EVE ARNOLD (1912–2012)
Eve Arnold, “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 on Wednesday in London at the age of ninety-nine, reports Douglas Martin of the New York Times. Magnum Photos, which Arnold belonged to for more than a half-century, announced her passing; the artist was one of the collective’s first female photographers.
Martin writes that “Arnold was a leading light in what is considered the golden age of news photography, when magazines like Life and Look commanded attention with big, arresting pictures supplied by adventurous photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa, and Margaret Bourke-White.”
Arnold was born in Philadelphia to Ukrainian immigrants and studied photography at the New School under Alexey Brodovitch, the art director for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. In 1961, Arnold moved to England where she lived for the rest of her life. Some of her most famous works include images of Malcom X and Joan Crawford as well as a range of documentary photographs depicting “communist officials in China, a South African shantytown, a Havana brothel, and a Moscow psychiatric hospital.” She is widely considered a precursor for celebrity photographers like Annie Leibovitz; in 1985, Mary Blume of the International Herald Tribune_ wrote, “in a distinguished career, Eve Arnold has photographed ‘Everyone’ with a capital ‘E’ and also everyone.”
Martin reports that “Arnold’s many honors include the Order of the British Empire and the lifetime achievement award of the American Society of Magazine Photographers. She was a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and was named a ‘master photographer’ by the International Center of Photography in New York, considered by many to be the world’s most prestigious photographic honor.”
