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 pat...

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 t...

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 childr...

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...

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 impecc...

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 photographe...

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...

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 app...

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, t...

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 m...

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 bom...

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...

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 t...

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...