Over the past few months, Magnum’s project A World in Color has revived and digitized unseen images of Europe, which have been hidden away in Magnum’s Paris color archives for decades. For this summer edition, the project spotlights photographs of Europe’s Mediterranean coastlines, ranging from 1961 to 1992. Warm bread on a Greek terrace, a headstand at a cove in Monte Carlo — these unpublished photographs explore life at the threshold between land and sea.
Newly discovered images of Greece in 1978 by the late Constantine Manos are revealed here for the first time, showing his impulse towards a radically new aesthetic and the beginning of his break from black and white. Also featured are images by Elliott Erwitt, Philip Jones Grifffiths, Harry Gruyaert, Patrick Zachmann, Bruno Barbey, Alex Webb and more, transporting us to the unhurried rhythms of the Mediterranean, from Barcelona to Corfu.
A binding force for Europe’s coastal communities, the Mediterranean has secured its place in the collective psyche for millennia. Here in the Magnum color archives, the sea announces itself sometimes brazenly, other times discreetly — whether visible or not, its presence is always palpable.
In 1962, at 28 years old, Constantine Manos believed something might be waiting for him in the remote communities of Greece. Growing up in South Carolina, he had heard about life in the chorió — the village — from his parents, Dimitri and Aphrodite (Vaporiotou) Manos. In their Greek community on the Turkish island of Avsa, his grandfather and namesake, Constantinos, was a fisherman. Forcibly displaced during the population exchange in 1922-23, the couple emigrated to America before Manos was born.
With an advance from publisher Frank Taylor, Manos shipped a trunk to Athens full of darkroom equipment, classical LPs, and a record player. After a winding journey from Germany to Greece in a Volkswagen van, he arrived in Athens and had a marble sink built for his darkroom. For three years he traveled throughout the country, adhering to one rule he set for himself: “I would only photograph in isolated villages, with no electricity,” he said.
For Manos, his 1972 black-and-white photobook, A Greek Portfolio, “was a watershed.” He captured a world he might have inhabited but never did, a window into his parents’ and grandparents’ lives. In the ’60s, monochrome was his idiom for expressing a certain dissonance between the modest communities and himself — the son of Greek emigrées turned observer. “I had this idea that everything should have a somber feeling,” he said about the project. “I remember driving through the countryside and if I saw clouds in the distance, I would head in that direction.”
And yet, newly discovered photographs from 1978 reveal an evident contrast to his 1960s Greek Portfolio. In these saturated color images, the first filaments of a different approach emerge, the beginning of Manos’s search for strangeness — for “pictures that asked questions and didn’t give answers,” he said.
Establishing more defined contours between light and dark, Manos probed into a deeper mystery with his subjects in color. He investigated what the body is resisting or embracing, what might be at stake. Faces are often hidden — his subjects are turned, obscured, or altogether inaccessible, sometimes revealing only a pair of hands. These archives uncover a significant shift in Manos’s aesthetic, in which people’s gestures are amplified against the shadows, a precursor to his first major color work, American Color (1982-1994).
A self-proclaimed “people photographer,” Manos was drawn to the social dynamics of the Mediterranean rather than its landscapes. He was struck by the Greeks’ “unquestioning warmth” and philoxenia — a deeply rooted social code of hospitality. “I was searching for a beautiful and poetic look in my pictures,” he recalled, “and found it in the people.” On his 1978 trip, he captured two children embracing at the Panathenaic Stadium, the site of the first modern Olympic games.
“It’s very important to me that there are always people in my pictures, and that they are doing what they do naturally […],” Manos said. He explored how these natural, off-guard states can reveal individual desires, tensions and intentions that cannot be replicated. “Every person is a unique creation,” he added, “there are no two faces that look alike, there are no two bodies that look alike — it’s remarkable, it’s like fingerprints.”
Back in America, after developing his images, Manos was eager for transformation, and decided to fully switch to color. “It was a radical change for me, and it was certainly a conscious effort,” he said. While Greece embodied his black and white work, it also became one of the first fields of experimentation for his new approach and venture into color. Years later, Manos — who sadly passed away in January — realized that his photographs in A Greek Portfolio documented “a lost world.”
In 1966, the year Manos was shooting on the set of the Greek-British film “The Day the Fish Came Out,” Elliott Erwitt was on the island of Corfu, off the coast of the Greek-Albanian border. He was photographing for an essay published that year in Holiday magazine called “Return to Corfu” by the expatriated British author Lawrence Durrell. Durrell, who was revisiting the island for the first time in years, had moved to Corfu with his first wife in 1935, and convinced his mother and siblings to join them. When the Germans invaded in 1941, he and his wife fled to Egypt.
