Eve Arnold

Early life and career A photo taken by Eve Arnold in 1950, titled Charlotte Stribling Stretching. Eve Cohen was born in Philadelphia, the fifth of nine children of immigrant Russian-Jewish parents, William Cohen (born Velvel Sklarski), a rabbi, and his wife, Bessie (Bosya Laschiner). Both of Arnold's parents grudgingly accepted her choice to abandon medicine to study photography. in Manhattan. Studying photography under Brodovitch, she produced a collection of photos from Harlem's vivid fashion show scene. The collection was published the series in the London Illustrated Picture Post in 1951. Although the series launched her career, she later wrote in a diary entry that the editor of the magazine changed her captions and reversed the message of her photographs to fit a racist narrative. She then became interested in African American migrant workers suffering housing discrimination in Long Island. She produced a film in 1971, Women Behind the Veil, focusing on Arabian harems and hammams. Arnold left the United States and moved permanently to England in the early 1970s with her son, Francis Arnold. Several of her famous photographs were featured in Look, Life, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Geo, Stern, Paris-Match, and Epoca. While working for the London Sunday Times, she began to make serious use of color photography. and elected Master Photographer by New York's International Center of Photography. Arnold was one of only five women in the catalogued touring exhibition Magna Brava. Rejected as a Vietnam War photographer, she found photographing South African shanty towns also critiqued and drew awareness to the injustices in the world. In 1997, she was appointed a member of the Advisory Committee of the National Media Museum (formerly the Museum of Photography, Film & Television) in Bradford, West Yorkshire. She was appointed an Honorary Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2003.

She lived in Mayfair for many years until her last illness, when she moved to a nursing home in St George's Square, Pimlico. When Anjelica Huston asked if she was still doing photography, Arnold replied: "That's over. I can't hold a camera any more." She said she spent most of her time reading such writers as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy. One of her last photos is of her grandson when he came to visit her for a photography lesson in 1994. She describes in her diary entry of that day the bond between photographer, subject, and camera that is necessary for a portrait. She continued to stress her style of simplicity in photos with natural lighting and lack of posing and embellishments. She sums up "curiosity" as a one-word description of her driving force that led to her career of which was described as a friend as "a one-woman cultural exchange".

Selected works

Photographs Fashion Show, behind the scenes, 1950 Marilyn Monroe, 1960. National Book Award for In China, 1980