More than meets the eye

Born a few years after the NFB, Magnum Photos was created in 1947 by four photographers and survivors of World War II, including Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Created as a photographic cooperative, where the members own the agency and retain the copyright to all their work, Magnum quickly became – and has remained – the world's most recognizable photographic agency, creating iconic images from Hollywood to Afghanistan to Lebanon.

While the Magnum In Motion feature has been online for a few years, an upgraded interface has been accompanied by more – and more interactive – exhibitions. The site's home page is dominated by a four-panel slideshow which cycles through a series of featured photographic essays (each sample reveals a text introduction on mouseover), while below, the rest of the content is divided into collections of more Essays, Podcasts, and breaking News about the agency.

Essays are delivered in the form of self-running Flash-based slideshows, and cover topics from the Tour de France, to Philip Halsman's (101 Life Magazine covers) unique approach to portrait photography, to the continuing legacy of the Chernobyl disaster. (Like the NFB collection, topics here run from the purely entertaining to the deadly serious.) Reminding us of the action going on behind the camera, each presentation also includes narration by the photographer or an online "curator" for the collection, offering a glimpse of the photographer's personality and experiences as well as his or her technique and intent. Links beside each interactive include access to biographies of, and books and portfolios by, the featured artists. At least one essay (a profile of photographer Steve McCurry) also includes the occasional video clip, but even here, the still images are the elements with the greatest impact. Podcasts presents a subset of the Essays as re-edited QuickTime videos – though without such extras as photo captions, direct access to specific images through a thumbnail index, or related web links.

While the emphasis is clearly on the finished product as released for public consumption, both sites are also engaged in revealing a bit more than the artists originally envisioned. Still, the audience's knowledge of the degree and nature of effort involved in creation is irrelevant to the original aim of these works – and if you choose, you can simply view the NFB animations without perusing the extra information, or turn down the sound while watching the Magnum photo essays, and experience the projects in something closer to their original context. But we're a curious species, and it can be difficult to resist the chance to take a peek behind the curtain – if only to have a greater appreciation of the production onstage.

The National Film Board's Focus On Animation can be found at http://www.nfb.ca/animation/objanim/en/index, with Magnum In Motion at http://inmotion.magnumphotos.com/.

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