Product Description

There are few things that unify people across the world better than the game of soccer. More than just kicking a ball about, soccer stirs passions beyond rational thought, affecting the mood of a nation or even the fortunes of a government. Since the 1930s various members of Magnum have photographed the world of soccer, documenting the teams, the supporters and the game, from barefeet on African mud or a Brazilian beach to kicking cans in the backstreets of Newcastle. This collection shows how deep the roots of soccer run and how wide they are spread, how soccer culture crosses every boundary of nationality, race and religion, how it throws up important social issues such as the empowerment of women through soccer in Iran and the bitter religious rivalry between Glasgow's two teams Rangers and Celtic. This portfolio of images combines the beauty of the game itself with the aesthetic quality associated with the photographers of Magnum and provides a celebration of the world game' as well as a fascinating social portrait of the world over a period of more than half a century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #454247 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 184 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
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 Brotton

Customer Reviews

A Beautiful Homage To the Beautiful Game!
An absolutely beautiful collection of about 200 black and white and color photographs celebrating the global sport known as football. Since its founding by a collective of photojournalists in the '40s Magnum has been one of the world's premier photo agencies, so it's not surprising that their archives have yielded such an array of compelling photos of the beautiful game. Few of the photos are of the high level world or professional ranks, rather they are of regular players and fans in the grimy cities, dusty villages, and muddy pitches of the world. Some are action shots, some are posed, some are impressionistic-but all are a tribute to the simplest of sports. Sure to delight devotees of either football or photography, it's an attractive and inexpensive collection that deserves wide readership.