Back to Peace? - Audioguide [ENG]

Less than twenty years after the end of the Second World War, a new shadow seemed to be falling over the peace Europe was seeking to rebuild. The shadow of a wall.During the night of 12–13 August 1961, Berlin was divided into East and West by the Berlin Wall, the best-known symbol of the Cold War. Initially, it was not a solid wall, but a border marked out by barbed wire, concrete blocks, and patrolling soldiers.Streets and homes were abruptly cut in half. Families, lovers, friends and neighbors were divided by a boundary that had once been invisible, and that became more real day by day.This extraordinary situation, a city that was being broken in two brick by brick, was photographed by four Magnum photographers: Burt Glinn, René Burri, Leonard Freed and Thomas Hoepker. True to the agency’s approach, their images convey both the historical fact and the lived experience of Berliners. Some scenes feel almost surreal. We see people standing on railings or on mounds of sand, looking over a wall that is only half-built, waving from a distance to friends and relatives they could still embrace just days earlier. Some peer through gaps between the concrete blocks. In another image, a bricklayer walls up a window in a house that is about to become part of the barrier. Groups of soldiers watch each other from just a few meters away.These unsettling photographs also bear witness to a reality that shaped life in Berlin from then until 1989, only a few decades ago.The Berlin Wall marks the end of our journey, which has made us witnesses to the conflicts of the Second World War, the rebuilding that followed, and the new fears of the post-war world. Witnesses not only to events, but to the lives of people who faced moments of anguish and moments of hope, and who have reached us through the lens of Magnum Photos.Thank you for accompanying us on this journey.As you move through the exhibition, the question we asked at the beginning still echoes, and in the world we live in, it feels more current than ever.Back to Peace?Is a return to peace possible?

Who were the people who would inherit the world after the Second World War?Generation X was a collective project involving some of Magnum’s best-known photographers, many of whom we have already met in the rooms of this exhibition.It began with an idea devised by Robert Capa, who in 1951 asked his colleagues to portray a young man or woman in the country where they were working, capturing both the individual and the setting of their everyday life. The sitters were also asked to complete a detailed questionnaire about their family, their ambitions, and what they believed in.With twenty-four subjects from fourteen countries around the world, Generation X became a broad portrait of young people stepping into adulthood just a few years after the war. They are individuals caught between the still tangible signs and memories of the conflict and the hope for the future that awaited them.The project also lets us see, up close, the humanist outlook shared by Magnum photographers. As we have already seen in earlier rooms, this series operates on two levels at once: on the one hand, it achieves an intimate understanding of people, their stories and their inner lives; on the other, it offers a wider view, a shared picture of an entire generation. Not a single, uniform world, because beyond what may look like a generally optimistic attitude towards the future, each subject conveys a different life, shaped in a different way by the conflict and by its consequences in peacetime.

A Polish photographer who later became a French citizen, David Seymour, known as Chim, photographed the Spanish Civil War, just like his fellow founding member of Magnum, Robert Capa.Between 1945 and 1948, he photographed Germany, Austria, Poland and other European countries for a range of publications. His reportages capture people’s lives in the years immediately after the war: displaced children, families searching for loved ones, and civilians in the process of rebuilding. Chim’s photographs are not just a clear record of events but also leave room for his subjects’ individuality, so what we see is not an anonymous crowd, but portraits of real people. His images help us understand that the ruins left by war are not only destroyed buildings, but also rubble carried within.In 1948, the reporter was commissioned by UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, to photograph the conditions of Europe’s children, while also documenting the organization’s work. The photographs from this series, Children of Europe, reveal stories behind the children’s faces that are hard to accept: boys and girls who survived human cruelty, a young rape survivor in Naples, scenes of extreme poverty, wounded and mutilated children. Chim approaches these situations without slipping into easy sentimentality, portraying his subjects in all their psychological complexity. He often wrote their stories himself in the photo captions, turning each image into a way of exposing the impact of war on the innocent.

Looking at the photograph Glyptothek. Roman statue, it is as if a single image contains a metaphysical painting by Giorgio de Chirico, a fragment from a documentary on ancient art, and the devastation of a bombed city.These are the three sides of Herbert List. A Jewish photographer of German origin, he developed his style between the 1920s and 1930s, shaped by Surrealist and metaphysical painting. Later, after leaving Germany in 1936, he focused on architecture and antiquity, photographing Greece for his book Licht über Hellas, published in English as Hellas.In his photographs taken in Munich between 1945 and 1946, collected in the series Memento 1945, List gathers all those earlier experiences into a body of work that represents what war leaves behind, with a distinctive and wide-ranging eye.

