A Reflection on Eve Arnold

Written by Fionna McLauchlan | 26 January 2012
Posted in Features - News

Photography: See Wah

The beginning of 2012 witnessed the death of one of the world’s finest and foremost photojournalists. Eve Arnold, the first woman to become a member of the celebrated photographic agency Magnum, sadly passed away at the age of 99, leaving behind her an astounding legacy and some of the world’s most iconic images.

For those who are not familiar with Arnold’s photographic career, she is perhaps best known for her portraits of Marilyn Monroe. The entire Magnum agency went on location to shoot John Huston’s filming of The Misfits in 1961, but it is Arnold’s intimate portraits of superstar Monroe that have become the most celebrated. Arnold’s documentary image style and her rejection of studio style lighting meant that a whole new side of the actress was captured. Monroe appears fragile and vulnerable, as though Arnold has caught a second of Monroe’s innermost thoughts that could never be revealed in a studio shoot. The two women had a bond and Arnold photographed Monroe for the majority of the star’s career.

During the 1950s and the 1960s Arnold worked for a number of magazines, such as Life, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar and Paris-Match, capturing the likes of Paul Newman, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Rocky Marciano, Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich to name but a few. Arnold’s image of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at a pub during the filming of Becket, in Shepperton, England in 1963, has become particularly renowned regarding the capture of an intimate moment of the famous couple’s hectic life. This is what Arnold did so well; she captured the simple, human points in the life of a celebrity – a pensive expression between takes, or a passing look of sadness.

“If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.”

However, to suggest that Arnold was simply a celebrity photographer is wholly demeaning with regards to her wide and varied career as Arnold was a humanist, a photographer of the people, who travelled extensively and often put herself into dangerous scenarios in order to capture the perfect image. As war photographer and Magnum co-founder Robert Capa so aptly stated, Arnold’s photography falls “metaphorically between Marlene Dietrich’s legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers.”

The success of her photojournalistic career renders her work with Monroe as somewhat trivial in comparison.

She was a truly daring photojournalist from the very beginning. Daughter of Russian immigrant parents in Philadelphia, she dropped the idea of studying medicine (despite her parents protests) to take up photography and began a course at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1948. For her first assignment she chose to cover fashion shows in Harlem, displaying from the start her determination to get the images she wanted, as the area was largely viewed as a ghetto – not the place for a young, white, female photographer.

But this was not a factor that bothered Arnold and her assignment in Harlem grew quickly into the fascinating documentation of Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement – her portrait of Malcolm X has become one of the most well-known images of the Black Power leader. Subjected to shouts of “Kill the white bitch!” and on one occasion finding the back of her dress to be covered in cigarette burns, Arnold’s coverage of the black power movement showed her drive to cover the events, whatever the level of threat.

Throughout her prolific career, she photographed Republican conventions, McCarthy hearings, head of the American Nazi Party George Lincoln Rockwell, political dissidents drugged in a Russian lunatic asylum and she took some of the first ever images of China when its borders were opened to western journalists. The success of her photojournalistic career renders her work with Monroe as somewhat trivial in comparison.

Arnold often captured the marginalised – and as a woman in a profession run by men, she experienced what it felt like to be the minority. Her photography was initially ignored in the United States for the reason that she was a woman and because the subjects of her photos were largely black. It was not until she sent examples of her work to Picture Post in London that her talent was recognised, and not long after that, she became the first female member of Magnum in 1951.

Arnold often dealt with the issue of being a female photographer and explored the position of women in many of her projects, including two books: The Unretouched Woman (1976) and All in a Day’s Work (1989). However, for Arnold, she was a photographer first, and then a woman. She stated she did not want to make socio-political statements about being a woman through her photography but, rather, she was interested in how being a woman would influence her work and composition.

Upon the passing away of such an important female photographer, it seems apt to consider where the position for female photographers has changed today. It is evident that there are more female photographers now than there were in the 1950s when Arnold’s career took off, but with men still a clearly majority amongst members of Magnum, one could question what it will take for the situation to change.

Eve Arnold was, and will remain, an icon and pioneer in the world of photojournalism. She should not be remembered as just the woman who photographed Marilyn Monroe, as her eye for an image went far beyond that of just celebrity portraiture. She travelled far and wide to observe and capture the human condition in its most intimate details, and will certainly always be remembered as one of the world’s most important photographers, as well as one of the world’s most influential women.