In 1976, Eve Arnold sat on her veranda in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and, as legend has it, wrote her first book, The Unretouched Woman (New York 1976), in one sitting. She was already in her sixties and one of the foremost photojournalists of her time. She had a clear subject in her mind. ‘This is a book about how it feels to be a woman, seen through the eyes and the camera of one woman – images unretouched, for the most part unposed, and unembellished.’[1]Though she steered clear of being called a feminist, she wanted to communicate her views on women, having spent so much time in an industry preoccupied with perception. She writes: ‘I am not a radical feminist, because I don’t believe that siege mentality works. But I know something of the problems and the inequities of being a woman, and over the years the women I photographed talked to me about themselves and their lives. Each had her own story to tell – uniquely female but also uniquely human.’[2]
Arnold didn’t just photograph the famous; she was equally fascinated by the everyday, the marginalised and poor. She sought out women of all shapes and sizes, and of various levels of social standing. Her photographs have an air of a ‘caught shot’ but were a result of rigorous investigation and research. She knew well the people she was photographing. Many were lifelong friends. ‘Themes recur again and again in my work. I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.’[3]
Eve Arnold was born in Philadelphia on 21 April 1912. Her parents, who had changed their names to William and Bessie Cohen (born Velvel Sklarski and Bosya Laschiner) so that they might fit in better, were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine who had fled the pogroms. She was the fifth of ten children and although the family were now safe from persecution, poverty had followed them from Ukraine. At times, her mother would place a pot of boiling water for hours on the stove so that the neighbours would think that soup was being cooked to mask the reality that there was simply no food. Unable to afford a college education, Arnold studied to become a secretary and as a first job worked in a local real-estate office as a bookkeeper. It was at around this time, in the early 1940s, that she was gifted her first camera by a boyfriend.
The twentieth century saw great technical advancement in photography. The static camera, reliant on its tripod for stability and picture clarity, was replaced by the more affordable handheld camera. There was a rise in amateur and professional photographers alike who were drawn to the medium for its potential in recording daily life. This development marked the birth of photojournalism – one of the many new isms of modern times – for which the rules were still being written in the middle of the century. Those who are now referred to as the giants of photojournalism, such as Robert Capa or Henri Cartier-Bresson, were just starting to carve out their place as the recorders of history. Arnold was one of the few photojournalists offering a female point of view who often, and not always unconsciously, applied a bias, choosing to photograph mostly female subjects.
At the age of thirty-one, and after her father’s death, Arnold finally moved to New York where she got a job working at a film-processing factory, Stanbi Photos. Although she was past what was considered at the time ‘of marrying age’, she also met her future husband, Arnold Arnold, during this period. His original surname was Schmitz but he changed it after escaping Nazi Germany. As their son, Frank, would later recount, ‘he didn’t want to be a Jew in Germany, or a German in the States’.[4]
Although the marriage started well, it broke down after Frank’s birth in 1948, and soon after ended in bitterness. She never discussed her feelings about her marriage with anyone. Though showing great managerial potential at work, Arnold left her job at Stanbi Photos to look after her son, but quickly felt restless for intellectual and creative stimulation. She was increasingly interested in developing her photography skills, so when a friend told her about a class led by Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in New York, Arnold was quick to sign up.
Brodovitch was the renowned art director of Harper’s Bazaar, and his students included Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. He advocated the importance of avoiding clichés, capturing the essence of a situation and for his students to look into themselves to find solutions after they made mistakes. He was a challenging teacher and many students dropped out of the class, wanting more conventional instruction on photography. Arnold describes her apprehensiveness at the beginning of the course but, in many ways, it was the ideal place for her to flourish. She already had a wealth of technical knowledge from her past profession. She now had to find her photographic style.
