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While right in the midst of enjoying it, everything goes down so smoothly, and life can seem to make more sense. But pleasure can be deceptive, leaving nothing more behind than a dizzying headache later. ''I like champagne, but champagne doesn't like me,'' a friend recently warned at dinner. When the legendary photographer Robert Capa was brainstorming for a name to call his new photo agency, he thought about champagne, but not just any ordinary bottle. It had to be the biggest, the best. In his autobiography Slightly Out of Focus, A huge new book entitled Magnum Degrees offers a few glimpses of this noble tradition at work, some of which were shot expressly for these pages. Henri Cartier-Bresson, patriarch of 35 mm. camera work and the first to call ''the decisive moment'' photojournalism's highest goal, came out of retirement to offer just three pictures, including one clever portrait and a dreamy landscape. With his surreal scene of fishermen in Sri Lanka teetering atop wooden poles, Steve McCurry succeeds on every level. He introduces us to something we have never seen before; he seizes fleeting and defining action; he engages our senses and emotions; his simplicity of vision harmonizes perfectly with the subject; and he does it all with a breath-taking lyricism. The best photojournalism may occasionally be delayed for want of artistic inspiration or a bit of luck. Far more often though, it is the result of thinking three steps ahead, the same way a seasoned hunter sets out knowing when and where to go, knowing exactly what to look for and remaining patient to the limit. Abbas achieved this with a Filipino man being nailed to a cross on Good Friday; and Susan Meiselas explored a different pain in New York's underbelly called Pandora's Box. Marine Franck captured the verbs and mystery of Buddhism. James Nachtwey, the most lauded photojournalist of the last several generations, deserved to show much more than the half dozen stories and individual moments allotted to him. Chris Steele-Perkins struck a sublime balance between composition and content when he peered at inmates through the checkerboard masonry of a Pakistani mental ward. He vividly proved that one can contemplate chaos and adopt the viewpoint of chaos without falling into it. The creators of this book already enjoyed the right pedigree, the highest credibility, an abundance of talent and enough access during the last ten years to have undertaken any challenge that caught their eye. The table of contents reads like a cross between an atlas and the agency's billing ledger,leading to a structure much like the Day-in-the-Life series of picture books. But because this would be Magnum's version, it had to become A Decade in the Life of the World. By packing 617 pictures into 536 pages, they have certainly made an intoxicating volume. For those who crack it open on their laps and try to down it all in one sitting, the experience may well numb the legs. Lovers of photography will be inspired by many of the individual images in this book. Despite it's champagne price tag of $70, many may want to own it just so they can consult the pages like a Gospel. All photo reporters thirst for the chance to develop an idea, then to distill it into a dozen pictures and finally see it splashed across several pages. The core of this book should have done that again and again. When a Russian soldier in Chechnya scowled at his own face in a mirror, a whole narrative tale could have unfolded from that. Likewise a little Ugandan girl with her hands cut off during war deserves to be seen as more than a single portrait. Writer Michael Ignatieff, in his preface to the book, calls Magnum's photos ''fragments of some gigantic puzzle which we collect in the hope that one day we might be able to assemble it into a discernible pattern.'' Hopefully, he wasn't talking about what happened to the cover. Rather than choose one or a few or even no picture at all for the front, a decision was made to run a stack of them through the paper shredder, and then glue the agency's public image back together into a colorful but perversely deconstructed cloth. It was a solution that certainly did not prove Magnum's reputation for respecting and honoring images. If photographers cannot figure out how to organize their own thoughts and their own book, why should they expect other editors to trust their judgment? Neither randomness nor saturation coverage has ever made a very compelling story. To some extent, the photo story format has been put to work here, but never luxuriantly. Perhaps their overriding need was to spread the photo credits around; but a great story does not have to be told by a single photographer. Luc Delahaye's picture of three brothers in Sarajevo could work well with others, either preceding or concluding any of the many cycles of Balkan revenge: the mourners become the killers becoming the victims. Instead, two visually identical statements about snipers are crammed into the book. It's possible that the editors of this book did not have an avalanche of great stories to wade Magnum's original credo promised that photography could ''eradicate the alibi of ignorance.'' They felt that their cameras' testimony would be worth any cost if it could raise an alarm and change the world. In Rwanda and Bosnia, however, the world saw, yet still did nothing. ''What am I doing here? What is the point of taking pictures? Is this just a sophisticated form of post-imperial voyeurism?'' These are the questions that they say haunt Magnum photographers. If they could just devote themselves to the larger questions looming for our visual media, they would have plenty with which to challenge themselves. The disciplined photo reporter appreciates the utilitarian, linguistic and historic value of the work, and always wants to communicate -- intentionally,willingly, compellingly. The photojournalist earns all the self-respect needed in life by helping people to tell their own stories. That urge, for both sides, has its own intrinsic worth, regardless of agenda or outcome. We have crossed over forevermore into the age of visual communications. Many teachers and parents don't grasp that yet, and wonder why they can't compete for young people's attention. It's a whole different language, one that is more potent, more memorable and that has its own particular grammar. So far though, most of the visual stream directed at children is shallow, repetitive and poorly organized. Starting tomorrow, visual communicators have no less a challenge than the translation of every school's entire curriculum, the contents of all libraries and the energizing of print media everywhere. An organization like Magnum, still respected as the Pilgrims, the Rabbis and the Jesuits of photojournalism, could lead in the development of this robust language, not by drifting inward but by carving out new, more interesting, complex, subtle and insightful stories. Rather than fostering some laissez-faire anarchy, which seldom translates into good stories or books, Magnum must help create the laboratory and then something like the dictionary and the encyclopedia for The Visual Age.
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Capa bragged about how drunk he got at least once a day, as though that earned him a place at the table of great alcoholic writers. As good as Capa's work could be, he felt a compulsion to soak it in brash excess.
through, since too many Magnum photographers are in the habit of reaching for shadow, surface and layer alone. When they might have thoughtfully assigned themselves to create an epic sage, they instead ended up with a photo album. Far too often, Magnum Degrees looks glaringly uneven and repetitive, like it's staggering under its own weight. Though not for a lack of pure talent, their opus finally falls flat from a lack of ambition and vision.