Getting inside the scene
Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Anjelica Huston, Malcolm X and Richard Burton, just a few famous faces to step in front of Eve Arnold's lens. Arnold's photograph on the set of the Misfits (above) of Monroe is arguably the shot that defines both star and photographer.
Born in Philadelphia in 1912 Arnold came late to photography, she was almost 35 when she first picked up a camera in earnest, studying with before joining in 1951.
In 1962 she left the US for England. She timed her arrival well as the Sunday Times Magazine was looking for photographers to work on its new colour section, and Arnold stepped up to the plate. According to Michael Rand, art director at the Sunday Times:
"Eve was established as a key member of the magazine team alongside and ... Eve was creative and innovative... immensely versatile."
At the back of a recent publication, Eve Arnold's People, which is edited Brigitte Lardinois, I was intrigued to find that Arnold had maintained a year-by-year list of her assignments, including the number of rolls of film shot, 212 on if you were wondering. It shows her ability to tackle a wide variety of subjects, shoulder to shoulder with film stars one minute and at a girls' school the next.
For me, Arnold's work spans the moment photojournalism moved from black and white to colour, and yet you can see her hand in every picture she takes.
In 1990 Arnold told the 91Èȱ¬ that "as soon as you pick up the camera and do it in colour it's hard not to romanticize, it's because black and white is an abstraction, you can criticise more easily."
That said, I don't see criticism in any of her pictures. She touches her photographic subjects, but ever so lightly, from the bar girl in Havana 1954, to the picture of a couple getting divorced in Moscow in 1966.
It's as if those depicted are part of her family, the images are snapshots if you like. I don't mean that in a negative way, but you get the impression Arnold is part of the furniture, even on assignments when she obviously had limited time.
In Eve Arnold's People, Jon Snow writes: "Eve Arnold posses an infinite capacity to be in the midst of what she is looking at without disrupting what she's trying to capture."
Her pictures may not have the humour of her contemporary , or the grace of but her ability to be inside a scene is second to none.
As Arnold says: "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." I couldn't agree more.
Eve Arnold's People is published by Thames and Hudson.
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