Each week, Brodovitch would assign a broad subject for the class to photograph, such as ‘advertising’ or ‘a record cover’. The students would then gather and critique each other’s work. They were to learn from each other. Arnold described her first critique as akin to being ‘flayed alive’ because the students found fault with each of her images. Crushed but determined to do better, when ‘fashion’ was assigned, she looked for a fresh subject and in passing asked her son’s nanny, Dora, if there was anything interesting to photograph in Harlem to do with fashion. She learned that there were over three hundred fashion shows a year with paid audiences. Arnold did not like the fashion photography of the time that to date always involved a static model posing in a studio with a blank ground. She realised she might find something fresh to photograph within the black communities of Harlem, and approached the assignment more like documentary photography than a fashion shoot.
Entrepreneurial as ever, Arnold contacted the modelling agencies who organised the shows and was invited to an upcoming one at a deconsecrated church. She was nervous about the assignment because she was self-conscious at being exposed as an amateur. Interestingly, as this occurred before the civil rights movement, there was as yet no racial animosity, so her presence at the show went unnoticed, which was not the case when she photographed the Black Muslims rally ten years later. What drew the attention of the audiences to her, more than her skin colour, was the presence of a camera. Rather than pay attention to the fashion show, they started posing and making faces for the camera. Arnold decided to step backstage and photograph the models who were too busy getting dressed to notice her. She did note that Fabulous (Charlotte Stribling) changed her walk when she saw Arnold’s camera. The experience taught Arnold her first important lesson in photography. The camera is always intrusive.
In the group critique that followed, Arnold was singled out for her images. Instead of moving her on to the next assignment with the rest of the class, Brodovitch sent Arnold back to Harlem to do a more comprehensive study of the fashion shows. She spent over a year in Harlem visiting the shows, bars, churches and restaurants every weekend to truly get to know the community. She learned how to develop professional relationships, how to be present but not visible, and how to assemble a visual storyline. It was only forty years later, when reflecting on the shoots, that she fully grasped what it was that she had achieved. It was a time when the fashion world ignored black people. The clothes were made by local seamstresses or, at times, by the models themselves. The beauty industry was a white concern, or at least that was how it was viewed. Indeed, the models she photographed were all using skin-whitening products and straightening and bleaching their hair. She had borne witness to a whole part of the population that was a vibrant part of the city but was entirely ignored. She broke away from the fashion studio shoots and produced something genuinely fresh. She was, as she put it, ‘recording social history’.[5]
Arnold sent the images she took of Harlem to fashion magazines in the hope that they might get published, but no American magazine was interested. Her husband knew the editor of the well-respected English magazine Picture Post, who loved the photographs and ran them over an eight-page spread. For the images to be published was a big coup for Arnold. It also marked her second lesson in photography: retain editorial control. The text accompanying the images was racist and patronising to the models. For the rest of her career, she fought bitterly to retain control over her images so that her intention would not be thus distorted again. Where possible, she wrote her own captions and copy.
These Harlem images, regardless of the text with which they were published, caused a sensation and caught the attention of many, including fellow photographers. It might be hard in the digital age and with the prevalence of photography to appreciate how shockingly different these images were than anything seen before – for the subject, the technique and the style. Without Arnold’s permission, and without paying for the rights, a German magazine had republished the images. Though this was unjust, it did mean that when she applied to join the prestigious photographers’ agency Magnum Photos, they had already seen and admired her work. She and the photographer Inge Morath in Paris became the first two female members of the agency.
Magnum Photos was set up in 1947 by legendary photojournalists Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour. The idea behind the agency was to protect the work of its photographers by ensuring that they retained the rights to their own work. It was common at the time for the commissioning organisation to keep the rights to the image, the logic being that if they had paid for it, it belonged to them. This meant that the photographers could not retain editorial control or resell an image and therefore make more money from their work, which made it hard to make a living as a photographer. Magnum would eventually change the copyright laws in favour of photographers.
