THE BEST OF THE BEST

The entire collection of pictures amassed by the Magnum photo cooperative will be accessible to the public. It is one of the most important photography archives of the 20th century, consisting of more than 180,000 images known as press prints, the kind of prints once made by the collective to circulate to magazines and newspapers.

They are marked on their reverse sides with decades of historical impasto — stamps, stickers and writing chronicling their publication histories — that speaks to their role in helping to create the collective photo bank of modern culture.

The new owners have reached an agreement with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to place it there, for study and exhibition, for at least the next five years. It will be the first time that the archive will be accessible to scholars and the public.

The earliest pictures in the archive date from before Magnum’s founding, to the work of photographers like Capa during the Spanish Civil War. The latest are from 1998, when the cooperative stopped using press prints as a way to circulate its images. In between those years are images that make it seem as if a Magnum photographer was present at almost every significant world event — D-Day, the U.S. civil rights movement,the Rwandan genocide, the rise of Fidel Castro — and also around to capture almost every celebrity and newsmaker: Gandhi, Monroe, General Charles de Gaulle addressing the people after the liberation of Chartres in 1944, Kennedy, Ali,Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Havana, 1963.

The prints are relics from an age of photography that has now almost fully passed, due to the technical changes that have taken place in the world of photography, including the digitization of images.

The work of these famous photographers is included: Bruce Davidson, Chien-Chi Chang, Constantine Manos, David Seymour, David W. Dunlap, Dennis Stock, Eli Reed, Elliott Erwitt, Gilles Peress, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Larry Towell, Leonard Freed, Magnum, Philip Jones Griffiths, Randy Kennedy, Rene Burri, Robert Capa.

To view a sample of 14 photographs can be found at LENS, THE PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO AND VISUAL JOURNALISM blog @ new york times.com.

Cheers.