Black Star (picture agency)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Black Star Picture Agency ( Black Star for short ) was the name of the picture agency founded in 1935 by the German émigrés Ernest Mayer, Kurt Szafranski (later Safranski) and Kurt Kornfeld with headquarters in New York City and branches in London and White Plains, New York . The agency had a major impact on the history of photojournalism in the United States: it was the first private photo agency in the United States to introduce new techniques in photography and photojournalism. The then leading magazines Life Magazine and TIME were important buyers .

history

The Black Star Picture Agency was founded in New York in December 1935 by Ernest Mayer, Kurt Szafranski (who called himself Kurt Safranski in the USA) and Kurt Kornfeld. All three had fled Hitler's Germany as Jews . Mayer had previously founded the forerunner agency "Mauritius" in Berlin in 1929 . During the Second World War and the post-war period, Black Star was one of the most important photo agencies, mainly supplying the major news magazines such as Life Magazine and TIME .

Well-known photographers for Black Star included Robert Capa , Bill Brandt , Henri Cartier-Bresson , Andreas Feininger , Mario Giacomelli , Philippe Halsman , Germaine Krull , Lee Lockwood, Charles Moore , Martin Munkácsi , Marion Post Wolcott and W. Eugene Smith .

In 1964 the agency was acquired by Howard Chapnick, who had previously worked in its management for a long time. He expanded the focus from pure photojournalism for magazines to photo essays and illustrated books.

The Black Star archive, comprising around 300,000 individual photos from over 6,000 photographers, was acquired in 2003 by the Canadian businessman Jimmy Pattison. In 2005 the archive was anonymously, but presumably donated by Pattison's group of companies, Ryerson University in Toronto , which in 2012 turned it into the publicly accessible Ryerson Image Center collection .

The Black Star Publishing Co. continues to work with the marketing company Idea Grove as Black Star Rising as a commercial photo agency.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hendrik Neubauer: Black Star: 60 years of photojournalism . Könemann, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-89508-250-3 , pp. 6-27.
  2. ↑ Brigitte Werneburg: LIFE: Leben in der Emigration - German Photojournalists in America , December 1991
  3. ↑ David Oels, Ute Schneider: "The whole publishing house is simply a bonbonniere": Ullstein in the first half of the 20th century , Berlin 2015, p.395, footnote 16
  4. ↑ Michael Torosian: Black Star: the Ryerson University historical print collection of the Black Star Publishing Company: portfolio selection and chronicle of a New York photo agency . Lumiere Press, Toronto 2013, ISBN 978-0-921542-18-6 , p. 39.
  5. ^ Obituary in the New York Times, May 29, 1996
  6. ↑ Ryerson Receives Significant Image Archive Gifted to The (Toronto) Globe and Mail, April 12, 2005
  7. ↑ Nathalie Neumann: Photography in War - a perspective from Canada , in: Photo History, Issue 137, 2015
  8. ^ History of the Black Star Agency 1935–2010

Web links