A vivid distillation of a deeply fractured country’: a history of the United States in nine photographs

The American photographer Peter van Agtmael experienced a life-changing moment, aged 19, when he happened on a copy of Magnum Degrees, a photobook published in 2000 of dramatic images from the previous decade.

“I got an instantaneous education in the beauty, violence, mystery, complexity and simplicity of photography,” he writes in his afterword to Magnum America, a much bigger, more mysterious and complex compendium of photographs spanning nine decades, from postwar 1940s to the present day.

Magnum was formed as a cooperative by a group of renowned war photographers, including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, in 1947. It’s cooperative nature was initially a reflection of its founders’ stoical postwar optimism in the face of the horrors and traumas they had witnessed, but also their shared spirit of creative independence.

Magnum America traces the nation’s often turbulent journey from those tentatively optimistic postwar years to the existential anxiety of the present political moment in which democracy itself hangs in the balance. Though punctuated by celebrated portraits and observational series on ordinary American lives, it is the hard-hitting photojournalism that arrests, from Capa’s blurred but powerful images from the D-day landing at Omaha beach to Van Agtmael’s eye-of-the-storm reportage of the siege of the Capitol by Trump supporters in 2021.

Van Agtmael and his fellow editor, the curator and feminist academic Laura Wexler, have not attempted to create a definitive visual history of the United States as reflexed through the lenses of Magnum photographers, but instead deftly explore ideas of history, culture, myth and national identity. The book comprises 600 images – some famous, some relatively unknown – culled from a total of 227,450. The selection here reflects that mix, but concentrates on images of conflict and political drama that are pertinent to today’s fraught pre-election moment.

The book is also a revealing social history of Magnum itself: the ideal and the often problematic reality. For too long, it reflected the predominantly white, male world of photojournalism, the exceptions being pioneers such as Eve Arnold, Martine Franck, Inge Morath and, later, Susan Meiselas. And, though Magnum photographers made some of the most memorable images of the black civil rights struggle in the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1988 that Eli Reed became the first black photographer to enter the Magnum fold. That irony went unnoticed for a long time. Today, Magnum is a diverse organisation, but it is its relevance – and, by extension, photojournalism’s role – that is also at stake in a world of relentless image-making and instant image-dissemination, an environment unimaginable to its founders. The ongoing carnage in Gaza enters our consciousness daily on social media, where local photojournalists as well as ordinary people with mobile phones bear witness at great risk in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian disaster. Not one photojournalist from Magnum or any other western photo agency has reported from Gaza because of Israel’s refusal to admit even embedded members of the international media. The integral act of bearing witness, which is at the core of Magnum’s collective being, continues just as powerfully all the same. The next big volume of retrospective Magnum images may have to find a way of grappling with that dilemma.

1940s: Robert Capa

American troops landing on Omaha beach, D-day, Normandy, France, 6 June 1944

On 6 June 1944, Robert Capa was one of a handful of photographers granted permission to cross the English Channel with allied forces during the D-day operation to liberate occupied France. He travelled with American soldiers from E Company of the 16th Infantry Regiment. This blurred but evocative image was taken in the immediate wake of their arrival at Omaha beach, where they were met with cannon and small arms fire from embedded German troops as they leapt off their landing crafts into cold, choppy waters. It remains one of the most visceral images of that pivotal, but at times chaotic, operation, during which about 4,440 allied soldiers lost their lives and close to 6,000 were wounded.

Intriguingly, the circumstances in which the 11 images that comprise Capa’s reportage from Omaha beach were created – which he described in characteristically self-mythologising fashion in his memoir, Slightly Out of Focus – have recently been contested. Likewise his contention that they were all that remained of 106 pictures he sent to Life magazine on his return to England, the rest having been mysteriously destroyed after being left too long at a high temperature by an unfortunate lab assistant who was processing them.

Whatever the truth, the photographs that were taken under extreme duress during his relatively short time on the beach – he made it on to a departing boat after a severe panic attack in which his hands were shaking so badly he could not reload his camera – are a powerful and up-close record of that day’s tumultuous events. There have been several attempts to identify the “soldier in the surf”, with Private Huston “Hu” Sears Riley the most likely contender. That he has not been definitively identified lends another level of poignancy to the image.

Capa, one of Magnum’s founders, was arguably the most revered photojournalist of the 20th century. His most famous quote epitomised his cavalier approach: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” In 1954, 10 years after this photograph was taken,