Although top photographers now enjoy high status and good money, they were once regarded as little better than any other button pushers — elevator girls, say — and were expected to run around, snapping whatever commissioning editors told them to.

This all changed when Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour set up the Magnum Photos cooperative in 1947. Magnum created the idea of the indispensable lensman, and greatly increased the creative freedom and fees that the best in the business could command.

A key figure in Magnum's early days was the Swiss photographer Werner Bischof, whose photographs of postwar Japan can now be seen at the National Showa Memorial Museum. Along with the Austrian Ernst Haas, Bischof was the first new Magnum member after the four founders, joining in 1949. But being invited to join Magnum was about more than just photographic ability, according to museum curator Kazuhiro Watanabe.

"I think that Bischof was recruited into Magnum because he had the right qualities," Watanabe says. "He had good technique, but he also had a good personality, was politically correct, and had a social conscience."

Magnum was founded in the aftermath of World War II, the perceptions of which had largely been defined by photography. The members of the group were clearly seizing their moment, and with it the belief or conceit that photography now had a much bigger role than before, that it had to have political significance and convey an appropriate message.

In 1951, Bischof's "Life" magazine pictures from India of the Bihar famine marked him out as the right kind of socially concerned photographer and as someone prepared to cover Magnum's Asian beat. These factors were important in the decision to send him to Japan.

On the surface, this appeared to be a delicate assignment. The country was then in the final stages of the Allied Occupation, while only a few years before it had been demonized in wartime propaganda and subjected to firebombing and nuclear attacks.

But if Bischof was expecting scenes of desolation and social dislocation that would provide easy images to reflect Magnum's politically correct message and antiwar ethos, the situation on the ground was quite different. By arriving in 1951, Bischof had long missed that opportunity, and, as his pictures show, the conquered land was already in the process of vigorously pulling itself up by the bootstraps. While there is some evidence of poverty and squalor in Bischof's photos, there is practically no sign of wartime damage. Streets are clean, buildings in good repair, and the people — especially the young boy in jeans and a Hopalong Cassidy sweater in "Shoeshine, Tokyo 1951" — are relatively well-groomed and immersed in the normal day-to-day interactions of work and play.

Even the photographs that focus on the agents of occupation, the American GIs themselves, seem unable to serve up a convenient visual parable denouncing war and its aftermath, making for complex and more fascinating images. "Men's Shoes, Ginza Tokyo 1951" shows a couple of black GIs on a busy street. What is remarkable about this photo is the relaxed atmosphere of the people around the occupiers, showing that initial tensions had long since abated.

The one photo that clearly tries to capture the tragedy and pathos of wartime loss and suffering is "Victim of WWII, Tokyo 1951." This shows a legless man propped up on crude artificial legs, busking for money in the street. But any sympathy you may wish to bestow is superfluous. The attitude of the subject is replete with the unsentimental, pragmatic lack of self-pity that enabled Japan to recover so quickly. Despite missing his limbs, the ex-soldier shows a positive attitude in the face of adversity.

In October 1951, Emperor Hirohito paid the once-devastated Hiroshima a visit. This was not an opportunity to be missed by Bischof, but, here again, we see very little to pity in the images. The Atomic Bomb Dome is of course there in its carefully preserved ruination, but everything else looks pristine and defiantly cheerful. Even one of the casualties of the atomic bombing, Mr. Kikkawa whom Bischof dramatically photographed stripped to the waist in front of the Dome, is revealed in other shots as running a brisk souvenir trade from a stall proudly labeled "The A-Bomb No. 1 Patient."

While Magnum elevated photographers to new heights, it also seems to have cast a curse on its founders. Capa was shot dead in Indochina in 1954, Seymour likewise in Egypt two years later, while Bischof himself died in 1954, after his car plunged into a gorge in the Andes Mountains. The superstitious might imagine that all three died victims of the hubris created by the greatly enlarged role they had secured for photography in the postwar period.

"New Japan and the Eternal Tradition 1951-1952: Werner Bischof Photographic Exhibition Japon" runs till April 19 at the National Showa Memorial Museum. For more information call (03) 3222-2577 or visit www.showakan.go.jp