Empowered by her new status and approval at Magnum, and inspired by her colleagues, Arnold looked to further her career in photojournalism. She was aware that she would still need to prove herself as a woman in a predominantly male environment and decided that rather than try to emulate the maleness of her counterparts, she would celebrate her gender as a woman. She started to focus on what were considered female subjects such as fashion, family, birth and female personalities. She believed that a photograph had to have a personal point of view and a passionate personal approach. Coupling female subjects with her approach opened up a plethora of subject matter that didn’t much interest any of the other journalists. Though she did try studio work, Arnold always preferred to photograph the real world.
A good example of this is her series of photographs taken in 1959 in a hospital at Port Jefferson, Long Island. Arnold embarked on a series to tackle a subject that was taboo in the late 1950s: childbirth. She documented the raw emotion of the first five minutes after birth in the natal ward. The story was published in Life magazine over a six-page spread. The image that showed a mother’s hand clutching her newborn baby’s finger became a classic image, used time and again to advertise everything from breakfast cereal to life insurance. Thanks to Magnum, Arnold got paid each time the image was used commercially.
This series, ‘A Baby’s Momentous First Five Minutes’, was both emotional and practical, showing the touching reactions of the mothers but also the dispassionate effectiveness of the nurses. Arnold later wrote that she was there to document how ‘the cord is cut; the child is slapped … tagged … footprinted … weighed … washed … anointed … measured … and swaddled’.[6] To her audiences, the images were enlightening and informative, but also scandalous, regarded as obscene by 1950s sensibilities. Even her mother, who struggled with Arnold’s career choice, said, ‘What’s to be proud of?’ when she saw the prints.[7] Though she did not speak of it much, the series also served as therapy for Arnold who had suffered a miscarriage in the late 1950s, followed shortly afterwards by a hysterectomy. She fell into a deep depression and used her time at the hospital to confront her pain and work her way out of her personal loss.
Arnold considered herself to be predominantly a photojournalist. The respect she had gained for her work meant that many of the magazine and newspaper editors with whom she worked would at times allow her to choose her stories. This gave her the freedom to explore areas of personal interest and travel to new destinations. However, photojournalism was time-consuming (an assignment could take over three months) and the pay was not enough for her to sustain herself. Even after she joined the Sunday Times Magazine team in the 1960s, she still needed financial relief from her commercial work to make ends meet, which usually comprised portraiture, promotional photography for the film industry and advertising.
Arnold’s first celebrity portraits were of Marlene Dietrich, who was recording her greatest hits from the war period in a recording studio at Columbia Records in New York in 1952. The session started at midnight and continued until six in the morning. Arnold saw the assignment as portraiture in action and was quick to learn not to ‘click’ the camera shutter during the recording, and to capture the creative, jovial mood among the musicians. The resulting images were a new take on the film-star portrait, capturing an intimate view of a performer at work, rather than one posing knowingly for the camera. They showed the star in a way that her fans hadn’t seen before, as a hardworking performer who was a presence offstage as much as onstage.
Dietrich was said to have been annoyed that Arnold was at the session the whole night taking photographs, though when she saw the resulting images, she loved them and invited Arnold to more sessions at various occasions, leading to a lifelong friendship. Dietrich saw that Arnold was not just a great photographer, but that she could trust her to depict her in a sympathetic way and that she would not abuse that trust. Of the shoot Arnold would later comment: ‘I also grew up with Hollywood movies. Although I was a reluctant host to their imagery, I could not deny their impact on me and on other women. They affected the way we saw ourselves and the way men saw us. The traditional still photograph was an idealized portrait. The subject was posed in the most flattering position, and the features were lit – eyes, lips, teeth, cheekbones, breasts, and in Dietrich’s case, legs – like so many commodities. Wrinkles and blemishes were removed by the retoucher. Everything that life had deposited was pencilled out.’[8]
The images caused a sensation. They forever changed celebrity photography, moving it away from the photography studio and into true environments, at work, at home, out shopping or visiting friends. They marked the start of visual lifestyle consumption, where the spectator could glimpse into the life of the celebrity and see the reality behind the scenes.
