A Magnum photographer must be able to communicate, to move and at the same time to document reality. The author and curator shows how the agency owes its excellence to precisely this ability of its members to embrace both art and journalism: the photograph as personal creation and as testimony. The book is divided into three parts. The first looks at the archive through a humanist lens and concentrates on the ideals of freedom, equality, participation and universalism that emerged after the Second World War. The second shows the fragmentation of the world as told by the members between the 1970s and the 1990s, with particular attention to subcultures, minorities and the excluded. The third follows the different forms of expression with which they have captured the changes of the world and the dangers that threaten it. Besides the individual and collective projects, the book gathers magazine covers and extracts from newspaper articles and books, placing some of the best-known images in the world in their creative context, with entries on members chosen among the ninety-one who have belonged to the agency, an anthology of unpublished texts and a chronology. "Magnum is a myth and a con." "Magnum is a paradox." "Magnum is photography." (Quotations from Inge Bondi, Wayne Miller, Lee Jones, John G. Morris, Antoine d’Agata, Marc Riboud, David Seymour and Henri Cartier-Bresson.)