Eve Arnold RIP

Eve Arnold obituary
Celebrated Magnum photographer who documented 'the poor, the old and the underdog', as well as the stars

Amanda Hopkinson
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 5 January 2012

The longevity of Eve Arnold's career as a photographer matched the heterogeneity of her work. Despite the success of her portraits of the rich and famous, Arnold, who has died aged 99, was equally well known for photographing "the poor, the old and the underdog". She said: "It's the hardest thing in the world to take the mundane and try to show how special it is."

In fact she achieved the reverse, showing us the often pathetic and banal in the lives of the glitterati she always shot without the benefit of artificial lights, as well as how ordinary daily lives, from Afghanistan to Zululand, were never mundane. As the war photographer and Magnum co-founder Robert Capa put it: "[Arnold's work] falls metaphorically between Marlene Dietrich's legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers."

Arnold was the first woman to join the Magnum photographic agency, and much of her work fell within its tradition of in-depth editorial photography. She held characteristically trenchant views on the minority – and at times marginalised – status of female photojournalists, while being acutely aware of the role played by female stars as well as by unrecorded women the world over. The whole of the Magnum agency went on location to shoot John Huston's filming of The Misfits (1961), but it was Arnold's intimate portraits of Marilyn Monroe, fragile and poised by turn, (including one incredible image, where she emerges from the black of a nightclub into the white glare of the spotlight, boogying uncertainly with a smiling Arthur Miller) that endured. Arnold not only befriended many of her subjects, including such greats as Monroe, Joan Crawford, Isabella Rossellini and Dietrich, but increasingly wrote about them as well as photographing them.

Travel formed a cornerstone of her life's work. While much was published in picture magazines during their heyday from the 1950s to the 1980s, Arnold often developed her themes so extensively that they merited full-length books. She took the subject of women further in her books The Unretouched Woman (1976) and All in a Day's Work (1989), and, using her long stays abroad, in the series In China (1980), In America (1983) and The Great British (1991).

The daughter of Russian immigrant parents, she was highly conscious of a worldwide legacy of pogroms and diasporas. As she told me in 1991: "I don't feel at home anywhere. I feel at least as much at home here [in London] as any place else. I tell myself we're all world citizens. There's a kind of displacement that takes place, and friends and colleagues become your family."

Arnold was born in Philadelphia, the middle of nine children of William Cohen (born Velvel Sklarski), a rabbi, and his wife, Bessie (Bosya Laschiner). Her mother had initial doubts about her daughter's choice of career. "I remember how she struggled all her life, raising all these children, and how her English always remained quirky. Eventually she accepted what I did, but grudgingly. When I did the Life magazine story on the first five minutes of a baby's life, she said: 'What's to be proud of?'"

Arnold's father was more impressed with her first career choice, medicine, but she abandoned this to take up photography at the suggestion of a boyfriend who presented her with a Rolleicord in 1946. At the time she was working in a photo-finishing plant in New York, and began documenting the city from what was then a radically different angle. This was a boom period for documentary photography in general, and the birth of "concerned" or "humanitarian" photography, still very much black-and-white "mood"-influenced. This tradition was epitomised at Magnum, founded by Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David ("Chim") Seymour in 1947, which Arnold would soon join.

In 1948 she enrolled at the New School for Social Research in New York. Taught by the art director of Harper's Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch, she applied the set subject of a fashion show to document a catwalk, set up in a deconsecrated Harlem church. She was unusual not only in being a female photographer, but even more so in being a white woman, working in what was then widely referred to as a ghetto. The fashion show, too, was something else, devised extravagantly in deliberate defiance of the formal lines and stiff styles of the haute couture of the day. The response of Arnold's class (which included Richard Avedon) was so overwhelmingly positive that Brodovitch told her: "You go back to Harlem and stay with it."

She continued working in Harlem for the next year and a half, as the fashion project grew into a unique documentation of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, but no one else seemed particularly interested. By this stage she had moved to Long Island, where she lived with her husband, Arnold Arnold, and their son, Frank. Wearied by press rejections in the US, her husband helpfully sent a selection of her prints to Picture Post in London.