The images piqued the interest of other celebrities to be captured by Arnold. One such celebrity was Marilyn Monroe, to whom Arnold was introduced at a party thrown by John Huston. It was two years after the Dietrich images had been published in Esquire magazine and Marilyn said: ‘If you could do that well with Marlene, can you imagine what you can do with me?’[9] Over the next ten years, Arnold became a trusted confidante and companion to Monroe. Unlike any other photographer, she would capture Monroe’s ascending fame both in front of and behind the camera.
Arnold’s personality and strength of character meant that she endeared herself to her subjects. She was able to enter their inner worlds and would often return to work on more photographic series, recording them over time. She never broke her word. She had great integrity, and her subjects knew they could trust her to represent them honestly, kindly and with their approval. It was how Arnold managed to get photographs of Monroe that other, equally talented photographers didn’t. As Arnold wrote of their relationship: ‘Over the ten-year stretch during which I photographed her, the infinite changes she could wring from situation to situation never failed to surprise me … These changes are only possible if the photographer has forged a relationship which permits an atmosphere in which the subject feels relaxed and safe, an intimacy that allows the person being photographed to be uninhibited and to release hitherto unknown aspects of herself.’[10]
Arnold much enjoyed photographing Monroe, who seemed to know how to command the camera and pose perfectly for a photograph. Arnold was surprised how she could angle herself to appear thinner and taller in photographs than she was. She also bore witness to Monroe’s mental strain, her vulnerability ever-present in the legendary images Arnold took on the set of The Misfits in 1960. No one was to know that the film – shot in the Nevada desert – would be Monroe’s last motion picture. The following summer, the thirty-six-year-old actress would be found dead in her Los Angeles home. ‘My most poignant memory of Marilyn is of how distressed, troubled and still radiant she looked when I arrived in Nevada,’ Arnold recalled in her memoirs. ‘It occurred to me then that when she had lived with the fantasy of Marilyn that she had created, that fantasy had sustained her, but now the reality had caught up with her and she found it too much to bear.’[11]
Nineteen-sixty-one marked an important year for Arnold. It was the year she moved to England to enrol her son at boarding school and separated from her husband. It was also the year she started to photograph a group of black supremacists in the United States. Commissioned by Life magazine at her own suggestion, Arnold was to photograph a controversial new figure in American leadership, Malcolm X. She had spent many months researching him before the commission finally came through. Arnold had already started building a reputation as a photographer with a strong social conscience, though it was the Malcolm X project that would propel her on to the international stage like never before.
Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, was the leader of the Black Muslims or the Nation of Islam. When he was a child, his father was murdered by white supremacists and his uncle was lynched. His mother was committed to a mental hospital when he was thirteen, leaving him to grow up in foster homes where he suffered abuse. In his late teens, he was arrested and imprisoned for ‘breaking and entering’. In prison he encountered the Black Muslims. With this organisation, Malcolm found a strong substitute family and a way to fight back. Opposed to the civil rights movement that called for integration, the Black Muslims advocated for the separation of black and white, believing in black superiority. It was while he was in prison that he changed his name, rejecting the family name that was given to his ancestor by his slave owner. Fuelled by anger, he agreed with the Black Muslims movement’s idea that a black nation should have its own territory in the United States.
Arnold’s first interaction with Malcolm X was at a Black Muslims rally in Washington DC in 1961. She found him to be an impressive orator and followed his lead on how he wished to be photographed. Arnold wrote about how he was aware of the importance of the camera and the way one is depicted by it: ‘I am always delighted by the manipulation that goes on between subject and photographer when the subject knows about the camera and how it can be best used to his advantage.’[12] Arnold found Malcolm X electrifying and over the next eighteen months was periodically allowed into his entourage to photograph him. She followed him around the country attending meetings and rallies. At the rallies, the men were dressed in black suits, ties and polished shoes, and were separated from the modestly dressed women. The women watched from a mezzanine or listened from an adjoining room. At the 1962 rally in Chicago, an unlikely ally of the Black Muslims joined the rally: the American Nazi Party. The Nazis shared the vision of a racially divided America. Arnold, a slight Jewish woman, photographed their leader, George Lincoln Rockwell, coolly sitting cross-armed, surrounded by a black audience, listening to Malcolm X speak.
