By Daryl Lang

As Magnum Photos marks its 60th anniversary with a month-long festival, one reason for the celebration is that such an agency even exists today. Magnum's values can seem at odds with today's instant, digital, full-color nuggets of bite-sized news served by mass media companies.

At a talk Saturday night at the New York Public Library, four Magnum members – Philip Jones Griffiths, Susan Meiselas, Gilles Peress and Larry Towell – discussed the agency's place in the digital world. They were joined by Keith Beauchamp, a filmmaker who made use of the Internet and digital video technology to create his influential documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till.

Under prodding from moderator Fred Ritchin, associate chair of photography at New York University, the panel kicked around some ideas about how digital photography and user-generated media are changing photography.

Several times, members of the panel lamented the decline of film.

"Film had a certain value in the delay it created," said Peress, explaining that the digital photography changes the emotional and intellectual properties of the work.

Likewise, Griffiths made arguments in favor of film, including the importance of recording images for posterity.

"My objection to digital photography is there's no recording medium that is stable enough to guarantee it will last, that it will become valuable historically," he said. He praised the negative as a record of what actually happened. "If you're accused of faking a picture, with film you have the record of what was in the camera when you pressed the shutter there forever to prove that was the truth."

Yet even Griffiths gave a nod to digital for some of its advantages: "It's cheap, it's quick, it's effective, you can get stuff out in minutes when it would have taken days in the past."

Beauchamp, the filmmaker who solicited input on his Emitt Till documentary through the Web, was less interested in debating the merits of analog film. "This is not a huge dilemma. I don't see it," he said. "I think having new technology is a huge plus."

He also praised the new digital editing tools that are cheaply available. "It gives the regular layman an opportunity to tell a story," Beauchamp said, adding, "We all start out as amateurs first."

Indeed, no one on the panel seemed bothered by the vast amounts of amateur photography available online through sites like Flickr. "Am I glad those images exist? Of course I am," said Griffiths. "Who could possibly be against amateurs taking pictures?"

Meiselas said digital technology can give more exposure to photography, noting the dialogue around Spencer Platt's World Press Photo of the Year from Lebanon, which led the subjects of the photograph to speak out as a result of all the attention to the image.

Towell noted that he now carries a video camera and an audio recorder into the field to gather multimedia information. "It's given me the opportunity to do completely different things," he said. Towell is among the photographers who have essays posted on Magnum In Motion, Magnum's multimedia site.

Griffins concluded his remarks with a rather pessimistic observation that drew approving laughs from the audience.

"I believe that we can't ignore a simple, simple fact, and that is that the world is being dumbed down," he said.