Eve Arnold

Eve Arnold mixed photojournalism, as a crusader, with celebrity portraits, to pay the rent, in the second half of the 20th century

• Born in Philadelphia in 1912, into a poor Russian-Jewish family of nine children. 
• Her parents ambition for their daughters was to marry well, but Eve wanted to be independent.
• Given a camera by a boyfriend, she became a proficient amateur, whilst she worked for 5 years in a film processing plant in New Jersey.
• She had started taking pictures of black migrant families who were agricultural labourers in Montauk, Long Island: 'I have never been as shocked as when I entered the one-room shacks with old iron bedsteads with one shaded bulb, in which as many as 8 to 10 people sleep...no toilet facilities, no water...it's below the lowest possible standard of 30 to 40 years ago,let alone today's standards."

Migrant Labour 

One of her earliest stories as an amateur, documented the life of migrant potato pickers in Montauk, Long Island, New York

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• She married Arnold Arnold, a toy manufacturer, and had a young son before studying photography formally at the New School in 1952
• Her first class assignment was a fashion show in Harlem that turned into a comprehensive study. 
• Over the next decade, she developed a “three-tiered” working routine: “1. Writing and editing the current story. 2. Preparing the next assigned story. 3. Reading for and researching a third story. Meanwhile there would be film to buy, cameras to clean, money in foreign currencies to secure, injections against various diseases to have.
• The most gruelling stories were often those she proposed herself
• In 1954, she followed Senator Joe McCarthy at the height of the anti-communist witch-hunts

Roy Cohn and Senator Joe McCarthy

Washington DC, 1954

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• In 1960 she went to Petersburg, Virginia to cover the non-violent protest movement in the south. The Petersburg Improvement Association (PIA) had been set up in the 1950s as part of the US civil rights movement. Arnold listened to PIA members giving talks on passive resistance and in a series of photographs shows them instructing young black students how not to react to harassment by white people, who might goad and abuse them during sit-ins and demonstrations. 

'Non-violence in the South'

At a training school for sit-ins and demonstrations, black students are taught not to retaliate when harassed by whites, 1960

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• In 1960-61 she spent a year with the black Muslim leader Malcolm X, as he whipped up support in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York, backed by a now barely credible alliance with the American Nazi Party. It was after one of these rallies that Eve discovered the back of her sweater was pitted with holes where members of the Nazi party had stubbed out their cigarettes in hate at the sight of this small woman photographer who was obviously Jewish. 

Portrait of Malcolm X

Chicago, 1961

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• In the early 1960s, she joined the Sunday Times Colour Magazine as a photojournalist

A member of the Royal Society of Birdwatchers

England, 1964

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• In 1964 she went to the Caucasus in search of the oldest man in the world
• In 1969-70 she went to Afghanistan, Egypt and the Emirates, where she photographed inside the harem of Sheikha Sana, the niece of the ruler of Dubai. 
• In 1973 she was on assignment in aparteid South Africa, where she found black children were dying from malnutrition and disease and witnessed the separation of black families, the men forced to work in mines or in cities living in compounds hundreds of miles away from their wife and children. 

A midwife checks a baby 

at the Charles Johnson Memorial Hospital, Ngutu, Zululand, South Africa, 1973

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• In 1979, she was allowed into China for 2 three-month trips to cover a story, loosely described as “daily life”. She decided to work in colour, and brought back some of what are now her best-loved pictures 

A beautiful old Chinese woman 

who  stepped suddenly out of a doorway into the light before retreating. Over the years it has often been read as a surrogate self-portrait. When her grandchildren were little, 
they thought it was a picture of Eve herself.

At an emotional level - life experience etched into its wrinkles, a warm gaze, frail,engaging eye contact, probably - a grandma and a widow. At a design level - single point of her face in the centre adds stability,  black background and clothing draw eye strongly to her face

Young girl lying in the Inner Mongolian steppe with her white horse, in training for the militia

At an emotional level - the strong connection between the horse and the girl conveyed by their relaxed affectionate body positions. At a design level - subjects in bottom of frame provide stability as well as give sense of the scale of the featureless steppe, colour contrast creates separation yet harmony between 3 elements (white horse, pink girl, green steppe)

• Between these trips she carried out her more “glamorous” assignments. Divorced and now a single parent, she needed to earn more money and film location work gave her the opportunity. 
• Her first job was an all-night recording session with Marlene Dietrich at a New York studio in 1952. Dietrich liked the pictures, and approved of Eve, who she took to calling her “white-haired girl” (Eve went prematurely grey). 
• These were the pictures that Marilyn Monroe saw: “If you could do that well with Marlene, can you imagine what you can do with me?”
• Over almost a decade Monroe gave Arnold the kind of access she could only have dreamed of. The most telling pictures were those taken on the set of The Misfits, Monroe's last movie in 1961 shortly before she committed suicide.  

Marilyn Monroe 

at a casino in Reno, US, during the filming of 'The Misfits', 1960

• Eve Arnold died in January 2012, just three months short of her 100th birthdayhort of her 100th birthday. 

'I realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition. Now I question whether we were a combination of voyeur and exhibitionist as well as witness and crusader." Eve Arnold,