Retracing his life there, Durrell was overcome with the same sense of timelessness and hospitality that Manos experienced: “Much has changed, yes,” Durrell writes, “but more has remained obstinately and convincingly the same. […] Step off the ship and everywhere you will fall upon remembered faces, be instantly recognized and embraced: and I don’t mean only by old friends, but by everyone who remembers you.”
“The faces hereabouts were older and more wrinkled,” Durrell continues, “the smiles quieter, the expressions more sage and penetrating. Yes, it was in this landscape that I learned many important lessons: the kind you cannot put into words.” Erwitt himself made a strikingly similar sentiment about photography: “The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things with words.”
While Erwitt primarily reserved color for assignments and black and white for his personal work, he shot in color for decades, publishing an extensive photobook Elliott Erwitt’s Kolor (teNeues, 2013). “I care about pictures whether they’re brown, blue or green or black-and-white or color. The picture is what counts,” he told his son Misha, also a photographer, in a New York Times interview.
In 1959, Burt Glinn was in S’Agaró, Spain on the set of “Suddenly Last Summer,” starring Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift, and also traveled to Barcelona. Throughout the selections featured in A World in Color, Glinn’s archives have consistently revealed elegant, mellow palettes and a lighthearted simplicity. In his photograph of a lively bar, the women lead the dancing, their dresses illuminated against the jet-black shadows.
Further south, in the historical center of Valencia, Guy Le Querrec photographed the proceedings of the oldest court in the world. Every Thursday at noon outside Valencia Cathedral, eight elected farmers settle disputes about the water irrigation system surrounding the city. Established a thousand years ago during the al-Andalus period when the country was under Arabic rule, this institution of Valencian heritage was designated an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
Marc Riboud’s image of a sunset in Corfu evokes what he called the “instinct of the instant,” also the title of his 2009 Paris exhibition and book. Finding the harmony between light and form — Henri Cartier-Bresson told him he was a born geometrist — Riboud captured a staggered line of silhouettes at sea, accentuating the affinity between the boaters and the landscape.
In Harry Gruyaert’s book Rivages, Belgian and Normandy beaches are dominated by blustery, ominous skies. Yet his 1993 seascape in Ibiza is a serene ode to blue. Drawn to poetic coincidences, he noticed a rock the same shape as the sailboat in its company. “I’ve done assignments on fishing boats out at sea,” Gruyaert said, “and, it’s strange, when I come back I always need time to readjust. We want to go back [to the sea] because we feel hemmed in, confined,” he said. “In the sea is the promise of freedom, the dream of exploring, to discover something new.”
From 2009-2012, Patrick Zachmann created an autobiographical documentary film and photo-journal, Mare Mater. The project fuses the story of his mother, on the onset of Alzheimer’s, and young migrants who make the perilous attempt to cross the Mediterranean, leaving their mothers behind. Born and raised in poverty in a Sephardic Jewish family in Algeria, Zachmann’s mother crossed the Mediterranean in the 1940s en route to France, dreaming of “upward social mobility.” Crossing the sea was an act of complete erasure: “She wanted to forget Algeria, the poverty, to forget her origins. Now, I take the voyage in reverse,” Zachmann said. Weaving his own sense of absence with that of the migrants, he sought to fill the silence of his family history.
“It’s the story of the Mediterranean, the story of the sea, the story of mothers. […] There’s also the dream, the fantasy. The dream of a Europe that will never be as beautiful, as welcoming, and as rich as it seemed from the other side,” said Zachmann.
Exactly 30 years before Zachmann took this journey, he photographed a starkly different crossing — Greek shepherds transporting their sheep in a small boat. This 1979 trip to Greece traces part of Zachmann’s photographic connection with the sea, long before Mare Mater. “My relationship to time and memory and my never-ending quest for identity” form the “basis of my work as a photographer,” he said.
Elsewhere in the archive, Leonard Freed pictures nude lovers lounging on a gay beach in Mykonos in 1975; Alex Webb sees double in Barcelona in 1992, and Bruno Barbey captures a fisherman peering into his bucket in the waters of Elba, Sicily in 1984.
This selected visual cartography of the Mediterranean shows the continuous pull for Magnum photographers towards communities living along the edges of the coast, where one finds, as Manos said, “a cross-section of humanity.”
Don’t miss the next image reveals, a workshop with Lorenzo Meloni in Paris, and the upcoming FUJIKINA events in London and Cologne. Book your places here.
Explore the other chapters of A World in Color here.