Swiss photographer Werner Bischof approached the very first post-war years as an art and studio photographer. He worked in line with the principles of New Objectivity, an artistic movement which, in reaction to Expressionism, aimed to depict reality without idealization, rhetorical excess, or metaphor. In his early photographs, mountain landscapes, still lifes and portraits are treated with impeccable formal discipline, precise geometry, and a black-and-white style that almost resembles graphic design.Bischof described those years spent in Switzerland, a neutral country during the war, as an ivory tower, where he could refine his technique in a place that was relatively protected from the dangers of the conflict.With the post-war period, working for the humanitarian organization Swiss Relief and the Swiss magazine Du, his lens shifted from studio photography to documenting the pain and determination of people faced with rebuilding Europe.This resulted in a documentary style that united flawless, harmonious composition with social themes handled with great sensitivity.In Berlin, he photographed the ruined Reichstag on the horizon and, in the foreground, the remains of a helmet reflected in a puddle. The construction of the image, in which water, earth and rubble create three distinct planes, combines graphic precision and drama. The same can be said of a photograph taken in Naples where, against a carefully controlled alternation of empty space and pale surfaces, we see a group of children and the words “No alla Guerra” (No to War), as if it were a message left for their future.This is how Werner Bischof’s signature approach to photography took shape, and in 1949 he became the first Magnum member to join from outside the founding group.

The return journey of the French prisoners, filmed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, also marked the start of our route away from war, and it now brings us to Paris. We are in the first room of the exhibition’s second thematic section, dedicated to reconstruction and peace.Robert Capa is still alongside the soldiers, led by General Philippe Leclerc, as they liberate the French capital.As the photographer later wrote: “The road to Paris was open, and every Parisian was out in the street to touch the first tank, to kiss the first man, to sing and cry.”These words come alive in his photographs, where crowds even lean out from the ledges of buildings to celebrate the end of the occupation.This moment of freedom erupts almost alongside the fighting. The images from the reportage show scenes of conflict, and moments when celebration and danger overlap: one photograph depicts the crowd lying flat on the pavement after shots were fired by enemy snipers who were still active during the celebrations. As always, Capa was right there with them, probably lying or crouched down with his camera ready to shoot.

German-born Erich Hartmann served in the American Army after escaping Nazi Germany. At the time he was not yet a professional photographer, and many years passed before he returned to the places of the Second World War with his camera.He did so in 1994 with the In the Camps series, photographing 22 concentration camps, just a few years before many of their original artefacts and structures began to fall apart and were replaced with educational replicas and museum displays. Shot entirely in black and white, these images are striking for the total absence of people, which gives the sites an unsettling, anguished tone.While Zoran Music’s drawings created inside the camps often only show faces and bodies emerging against an undefined setting, here the empty setting brings out images and sensations of pain and atrocity: deserted operating and dissection tables, half-open doors of abandoned crematorium ovens, a noose still hanging from a gallows in the fog. Hartmann captures an absence that does not signify silence but carries an evocative force that speaks straight to the viewer’s heart.

In 1945, the United States Office of War Information commissioned French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to make a documentary of around thirty minutes, telling the story of French prisoners’ liberation and return home. Imprisonment was something Cartier-Bresson had personally experienced: he was taken prisoner by German troops during the war, later managing to escape.With a simple, direct approach, the film follows the return journey step by step: from liberation, to travel, to waits at border crossings, and finally the arrival home, as those returning search the crowd for the faces of their loved ones. Everything is accompanied by commentary spoken by the French poet Claude Roy.Although it was funded by the United States, the result is not a propaganda film, but an essential account of this specific final moment of the war. Despite the sober tone, it offers a surprisingly intense portrayal of the sense of separation caused by the conflict, the waiting, the hope, and, at last, the joy of those who were fortunate enough to reach a happy ending.

On 6 August 1945, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.The blast destroyed about two thirds of the city, instantly killing between sixty and seventy thousand people, and injuring roughly the same number. Never before had a single weapon caused a catastrophe of that scale.It is thanks to photographers like Wayne Miller, among the first to document Hiroshima around a month after the bombing, that the wider public was able to grasp the true magnitude of what had occurred.Miller’s reportage features images of utter desolation, where he photographs the epicenter of the explosion or the ruins of the few buildings still standing alongside scenes filled with people and impactful portraits showing the empathy between subject and photographer.In these photographs, in which people are at the center of the frame, we experience the aftermath of the bomb through the wide range of emotions on their faces. It is impossible not to see the suffering and the hardship in pictures taken inside a makeshift hospital swarming with flies, but despair is not the only feeling in this community newly struck by disaster.There is determination in the face of Dr Hisikichi Tokoda; dignity and unease in that of the mother holding her child. Here and there, there is even room for a smile, among the workers restoring a bombed building, or among the soldiers on a train returning home, defeated, but still alive.In these shots, rather than searching for the perfect image of tragedy, Miller seems to tell a story of humanity, equally fragile and determined, even at the very center of devastation.

