of the exhibition is unexpectedly broad and contemporary. With the ambition to create a multifaceted and global portrayal of the present, the photojournalists document life in Spain, Dalmatia, and Japan, capturing events such as Gandhi’s death in India, the rise of socialism in Hungary, and elaborate film productions in Egypt. Everyday scenes also find their place in the traveling exhibition, such as Erich Lessing’s playful series on children in Vienna.

Today, several images from Magnum’s First have become icons of photography. However, the exhibition as a whole also reflects the passionate commitment of these photographers to making the world a more humane place through photographic storytelling. Ultimately, Magnum’s First marks the beginning of an unparalleled success story—one that would shape documentary photography of the 20th and 21st centuries.

MAGNUM'S FIRST
Traveling Exhibition

Original Tour

1955 - Institut Français, Innsbruck, Austria 1955 - Würthle Gallery, Vienna, Austria 1955 - Bregenz, Austria 1955 - The Joanneum, Graz, Austria 1956 - Neue Galerie, Linz, Austria

Modern Tour

2008 - Gallery Flo Peters, Hamburg, Germany 2008 - WestLicht, Vienna, Austria 2009 - Sala Municipal de Exposiciones de San Benito, Valladolid, Spain 2009 - Versicherungskammer Bayern, Munich, Germany 2010 - Galerie der Stadt, Fellbach, Germany 2010 - Museum Bad Arolsen, Germany 2010 - Museum Haus Ludwig, Saalouis, Germany 2011 - Deutsche Börse, Eschborn, Germany 2012 - Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, Slovenia 2013 - Fundacion Canal Isabel II, Spain 2014 - House for Photography, Budapest 2015 - The Museum of Photography, Seoul, Korea 2016 - KUK, Monschau, Germany 2016 - Art Front Gallery, Tokyo, Japan 2017 - Museum de Brescia, Italy 2019 - Museo Diocesano Carlo Maria Martini, Milan, Italy 2025 - 2026 Image Centre, Toronto, Canada

Dates Available

May 1, 2026 - December 31, 2027

Werner Bischof
(Zurich 1916 – 1954 Trujillo / Peru)
Werner Bischof studied photography with Hans Finsler in his native Zurich at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School for Arts and Crafts) and afterward opened a photography and advertising studio. In 1942 he became  freelancer for Du magazine, which published his first major photo essays in 1943. Bischof received international recognition after the publication of his 1945 report on the devastation caused by the Second World War. In the years that followed, Bischof traveled to Italy and Greece for Swiss Relief, a charitable organization dedicated to postwar reconstruction. In 1948 he photographed the Winter Olympics in St. Moritz for Life magazine. After trips to Eastern Europe, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark, he worked for Picture Post, The Observer, Illustrated and Epoca. He was the first photographer to join Magnum as one of the founding members in 1949. Disliking the “superficiality and sensationalism” of the magazine business, he devoted much of his working life to looking for order and tranquillity in “traditional” cultures, something that did not endear him to picture editors looking for spectacular material. Nonetheless, he found himself sent to report on a famine in India by Life magazine (1951), and he went on to work in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Indochina. The images from these reportages were used in major magazines throughout the world. In the autumn of 1953 Bischof created a series of expansively composed color photographs of the USA. The following year he travelled through Mexico and Panama, and then on to a remote part of Peru, where he was engaged in making a film. Tragically, Bischof died in a road accident in the Andes on May 16, 1954, only nine days before Magnum founder Robert Capa lost his life in Indochina.

