By the dawn of the 1950s, the photojournalist was monarch of all he surveyed. No medium other than photojournalism challenged the status of the great picture magazines like LIFE and Look. The best photojournalists who survived World War II and then Korea were acknowledged giants. The 1947 founding of the photographers' cooperative Magnum had established the principle that picture takers should own the rights to their work. (Previously, rights had belonged to whoever commissioned a project.) Photojournalism could even claim a | theoretical foundation, as in Henri Cartier-Bresson's idea of the photographer as instant organizer of reality.
Within a decade, the...
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