"Magnum" Football Book

What Pele once called "the beautiful game" is captured in all its global diversity in Magnum Football, a wonderful collection of nearly 200 photographs of people playing football all over the world. Trawling its archives since its launch in the 1940s, the world-famous Magnum photographic agency realised that many of its great photographers had often incidentally taken stunning photos of ordinary people absorbed in the pursuit of the great game. The result is this beautifully packaged Phaidon book. Abbas, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Guy Le Querrec, Peter Marlow and James Nachtwey are just some of the great photographers gathered together in the collection. The pictures are wonderful: crippled Italian children playing soccer in the aftermath of the war in 1948, Marilyn Monroe kicking off a game in 1959, naked football in Brazil, blue-haired female Japanese fans all confirm that, as Simon Kuper points out, "the game is the same whether you are playing in the mud of Maharashtra, the Tuileries Gardens in Paris or a refugee camp". Football brings people together, but it's also the perfect photographic medium for capturing that "decisive moment" of the great goal, the extraordinary save, or the dejection of defeat. As these photos reveals, "a photographer is like a playmaker in football, a number 10, who sees angles nobody else does". In Magnum Football, even in a game of two halves, everybody wins. --Jerry BrottonRead More