Robert Capa
(Budapest 1913 – 1954 Thai-Binh / French Indochina)
On December 3, 1938, Picture Post introduced The Greatest War Photographer in the World: Robert Capa” with a spread of twenty-six photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War. But the “greatest war photographer” hated war. Born André Friedmann to Jewish parents in Budapest in 1913, he studied political science at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (German Academy for Political Science) in Berlin. Driven out of the country by the threat of a Nazi regime, he settled in Paris in 1933. He was represented by Alliance Photo and met the journalist and photographer Gerda Taro. Together, they invented the “famous” American photographer Robert Capa and began to sell his prints under that name. He met Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway, and formed friendships with fellow photographers David “Chim” Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson. From 1936 onward, Capa’s coverage of the Spanish Civil War appeared regularly. His picture of a Loyalist soldier who had just been fatally wounded earned him his international reputation and became a powerful symbol of war. After his companion, Gerda Taro, fell victim to a Republican tank in Spain, Capa travelled to China in 1938 and immigrated to New York a year later. As a correspondent in Europe, he photographed the Second World War, covering the landing of American troops on Omaha beach on D-day, the liberation of Paris, and the Battle of the Bulge. In 1947 Capa founded Magnum Photos with Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, and William Vandivert. On May 25, 1954, he was photographing for Life in Thai-Binh, Indochina, when he stepped on a landmine and was killed. The French army posthumously awarded him the Croix de Guerre with Palm. The Robert Capa Gold Medal Award was established in 1955 to reward exceptional professional merit.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
(Chanteloup-en-Brie 1908 – 2004 Montjustin)
Henri Cartier-Bresson, the son of a French industrialist, studied painting and soon developed a strong fascination for Surrealism in particular. In 1932, after spending a year in the Ivory Coast, he discovered the Leica – his camera of choice thereafter – and his lifelong passion for photography began. In 1933 he had his first exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. He later worked as an assistant for director Jean Renoir. Taken prisoner of war in 1940, he escaped on his third attempt in 1943 and subsequently joined an underground organization to assist prisoners and escapees. In 1945 he photographed the liberation of Paris with a group of professional journalists and then filmed the documentary Le Retour (The Return), about returning prisoners of war. In 1947, with Robert Capa, George Rodger, David “Chim” Seymour, and William Vandivert, he founded Magnum Photos. After three years spent traveling in the East, he returned to Europe in 1952, where he published his first book, Images à la Sauvette (published in English as The Decisive Moment). He explained his approach to photography in these terms: “For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. … It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.” In 1968 he began to curtail his photographic activities, preferring to concentrate on drawing and painting. In 2003, with his wife and daughter, he created the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris for the preservation of his work. Cartier-Bresson received an extraordinary number of prizes, awards and honorary doctorates. He died at his home in Provence on August 3, 2004, a few weeks short of his ninety-sixth birthday.

Inge Morath
(Graz 1923 – 2002 New York)
After studying languages in Berlin, she became a translator, then a radio journalist in Vienna, where she settled in 1946. Later, she was an Austrian correspondent for Heute, a United States’ military Information Service Branch publication based in Munich. All her life Morath would remain a prolific diarist and letter writer, retaining a dual gift for words and pictures that made her unusual among her colleagues. A friend of photographer Ernst Haas, she wrote articles to accompany his photographs and was invited by Robert Capa and Haas to go to Paris and join the newly founded Magnum agency as an editor. She began taking her own pictures in London in 1951, which she submitted under a pseudonym to various magazines, and assisted Henri Cartier-Bresson as a researcher in 1953 – 54. In 1955, after working for two years as a photographer, she became a Magnum member. In the following years, Morath travelled extensively in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Her special interest in the arts found expression in photographic essays published by a number of leading magazines. After her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller in 1962, Morath settled in New York and Connecticut. She first visited the USSR in 1965. In 1972 she studied Mandarin and obtained a visa to China, making the first of many trips to the country in 1978. Morath was at ease anywhere. Some of her most important work consists of portraits – of anonymous people as well as celebrities. She was also adept at photographing places: her pictures of Boris Pasternak’s home, Pushkin’s library, Chekhov’s house, Mao Zedong’s bedroom, artists’ studios, and cemetery memorials are permeated with the spirit of invisible people still present. Inge Morath died in New York City on January 30, 2002, during work on a documentary being filmed in celebration of her impending eightieth birthday.

Ernst Haas
(Vienna 1921 – 1986 New York)
An Austrian who became a naturalized American, Ernst Haas joined Magnum in 1949. Ernst Haas briefly studied medicine and then later photography at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna. His report on prisoners of war returning home to Vienna, published in Heute magazine, was subsequently published in Life, winning him immediate recognition and an invitation from Robert Capa to join the Magnum Agency. Images of a Magic City (New York), his first major color essay, was published by Life magazine in 1953. This began his career as a freelance photojournalist for famous magazines such as Look and Vogue. Haas settled in New York in 1960. His first solo exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962, Ernst Haas Color Photography, and he did a four-part series, The Art of Seeing for National Educational Television. His first book, The Creation, 1971, sold more than 300,000 copies. In the early nineteen-seventies he began teaching photography workshops. He was presented with numerous awards, including the Kulturpreis der deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie (1972), as well as the Leica Master of Photography Award (1986) and the Hasselblad Fondation Gold Medal (1986). He died of a stroke in 1986.