The convivial reception in 1950s Harlem had been replaced by an aggression awakened after years of racist oppression. Walking through the crowds, she kept hearing people shout, ‘Kill the white bitch!’ When she arrived home, she saw that her clothes had been singed by cigarette burns. On the morning of the Chicago rally, she received a threatening phone call from someone with a Southern accent who said, ‘Get the hell out of town before it’s too late’. Arnold was all too aware of the danger she was in at these events. She was already a Magnum member when Robert Capa and Werner Biscof, her mentors, were killed on assignment in 1954. The possibility of her coming to harm was not just an abstract concept but a reality. Arnold was not one to back down, however, and she saw the assignment through, sharpening her skills on how to work under pressure. After receiving her images and text, the nervous editors at Life decided not to run the story. Arnold was infuriated and offered the story to Esquire, who published the images, after which they were republished in countless newspapers.
Malcolm X left the Black Muslims after he became disillusioned with the movement and its leader, Elijah Muhammed. He subsequently embraced the civil rights movement and publicly renounced the Nation of Islam. On 21 February 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated by three members of the Nation of Islam, though there is some speculation about whether they might have been assisted by local law-enforcement agencies. Arnold’s photographs are the definitive work on Malcolm X, now considered to be one the most important leaders in American history.
Though Arnold always followed stories of human interest, after the publication of the Malcolm X story and her recruitment to the Sunday Times as a staff photographer on the new magazine, she had carte blanche from the newspaper editors to work on any story of her choosing. During the 1960s, black and white photography was quickly disappearing in favour of colour images and bringing new challenges for Arnold who favoured black and white images for their sense of abstraction. She found colour photography too ‘real’. She explained, for example, that the series ‘A Baby’s Momentous First Five Minutes’ could not have existed in colour: it would have been unbearable.
Arnold now found herself in a position in which she could realise the projects she longed to pursue. Though she still took on commercial jobs such as movie sets and advertising work to help subsidise her salary, she had the institutional approval and financial support to go after these projects, which helped to open doors. One of the first of these was ‘Behind the Veil’, which started in the late 1960s. She was on a job in Tunisia when she attended a rally where the President was calling for Muslim women to come out from behind the veil. She became fascinated by the concept of the veil and, aware of her lack of knowledge about it, she began travelling through Afghanistan, the UAE[13] and Egypt, photographing women of various social classes and nomadic tribes, in gender-segregated classrooms, and at weddings and bazaars. The series also led to her being commissioned by the BBC to make her first film project of the same title, which she filmed inside a harem in Dubai.
The film project was an incredible feat, requiring charm and determination. For Muslims, portrait photography is prohibited. Harems are well-guarded private spaces. Luckily for Arnold, she found herself at the right moment in history. She arrived just after the oil boom when there was an improvement in relations between the Middle East and the West. A mutual interest developed between the two cultures, which opened a window of opportunity for Arnold. The images and film show a world that was as yet infrequently visited by Europeans and Americans, and spaces most certainly closed off to men. To film in the harem, Arnold had to assemble an all-female team[14] and diplomatically navigate the royal families, which she did with aplomb. The documentary and photographs went a long way towards exposing attitudes towards women in the Arab world and in the West.
Perhaps one of her personal coups was her trip to China, which Arnold had long wished to visit. She had conducted in-depth research on the country, reading what primary-source material she could find. In the early 1970s China was closed to the West. In 1976, with the death of Mao, the Cultural Revolution was over, and two years later the Open Door Policy was introduced. This allowed businesses from the West to set up in China and marked the start of a new era for the country. Arnold had applied annually for a visa to enter China but had been denied for fifteen years until 1979, when she was finally granted entry for a three-month visit, followed closely by another visa for another three-month trip.