It was Picture Post's publication of the story in 1951 that launched her career. The effects were immediate. She joined Magnum, becoming a full member in 1957, and covered such high-profile news stories as Republican conventions and the McCarthy hearings, as well as conducting a 10-year study of a founding family of Brookhaven Township, and photographing the then largely taboo subject of births. (Later, Arnold was to say that this assisted her own recovery from the trauma of miscarriage.) Her marriage did not survive, however, and she gradually transferred to a London base, ostensibly for the sake of her son's education. She lived in the same flat in Mayfair until ill-health forced her to move to a nursing home in her 90s.

In the 1960s and 70s Arnold travelled back to the US, where she documented the civil rights movement, and to such "closed" regions as the Soviet Union and China. In 1971 she made a film, Women Behind the Veil, going inside Arabian hammams and harems. Regular features continued for Look, Life, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Geo, Stern, Epoca, Paris-Match and – especially – the Sunday Times colour supplement, under the picture editorship of Michael Rand.

Although she worked for all the great colour picture magazines, then in their heyday, her preference stayed with black-and-white. Around her, however, the mood was changing. She found the beginnings of "swinging London" and the new British photography (dominated by the male names of David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Anthony Armstrong-Jones) "as a mainly commercial thing, something grafted on to society". Her black-and-white selection for The Great British includes images from the 1960s light years away from hotpants and Beatlemania. It also shows a country where class divisions are still rife, from "Lord Bath on his Longleat estate, Wiltshire, during a Saturday morning shoot for pheasant" to an old war veteran, being bathed in a rundown Salvation Army hostel; from a surprisingly vulnerable Margaret Thatcher on the campaign trail to images of the new multiculturalism of the cities.

Arnold increasingly alternated between colour features on people's daily lives and glamorous silver screen portraits. She became more and more interested in cinema. Brought on to the set of White Nights (1985) to shoot stills, she compiled a book, The Making of White Nights, with a fellow Magnum member, Josef Koudelka, the following year.

Her portraits have the air of a caught shot, while in fact being the fruit of a long experience, a period of waiting while trust is built. They include Crawford wrestling with the "iron" girdle; Andy Warhol lifting weights astride a toilet; Dietrich from the legs up. While there was always a steady demand for the shots of James Cagney, Clark Gable, James Dean and Paul Newman, she reckoned that her 10-year-long documentation of Monroe evinced more constant and lasting interest than the rest put together. Certainly, those taken on the set of The Misfits were the high point of a major dual auction of Arnold's work, held in California and London in November 1993.

Arnold was a self-professed workaholic. At times she extended her remit into making films and writing her own picture stories. Later, her work and life became a regular postgraduate research subject. Loth to be boxed in as a "female photographer", still less as one of the rare "Magnum girls", she was one of five women included in the catalogued touring exhibition Magna Brava. Having been asked to write 10,000 words to accompany the pictures for In Retrospect, by 1993 she had reached 100,000 and was still writing. The book was eventually published in 1995. And in the preface to her "other autobiography", All in a Day's Work (1989), she celebrated photography's potential as "a kaleidoscope through which to view the way we relate to our world, the way we work to live and live to work".

Ever courteous, neat and soft-spoken, Arnold brought much of her own calm and gentility to her work, however anguished the subject matter. At first annoyed at being turned down as a Vietnam war photographer, photographing in the South African shantytowns brought home how hard it was to be inured to the world's outrages. This sense of injustice was the sand in the shell that prevented complacency, either at the world or at her own part in it. Asked if she were ever satisfied, she replied: "Never. I think if I ever get satisfied, I'll have to stop. It's the frustration that drives you."

In 2003 she was made OBE. Eve Arnold's People, edited by Brigitte Lardinois, was published in 2009. In 2010 she received a lifetime achievement prize at the Sony World Photography awards in Cannes, accepted by her grandson, Michael, on her behalf. Her negatives, films and videos are now at Yale University and the Tosca Fund has acquired the vintage prints, all signed and dated. She is survived by Frank and grandchildren, Michael, Sarah and David.

• Eve Arnold, photographer, born 21 April 1912; died 4 January 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jan/05/eve-arnold