Erich Lessing
(Vienna 1923 - 2018 Vienna)
Erich Lessing was the son of a dentist and a concert pianist. In 1939, before Lessing finished high school, Hitler’s occupation of Austria forced him to emigrate to Israel (then British Mandate Palestine). His mother remained in Vienna and died in Auschwitz. Lessing studied radio technology at Haifa’s Technical College before going to work on a kibbutz; after military service he also drove a taxi for a living. During the Second World War, Lessing served in the British Army as an aviator and photographer. He returned to Vienna in 1947. He worked as a reporter and photographer for the Associated Press and was invited to join Magnum by David “Chim” Seymour, one of the agency’s founders. He became a full member of Magnum in 1955. Lessing covered political events in North Africa and Europe, and reported on the onset of the Communist period in Eastern Europe for Life, Epoca, Picture Post and Paris-Match. His pictures of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution serve as a record of the hope and euphoria of the first days of the revolt, so soon to be followed by the pain of its brutal suppression. Lessing later became disillusioned with photojournalism as an agent for change. In the mid-nineteen-fifties he turned to art, science, and historical subjects. He specialized in large-format color photography, publishing more than forty books and establishing himself worldwide as a photographer of culture. Having taught photography in Arles, at the Venice Biennale, in Ahmedabad, India (where he established a professorship sponsored by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization), at the Salzburg summer Academy, and at the Academy of Applied Art in Vienna, Lessing has been honored with numerous awards, including the 1956 American Art Directors’ Award and the 1997 Austrian Grand Prize for Artistic Photography. He is a member of UNESCO’s International Commission of Museums, as well as CIDOC, its information branch. Lessing died in 2018 shortly after his ninety-fifth birthday.

Jean Marquis
(Armentières 1926 – 2019 Rambouillet)
In Paris, where he earned a living at a variety of odd jobs, Marquis met Robert Capa, the future president of Magnum, in 1949. Capa encouraged Marquis’s ambition to become a photojournalist. He started his professional career working for Pierre Gassmann, the founder and chief of the first European photo lab, Picto (Pictorial Service), which also did work for Magnum. Marquis was a member of Magnum between 1953 and 1956. His reporting took Marquis from the Haute Deûle canal in France, across the Rhine, to Hungary, Great Britain, and as far away as Lapland. On the side, he also shot stills for a number of films. In late 1955 he began working for L’Express magazine, where he remained for a few years. From 1956 to 1971 he worked for Time Inc., reporting for them on the Moroccan and Algerian wars for independence, French cultural events, the political revolutions in France in 1958, and the May 1968 student demonstrations. He reported on a wide variety of themes for the monthly magazine Science et Vie: the steel industry, medicine, modern technology, and Senegal were subjects for his camera, as were, for instance, children. After 1960 he published several books of photographs, including Il ne m’est Paris que d’Elsa (It’s Not Paris for Me Without Elsa), based on a collection of poems written by Surrealist Louis Aragon (1897 – 1982). The last important exhibition of his photographs was in 2001 at the Centre Régional de la Photographie in Douchy-les-Mines in northern France. He died in 2019 in Rambouillet.

Marc Riboud
(Lyon 1923 – 2016 Paris)
Marc Riboud was active in the French Resistance from 1943 to 1945. Until 1951 Riboud worked as an engineer in Lyon’s factories, then became a freelance photographer and moved to Paris in 1952. He was invited to join Magnum as an associate by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa in 1952; in 1955 he became a full member. In the mid-nineteen-fifties he set off for India in a specially converted Land Rover that once belonged to Magnum co-founder George Rodger, who had used it for his celebrated work in Africa. When he went to China in 1957, Riboud was one of the first European photographers to visit the country; he returned for a lengthy stay in 1965 with writer K. S. Karol. Riboud served as Vice President of Magnum from 1959 to 1973. He is best known for his extensive reports on the East: The Three Banners of China (1966), Face of North Vietnam (1970), Visions of China (1981), In China (1996), Tomorrow Shanghai (2003), and Istanbul 1954 – 1998 (2003). His most important book is 50 Years of Photography, published at the same time as his big exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in 2004. One of his most famous pictures was taken in Washington, D.C., during the 1967 March for Peace in Vietnam: a young woman holds a flower towards the bayonets of soldiers guarding the Pentagon. Riboud’s photographs have appeared in numerous magazines, including Life, Geo, National Geographic, Paris Match, and Stern. He twice won the Overseas Press Club Award (1966 and 1970), and, in addition to the exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, has had major retrospectives at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1985) and the International Center of Photography, New York (1988 and 1997). Marc Riboud died at 93 in Paris on August 30, 2016.