Magnum Photos receives the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord

There are photographs that remain etched on the retina and are impossible to erase, no matter how many years go by and the world changes before our eyes. These historical photographs allow us to tear out a piece of the past, to keep it in the present and, above all, to continue contemplating it in the future, avoiding the blows of oblivion. Many of these memorable snapshots bear the signature of Magnum Photos on the back, the most important photography agency in the world, which now goes one step further and receives the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord.

This award completes this year’s list of honors and focuses on that group of snapshot lovers who, in 1947, decided to begin portraying the world, with all its injustices and with all its harshness, to try to make society aware of the worst (and, sometimes, the best) side of reality. The pillars of Magnum in its beginnings were Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and George Rodger and their union arose by chance on the terrace of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in unstable times, just after the Second War World.

For them, the founding of this agency meant beginning to understand photography in a new way, in a different way. They wanted to be independent professionals and not have to bow to the demands of any media outlet. They wanted to have the freedom to discuss each topic and contribute their own, author’s perspective to the events they witnessed.

Soon, more professionals joined them, who also portrayed with their cameras moments of daily life, social revolutions and war conflicts that changed the course of history. Their works constitute the photographic memory of the modern world because they were, for example, hidden behind the camera during the Spanish civil war, always close to the events, capturing faces worn down by suffering; the races through the streets of Bilbao, when the alarms sounded; and death of the militiamen in the middle of the battlefield.

Magnum photographers were always where the news was and, therefore, they also witnessed the liberation of Paris in 1944; of the Prague Spring of 1968; of the Bloody Sunday that Belfast experienced in 1971 and the riots in Egypt. Nor did they miss the wars between Israel and Palestine in the eighties, nor do they miss the horrors that currently shake humanity such as poverty, drug trafficking crimes, discrimination and protests to end the war in Gaza, among a endless list of situations that make them a truthful look at a troubled world.