EVE ARNOLD:EVE ARNOLD, who fell in love with photography after a boyfriend gave her a camera and who came to be regarded as a grande dame of postwar photojournalism for her bold, revealing images of subjects as diverse as Marilyn Monroe and migratory potato pickers, died last Wednesday in London. She was 99.
She was born in Philadelphia but had lived in Britain since 1961.
Her death was announced by Magnum Photos, the photography co-operative to which she belonged for more than a half-century. She was among the first women it hired to take pictures.
Arnold was a leading light in what is considered the golden age of news photography, when magazines like Life and Lookcommanded attention with big, arresting pictures supplied by adventurous photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa and Margaret Bourke-White.
Acclaimed for capturing celebrities in intimate moments after winning their trust, Arnold developed a particular rapport with Monroe, the subject of a book of Arnold photographs. One image showed Monroe emerging from the black of a nightclub into the white glare of a spotlight with a smiling Arthur Miller, her husband at the time.
Another showed her pensively studying her lines on location in the vast western setting for the 1961 film The Misfits.
Foreshadowing the celebrity portfolios of photographers like Annie Leibovitz, Arnold captured Joan Crawford squirming into a girdle and James Cagney and his wife doing an impromptu dance in a barn.
But other pictures, just as memorable, were of the unfamous. Among the more than 750,000 Arnold took was one in 1963 showing an English curate mowing a lawn, his robes tied up to keep them clear of the blades. She took pictures in a South African shanty town, a Havana brothel and a Moscow psychiatric hospital. She documented a Long Island hamlet, Miller Place, and the first minutes of a baby’s life. She was an official photographer on 40 movie sets.
After waiting 10 years for a visa, she visited China twice in 1979. Travelling 40,000 miles, she photographed communist officials, Mongolian horsemen and oil drillers. The trip was chronicled in an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum and a book, one of dozens she wrote and photographed.
In 1985, Mary Blume of the International Herald Tribunewrote: "In a distinguished career, Eve Arnold has photographed Everyone with a capital "E" and also everyone."
Eve Cohen was born in Philadelphia on April 21st, 1912, one of nine children of Ukrainian immigrants. Her father was a rabbi. At 28 she gave up ambitions of becoming a doctor to move to New York. "That's where the boys are," she told the New York Timesin 2002.
She did find a boyfriend, and he gave her a camera, insisting she learn how to use it. It was a $40 Rolleicord, the cheaper version of the Rolleiflex. Her first picture was of a bum on the New York waterfront. The boyfriend was gone in a couple of years.
Cohen got a job in a photo-finishing plant, where she rose to manager. In 1948 she married Arnold Arnold, an industrial designer; later that year she gave birth to a son, Frank, who survives her.
Enrolling at the New School, she studied photography under Alexey Brodovitch, the renowned art director for Harper's Bazaarmagazine. One day he assigned his students to photograph a fashion story, and Arnold decided on an unconventional approach. She found it when she learned from her babysitter that fashion shows were held in Harlem – in churches, bars and other places there.
Brodovitch liked her pictures so much that he suggested she return to Harlem to create a portfolio. The British journal Picture Postbought her Harlem work.
She joined Magnum in 1951 on an informal basis and became a member of the co-operative in 1957.
She won the trust of stars by treating them with unusual courtesy. In the 1950s she was hired to photograph Joan Crawford, who wanted to promote her new movie, Autumn Leaves. By Arnold's account, Crawford arrived spectacularly inebriated, kissed her on the mouth, stripped naked and demanded to be photographed. Arnold demurred at first, then took the pictures.
A few days later, over lunch, Arnold handed the negatives to Crawford, assuring her that they would never be published. Crawford thanked her by allowing her to do a day-in-the-life photo feature about her. The pictures, which appeared in Life, are an up-close study of an aging star coping with her fading beauty – applying makeup, for instance, and struggling with that girdle.
In an interview with the London Independent,Arnold said she was never tempted to make the nude photos public, not so much out of concern for Crawford's image as for her own. "I didn't think they would do me credit," she said. "I had in mind a long career."
In 1961 Arnold and her family moved to England, where she lived the rest of her life. Her marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her son, she is survived by three grandchildren.
Eve Arnold: born April 21st, 1912; died January 4th 2012