"What is a revolution?" This is the question that begins Jon Lee Anderson's introduction to Magnum Revolution, a compelling selection of images from the archives of the Magnum photo agency of various uprisings around the world over the past 65 years. Anderson offers several interpretations of the word "revolution", some of them culled from the personal testimonies of those engaged in revolutionary struggles in places such as Nicaragua, Cuba and Syria, all of them hinging on "the paradoxical essence" of any uprising: the use of violence to overthrow an old order and bring into being a newer, fairer society.
This, then, is essentially a visual record of violent, often chaotic, struggle, and what it reveals, more than anything, is the human cost of revolution. It begins in recent times with Paolo Pellegrin's evocative images from the Arab spring, specifically Tunisia and Egypt, in 2011: people chanting, marching, fleeing; chaos, disorder and, in the midst of it all, a sense of great hope. A few pages later, though, Moises Saman's images from the same spreading revolution are more visceral and bloody: a youth carried bleeding through a stunned crowd; a traumatised boy staring from the wreckage of a burnt-out vehicle.
Pellegrin's name appears again in the list of photographers who have testified to the long struggle of the Palestinians. Ranging from 1969 to 2004, many of the images from the West Bank and Gaza are familiar but still affecting, not least Larry Towell's shot of a hysterical seven-year-old boy being arrested by Israeli soldiers. Like Josef Koudelka's classic shots of the Russian invasion of Prague in 1968 or Erich Lessing's portrayal of the anti-Russian uprising in Budapest in 1956, many of the early Palestinian photographs a young, grinning Yasser Arafat - now have the aura of historical record about them.
More unfamiliar, and thus more surprising, are the Norwegian photographerJonas Bendiksen's colour images of the Maoist revolution in Nepal, taken between 2004 and 2006.
"In the end,' writes Anderson, "with stunning visual potency, this book reveals that what we think of as 'revolution' has not really changed in the past 65 years."
Ironically, we are now in the midst of a revolution in the way that revolutions are being reported. As Anderson points out, "no Magnum photographer was present on the grubby outskirts of Sirte to witness and record Gaddafi's final moments of life, but we all saw what happened anyway". The profusion of camera phones and cheap digital cameras, alongside the rise of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, means images of struggle are disseminated globally in seconds by those on the ground. Magnum Revolution is a testament to the age of great photojournalism but it may also become a kind of requiem for that same age.