In this photographic exhibition we have set aside a space for an artist who, although he did not use a camera as his means of expression, managed to capture one of the most traumatic aspects of the Second World War, which he personally experienced. Zoran Music, a painter and printmaker from Bukovica, near Nova Gorica, was deported to the Dachau concentration camp in 1944. There, in secret, using makeshift materials and risking his life, he produced a series of drawings showing the reality in which he was trapped.With a style that was necessarily restrained, the artist depicted fragments of life inside the camp: hollow, lifeless faces and bodies, piled up or dragged away by soldiers. These drawings are a first-hand record of those atrocities, as well as the only lifeline for Music that helped him survive inside Dachau.After liberation, he returned to this subject in the 1970s with a series of paintings and prints titled “We Are Not the Last”, in which the scenes surface like images from memory, marked by the same sharp, dramatic stroke.

British photographer George Rodger caught the attention of LIFE magazine thanks to his images during the Blitz in London, when the city was bombed by the Germans in 1943.Some of these photographs stay with us because of their ability to simultaneously frame everyday life and the scars of war. They are a testimony to the resilience of Londoners, who carried on with their lives even under enemy bombs.This can be seen in the photograph of a warden making a call from a classic London phone box, with the door smashed in and on a pavement strewn with debris. Or in the shot of two children, one of them wearing a helmet, not as a game, but as a precaution.With a feature titled “LIFE Spends a wartime weekend on the Thames”, the magazine hired him as a correspondent.This marked the start of his long career as a photojournalist, which took him to work in Italy, France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, placing him at the center of some of the war’s most symbolic moments. In 1945, he accompanied British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and General Montgomery on an unusual and dangerous mission, as they crossed the River Rhine and spent half an hour in enemy territory. He also photographed the German surrender in the Netherlands, north-west Germany and Denmark.Rodger’s journey through the war reached its narrative and emotional peak when he photographed Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp where Anne Frank died.

After the Normandy landings, Robert Capa continued to follow the Americans, sharing the most dangerous moments on the front line with the soldiers.In March 1945 he parachuted into Germany with them. He managed to land in a field, but many others were killed by enemy fire or crashing gliders that had lost control. Alongside the troops, he then reached the city of Leipzig, which had been devastated by bombing.It is no coincidence that the word ‘shot’ can mean both a photograph and a gunshot. It was precisely as the photographer was taking a shot of a soldier leaning out from a balcony that the man was shot by an enemy sniper. Once again, this shows just how close Capa was able to get as he documented the conflict.Symbolically and poignantly, the photojournalist called this fallen soldier, killed during the final phase of the American campaign in Germany, “the last man to die” in the Second World War.

His real name was Endre Friedmann. Hungarian by birth, he studied in Berlin before fleeing to Paris during the rise of Nazism. It was there that he adopted the professional name by which he is still known everywhere today: Robert Capa.By 1939, before receiving acclaim for his Second World War pictures, he was already renowned as “the world’s greatest war photographer” thanks to his reportage on the Spanish Civil War. Ironically, the world’s finest war photographer did not find a single assignment on the front line of the global conflict until 1943, when he was sent as a correspondent to North Africa, alongside the United States Army. From that moment on, Capa accompanied the Americans in all their main military campaigns.In the same year he arrived in Sicily, where he photographed the soldiers’ advance and the siege of the town of Troina, defended by German troops. Amid moments of intense drama, his reportage also captured more colorful scenes: among his photographs, you can find one in which a young Sicilian farmer points with a stick to an American soldier, perhaps twice his height, showing him the Germans’ position — a conversation in gestures framed in an image with a strikingly balanced composition. In 1944 Capa was shoulder to shoulder with the Americans during the Normandy landings, at Omaha Beach. In fact, he was literally right behind them, photographing them as they climbed down from the landing craft, in a blurred image that captures the danger and the frantic rush of soldiers running under enemy fire, water up to their knees. The picture shows how close the photographer was to the action during the war, covering combat not from safe positions, but directly on the battlefield. As he himself said: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough”.

Welcome to Back to Peace? The War Seen by the Great Magnum Photographers. In this exhibition, we will guide you on a journey spanning the decades of the Second World War, the post-war reconstruction, and the early years of the Cold War, captured through the lenses of the photographers who changed the course of reportage.So who are the Magnum photographers?Magnum Photos is a photographic agency founded a few years after the end of the conflict, in 1947, by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandivert, five photographers from five different countries. Each of them had told the story of the war through their own eyes, and each of them went on to tell the story of the world in their own way.Magnum was not only notable for the great names who founded it and later joined it, but also for its mission to protect photojournalists. At a time when picture magazines exercised strong control over photographers, Magnum members worked to defend the intellectual property of their images and the integrity of their style, while taking a respectful, honest approach to the public.With this commitment to truthful perspective and storytelling, we prepare to experience the traumas and wounds of the last century up close, and, together, the slow and difficult rebuilding of peace.We will land with the American troops on D-Day. We will move through the rubble of a shattered Europe and of post-atomic Japan. We will see the faces of the generation entering the world in the first post-war years, until we arrive before the Berlin Wall, in the shadow of peace already threatened by the new fears of the Cold War.Back to peace? You can look for the answer among the exhibition rooms and photographs.