Eve Arnold – Legendary Photographer
Eve Arnold – legendary photographer, a pioneer of our times and a gifted and gutsy photo-journalist, died last Wednesday at the great age of 99. By all accounts this lady was a firecracker – where did she come from? How did she make such an impression upon the world. The first woman to be accepted as a full time member of the photographic co-operative Magnum, she was a popular and successful photographer/ photo-journalist at Life magazine.
Born in Philadelphia in 1912, on of 9 children. Her parents were immigrants from Ukraine.
She had ambitions to be a Doctor at one stage which she abandoned and moved to New York. Her first camera was a gift from a boyfriend – a Rolleicord (a poor relative to the Rolleiflex). She studied photography under Alexey Brodovitch the art director for Harper’s Bazaar – having assigned a project to his students he was particularly taken with the photos Eve Arnold presented.
She moved to London in 1961 and has lived in the UK since then.
Undoubtedly she is best known for her photos of the celebrities and stars of her time- think Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, James Cagney, Marlene Dietrich, but there are other pictures among the 750,000 that she took which show her amazing talent – such as her photographs from China, A South African shanty town, a brothel in Havana, a psychiatric hospital in Moscow. She was the official photographer on 40 movie sets.
Perhaps the the most prestigious of the many honours bestowed upon her was being named a “master photographer” by the International Center of Photography in New York.
Thank you for the wonderful pictures.
