| Summary: | Magnum Photos is a cooperative photographic agency founded in 1947 in Paris and New York. Its members have included some of the leading names in the profession and the agency has become an institutional reference in its field. The future of the agency’s archives remains uncertain, however. This article is an examination of the issues raised by their conservation and exploitation. It begins with a brief overview, mainly covering Europe and the United States, of the different documents concerned and the places they are held today: institutional organisations such as libraries and museums and professional sites such as the agency’s own offices. It then goes on to examine the issues raised by these collections and by their multiplicity, their variety and their geographical dispersal. It looks at the preservation policies of the agency itself which has launched programmes for digitising its pictures and which created a foundation, in New York, in 2007. The article then looks at the links that have emerged, since the end of the 1980s, between the digitisation of photographic documents and their appreciation as heritage. The ‘dematerialisation’ of archives which are now available on line has seen an attribution of new ‘material’ values to the documents, giving rise to the cult of so-called ‘vintage’ prints which now supply the art market. These two tendencies are not contradictory and indeed go hand in hand. The agency’s photo library is at the heart of these changes, which mobilise the values of exclusivity and rarity in the promotion of the images, from their use by the press and publications or their display in art and photo galleries.
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