Magnum Photos: Framing The World

For some 30 years, Susan Meiselas has photographed wars in Iraq, Nicaragua, El Salvador and other parts of the world, reports Sunday Morning anchor Charles Osgood.

Being an effective war photographer, she says, often comes down to "the thickness of your skin, you know. It has to be exactly the right dimension to feel it and to protect yourself at the same time."

"It's one thing to read it as a headline in the paper or even on the news, and you can flip the channel," she says. "But if you're living it and you're coming back, it's like coming back with the kind of virus that no one else has. In a sense you absorb it."

Meiselas and the other photographers who are members of the international agency, Magnum Photos, have been absorbing and conveying stories of strife and hardship around the world for nearly 60 years. And some of those stories are told in a new book simply called "Magnum Stories."

Meiselas says she thinks of herself as a storyteller. "I love narrative - but narrative within a frame," she says.

Sometimes, the narrative in a single frame is so riveting, it transcends the moment to become a symbol of the event for all time. For example, Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin's image of a man standing in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Or Steve McCurry's image from Pakistan of an Afghan refugee. Or Alex Webb's images from September 11. Or Magnum co-founder Robert Capa's images from D-Day on Omaha Beach or from the Spanish Civil War.

Paolo Pellegrin, who is based in Magnum's Paris bureau, has photographed unrest in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Sudan.

"I tend to think of them - of my photography and the world - as images which come out of the dark... I imagine sort of this rectangular frame which is dark.... And I have to dig to bring things out," he says.

What Magnum photographers bring out of their frames is what continues to drive them.

"There's a great sense of a legacy, of being part of a group of people that have recorded the history of pretty much the whole world in the last 60 years. And during this process of recording, they have also shaped the way that we look at events," Pellegrin says.

"It's not pure observation obviously. Because we're there. Things are affected by us," says Meiselas.

And we are affected by Magnum photographers too, because, when we look at conflicts throughout the world, often, it is through their eyes that we see.