Exhibition
The exhibition Gesicht der Zeit (The Face of Time) was presented between June 1955 and February 1956 in five Austrian cities and is the first independent exhibition organized by the Magnum group. The memory of it had been completely lost until 2006, when two old crates were found in the cellar of the French Institute of Innsbruck, containing the colored panels of the exhibition on which eighty-three black and white photographs by some Magnum photographers were mounted, together with the presentation text, the labels with the names of the photographers, the original poster and the typewritten instructions for assembling the exhibition itself.
The managers of Magnum Photos, promptly notified of the discovery, they immediately realized the exceptional nature of the discovery. It was an orderly and homogeneous collective exhibition of eight of the greatest masters of photojournalism. The authors of the photos were among the most famous photojournalists of the agency: Robert Capa, Marc Riboud, Werner Bischof, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ernst Haas, Erich Lessing, Jean Marquis and Inge Morath.
The photographic shots were subjected to a cleaning operation and all the original materials were restored. After over fifty years, the first Magnum exhibition was once again visible to the public and it was possible to reconstruct its history.
The exhibition was probably organized after the Magnum group, in May 1955, had taken part in the Biennale Photo Cinéma Optique at the Grand Palais in Paris, which had aroused considerable appreciation. After that first success, the agency decided to collaborate with the University of Paris to organize an independent exhibition. Perhaps this is how the idea of Gesichte der Zeit (The face of time) was born.
The exhibition became itinerant: after the first stop held at the French Institute in Innsbruck it moved to Vienna, Bregenz and then to Graz. The final stop was probably the Neue Galerie in Linz. From here the photos from the exhibition were returned to Innsbruck in February 1956, perhaps with a view to a further stage, but they remained there until their discovery in 2006.
Together with Werner Bischof’s exhibition at the St. Annahof Gallery in Zurich in 1953 and that of the Magnum photographers at the Photokina fair in Cologne in 1956, of which nothing remains, the Gesichte der Zeit (The Face of Time) exhibition is proof that, from the beginning, Magnum was different from other photo agencies. With its busy program of exhibitions and events, Magnum clearly demonstrated its intent to defend both the value of the photo as a document and the artistic value of the shots taken by the agency’s photographers.
Since its discovery in 2006, the exhibition, with the title Magnum’s First, has been staged in various European cities, and is also proposed here today in its original setting.
The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Magnum Photos, with the patronage of the Municipality of Milan and the support of Rinascente. Belvedere
Gardens, Vienna, Austria, 1954
© Erich Lessing/Magnum Photos
