69 She was the photographer who entered the Buchenwald concentration camp with the Allies the day after the liberation and was the first to tell the world about the horror of the Holocaust. To what extent are Bourke-White s words still appropriate today when everyone can doctor a photo? Leica What is meant by Iron Curtain? THE LASTING IMPACT OF PHOTOJOURNALISM Photojournalism uses photographs to tell stories or report on people and events. Some of the first photojournalists captured images that are still iconic. They showed poverty, wars, and famine, as well as victories and celebrations of WW2 and, by doing so, they succeeded in capturing emotions, too. Like never before, their shots showed the damage inflicted, not only on soldiers, but also on civilians. The Golden Age and WW2 In 1925, the German Leica company released a new camera which succeeded in capturing emotions. The great season of reportage had started and saw Europe home to a new understanding of both photography and journalism: photographers began to travel and became photojournalists. However, following the advent of Nazism and the flight of intellectuals from dictatorship, the new centre of photojournalism moved to the USA. Here, the decisive year was 1936: the founding of Life magazine. For this magazine, Margaret Bourke-White travelled to Europe with the aim of American writer whose reputation rests on the naturalistic novels on proletarian themes that he wrote in the 1930s, especially Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath (Pulitzer Prize) translated by Cesare Pavese and published under the title of Furore in a version cut by fascist censorship. to deceive: ingannare to doctor: falsificare famine: carestia flight: fuga rawness: crudezza First cover of Life 168 Creative artS Margaret Bourke-White reporting on life under dictatorships and during WW2. She hoped that showing the truth in all its rawness could save the world s democracy: I am firmly convinced, she said years later, that fascism would not have taken power in Europe if there had been a truly free press that could have informed people instead of deceiving them with false promises . The Magnum After their shots during WW2 had already become iconic, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David Seymour, and William Vandivert founded Magnum Photos Inc on 22nd May 1947. With the name borrowed from a champagne bottle, a new reality saw the light of day aiming at the protection of the photographer s work and the respect of photographic rights. Each photographer operated according to a geographical subdivision: Henri Cartier-Bresson in the Far-East, David Seymour in Europe, William Vandivert in America, George Rodger in the Middle East and Africa, while Robert Capa went all over the world. They had some early scoops, such as Robert Capa s first uncensored look behind the Iron Curtain at the Soviet Union with the writer John Steinbeck , and Cartier-Bresson s coverage of India at the time of Gandhi s assassination.