Submitted by Jean Dykstra on Fri, 01/06/2012 - 12:24pm
Eve Arnold at work, Magnum
Eve Arnold, the first American woman to be hired by Magnum Photos and a pioneering photojournalist and portraitist, died on Wednesday, January 5, 2012, at the age of 99.
Born Eve Cohen in Philadelphia in 1912, Arnold was the daughter of a rabbi and one of nine children in a family of Ukrainian immigrants. She moved to New York when she was 28, and took up photography when a boyfriend gave her a camera. The boyfriend didn’t last, but her love of photography did. She was mostly self-taught as a photographer, but she did take one, six-week photography course at the New School, and it was taught by the legendary Alexey Brodovitch, art director for Harper’s Bazaar, who noticed her talent and singled her out.
Arnold joined Magnum on an informal basis in 1951 and became a member in 1957. She traveled the world, taking photographs in China, India, Cuba and the United States, covering politics and making wide-ranging social documentary photographs. She was best known, though, for her celebrity portraits of such stars as Marilyn Monroe (to whom she devoted a book Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation), Marlene Deitrich, and Joan Crawford. Arnold was the official photographer on more than 40 movie sets.
Eve Arnold, Marilyn Monroe
She married an industrial designer, improbably named Arnold Arnold, and they moved in 1961 to London, where she lived for the rest of her life. Her marriage ended in divorce, but Arnold is survived by her son, Frank, and three grandchildren. In her book Eve Arnold: Retrospective, published in 1995, she looked back and observed that the the motive force behind her successful career was curiosity. “The very unpredictability of photography enthralled me,” she wrote. “The possibilities were endless.” Only an artist, however, could select among those endless possibilities to make a great photograph, and do it time and time again.
By Jean Dykstra
