Magna Brava
Dates: 13 September - 9 November 2002
Artists: Eve Arnold, Martine Franck, Susan Meiselas, Inge Morath and Marilyn Silverstone.
Refugees. Copyright: photog./Magnum Photos
Magna Brava celebrated the work of five outstanding
photojournalists who captured moving, daring and breath-taking
images from all over the world. All five worked for
Magna Brava and all five happened to be women. As Eve
Arnold once said, "I didn't want to be a 'woman photographer'. That
would limit me. I wanted to be a photographer who was a woman, with
all the world open to the camera."
The geographical reach of these five women is vast and this large exhibition documented events of global and local importance: Arnold was one of the first photographers to capture a (the) largely unknown and demonised China in 1979. Franck commemorates the lives of the threatened Gaelic-speaking community on Tory Island off the Irish coast, from 1993 - 1997. Meiselas produced humane coverage of war in Nicaragua and El Salvador from 1978 – 1983 and violence on the Mexico/US border in 1989.
Morath's collection of pictures in New York, date from the 1950s and spans over 40 years, encompassing a whole New York community from the famous and artistic to those walking the sidewalk.
Silverstone lived and worked in India between 1959 – 1977 and photographs resonate with the knowledge of the insider. Together the works offered a compassionate, compelling and unique vision of the world.