Obituary: Eve Arnold / Pioneering photojournalist known for Hollywood candids
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Eve Arnold, who was one of the first woman photojournalists to join the prestigious Magnum Photography Agency in the 1950s and traveled the world for her work but was best known for her candid shots of Hollywood celebrities, has died. She was 99.
Ms. Arnold died Wednesday at a London nursing home, Magnum announced. The cause was not specified.
Starting in 1951, when career women were a rarity, Ms. Arnold navigated distant countries and cultures, photographing horse trainers in Mongolia, factory workers in China and harem women in Dubai. Her photo essays appeared in feature news magazines and in the many books she compiled.
Ms. Arnold began working for Magnum on a freelance basis in 1951 and became a full member of the group in 1957.
The agency's founders included Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, considered the greatest reportage photographers of the time. Most members of the cooperative were men. Ms. Arnold's only female colleague at the agency was Inge Morath, who joined Magnum as a full member in 1955.
"I began to haunt the files at Magnum," Ms. Arnold recalled in her 1995 memoir, "Eve Arnold: In Retrospect." Studying contact sheets she found there, she learned how each of Magnum's photographers approached an assignment. Cartier-Bresson's photographs, in particular, taught her to tell an entire story in a single image, she wrote.
Ms. Arnold made Hollywood a specialty starting in the mid-1950s. Her attraction to the backstage of life gave her a particular angle on the movie business.
In several books, including "Eve Arnold: Film Journal" (2001), she wrote about her experiences in Hollywood. Some of her best-known images are candid shots of Marilyn Monroe. On the movie set of "The Misfits," Ms. Arnold captured the tension between Monroe and playwright Arthur Miller, her husband at the time and the screenwriter on the 1960 film. One photograph shows them together on a veranda, looking as if they have just cut short an argument. Others show glimpses of Monroe's legendary insecurity. In one photograph she sits at a table with a script in front of her, hands covering her eyes.
"She liked my photographs and was canny enough to realize that they were a fresh approach for presenting her -- a looser, more intimate look than the posed studio portraits she was used to in Hollywood," Ms. Arnold wrote of Monroe in "Film Journal."
It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Ms. Arnold published several more books, "Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation" and "Marilyn for Ever," in 1987. She exhibited and sold the images repeatedly for decades.
First Published January 8, 2012 12:00 am
