Overview

Join Nadya Bair, Assistant Professor of Art History at Hamilton College and former Postdoctoral Associate with Yale’s Digital Humanities Lab (DHLab) and American Studies, for a discussion of her new book, The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market, which was published by the University of California Press in 2020. Renowned critic and art historian Abigail Solomon-Godeau will join the conversation as a respondent.

The Decisive Network draws on extensive archival research to unravel the mythologies surrounding the Magnum Photos agency. Through a systematic reexamination of Magnum’s early operations, Bair reframes photojournalism as a collaborative profession, while also showing how Magnum made news images integral to visual culture in the two decades after World War II.

As an accompaniment to her book, Bair collaborated with the DHLab during her postdoctoral appointment to create Inside the Decisive Network, a web project that draws on a range of digital methods—mapping, network analysis, and online exhibits of Magnum photos—to illustrate the breadth of Magnum’s activities after World War II. For more information, visit the project website.

All are invited to attend!

Event Details

USC-LACMA History of Photography Seminar
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
12:30-2:00 p.m. PST
RSVP to vsri@usc.edu for the Zoom link