Atlas Gallery 49, Dorset Street W1U 7NF London Royaume-Uni
As one of Magnum’s earliest female members, Eve Arnold’s archive is as diverse as any from photojournalism’s heyday. Ranging from portraiture to editorial assignments, advertising and long term projects, it reflects the flexibility and tenacity needed to sustain a career spanning over 50 years. When she started in the 1950s, Arnold was a forerunner of the changes taking place in portraiture, which saw a more natural approach applied to all subject matter, whether Hollywood studio stars or documentary on the lives of poverty stricken potato pickers. Her empathy and determination, led to amazingly candid portraits of key Twentieth Century figures from the worlds of politics and popular culture from Malcolm X to Marilyn Monroe.
Born in Philadelphia in 1913 of Russian immigrant parents, Arnold came to photography late. The self portrait included in this exhibition is from 1950, the year she started. Mostly self-taught, she had received a valuable background in making pictures from five years working for a film processing company in New Jersey. Her only training was received on a six-week course in 1952 at the New School for Social Research in New York, where, for her first class assignment on fashion, she took a series of photographs of a fashion show in Harlem. She developed this story into a year-long study that through a contact of her husband’s was subsequently published over eight pages and the cover of Picture Post. These photographs, some of which are included in Portraits, were to provide her with a useful early lesson about controlling her picture rights when they were distributed without her knowledge by an unscrupulous agent. However, it was this unsanctioned wider publication that brought her to the attention of Magnum New York who took her on as a stringer.
Other images featured in Portraits include her famous study of a mother and child’s hand: “A baby’s first minutes, Port Jefferson, 1959”. Magnum’s archive was created to produce a steady income stream from the resale of a photographer’s images, and this picture, reproduced first in Life, was in Eve’s own words, used subsequently “to sell everything from insurance to corn flakes”. Her first personality shoot with Marlene Dietrich is also represented. In contrast to today’s restricted access, nothing was off limits in this all night shoot at a late night recording session, and Dietrich was delighted with the results. It was to prove Arnold’s calling card for future portraits of film stars.
Through Robert Capa, Arnold met and developed a life-long friendship with film director John Houston, and it was Houston who subsequently introduced her to Marilyn Monroe. Arnold was to photograph the starlet over a period of 10 years. A number of portraits of Marilyn are included here. In contrast to the relative ease of photographing movie stars, is her assignment on Malcolm X, leader of the Black Muslims. Her bravery, as a petite Jewish lady tackling the potentially incendiary experience of a national convention in Washington in 1960 is truly impressive, particularly given the appearance of members of the American Nazi party. However, of Malcolm X Arnold says that: “he was co-operative and considerate”.
In the early 60s Arnold moved to the UK and began working for the Sunday Times colour magazine. Their support enabled her to pursue long term editorial assignments such as a trip to Russian in 1966, an exploration of the customs of the veil in Afghanistan, Arabia and Egypt, which was to lead to her making a film with the BBC “Behind the Veil”, in the UAE, and then later in 1979 a trip to record daily life in China. The latter, produced when the photographer was in her mid-60s, is a body of work of which she is particularly proud. Published in numerous countries as a book, In China won the National Book Award, and has toured widely as an exhibition ever since.
Later in her career, Arnold went on to publish several other books on broad ranging subjects including her distinctive take on her native America and adopted home, Britain, as well as the catalogue In Retrospect that accompanied her 1995 exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery. Next spring sees the publication of Eve Arnold’s ‘People’, published by Thames & Hudson, which looks at this aspect of Eve’s career in even greater depth.