Arnold spent her time in China in constant motion. Her hosts were instructed to show her as much as possible and she covered forty thousand miles in the six months she was there. Her interpreter described the experience of accompanying Arnold on the trip, saying ‘It was like looking at a flower from the back of a galloping horse.[15] Arnold photographed schools, factories, markets, film studios, peasants, city dwellers and government officials, trying to capture the essence of the country on camera. Though she would be the first to acknowledge the impossibility of documenting such a vast, unknown land, the images were published in a book, In China (New York 1980), which was hugely successful and sold internationally. She received the National Book Award and a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers for the publication. It also led to an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 1980, which toured for three years, dazzling audiences across America.
It would be impossible to outline all the places that Eve Arnold visited, list all the people, or detail the impact of her work, in one essay. She broke down barriers, exposed hypocrisies, advocated for justice, and exposed elements of our world previously unseen, all with the click of a shutter. Within the frame of a picture, she told stories of lives, heartache, joy, disappointment, oppression, love and hate. Guided by humanity rather than ambition, Arnold arrived at the greatest heights and the farthest reaches of society, feasting with royals and crying with beggars. In her obituary in the Guardian, Amanda Hopkinson wrote: ‘Despite the success of her portraits of the rich and famous, Arnold, who has died aged 99, was equally well known for photographing “the poor, the old and the underdog”. [Arnold] said: “It's the hardest thing in the world to take the mundane and try to show how special it is.”’[16]
In her book Eve Arnold: In Retrospect, Arnold considers the question of whether photojournalism is art. She recalls a conversation between Capa and Cartier-Bresson. The latter was having difficulty being accepted as a serious photographer and asked Capa for advice. Capa said: ‘Stop calling yourself a photojournalist and call yourself a surrealist.’[17]According to her grandson, Michael, Arnold objected to being referred to as a genius in a review, preferring a more modest way of describing herself and her work.[18] She cited the definition of photojournalism by Gene Baro written in the catalogue for her In China show at the Brooklyn Museum: ‘The photojournalist doesn’t illustrate a story but explores a subject by way of the camera and provides a supporting text … But the best photojournalism transcends its subject and gives us images that have a timeless quality, so acute visually that no other explanation is needed finally. The art is in what remains when the occasion has faded.’[19]
Arnold never allowed her talent for capturing a moment to distract her from the need to thoroughly research her subjects and continuously refine her skills. Looking at her whole career, it becomes clear that rather than photographing women, she was photographing those in whose story she found value.
[1] Eve Arnold quoted on https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2017/april/21/eve-arnold-and-the-story-of-the-unretouched-woman/, accessed June 2023.
[2] Eve Arnold, The Unretouched Woman (New York 1976), quoted on https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/eve-arnold-the-unretouched-woman/?gclid=CjwKCAjwg-GjBhBnEiwAMUvNWyii-VTnna8myWNin74B-sIP3Nbiu0IZfJWSZfHHoxXYFtz-SRon1xoCce4QAvD_BwE, accessed June 2023.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Quoted in Janine di Giovanni, Eve Arnold: Magnum Legacy (Munich, London and New York 2015), p.18.
[5] Quoted in Eve Arnold: Magnum Legacy, p.24.
[6] Eve Arnold, Eve Arnold: In Retrospect (London 1995), p.17.
[7] Recalled by Eve Arnold, quoted in the Guardian obituary, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jan/05/eve-arnold, accessed June 2023.
[8] The Unretouched Woman, quoted on https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/eve-arnold-the-unretouched-woman/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIgKCAq7ai_wIVmPt3Ch0obw_8EAAYASAAEgIt4PD_BwE, accessed June 2023.
[9] Quoted in Eve Arnold: Magnum Legacy, p.53.
[10] Eve Arnold: In Retrospect, p.60.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid. p.63.
[13] Or the Trucial States, as it was known at the time of her travels in 1970. It became known as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) only in 1971.
[14] In her book Eve Arnold: In Retrospect (p.147), Arnold describes the difficulties she had in putting together an all-female team. She embarked on ‘Behind the Veil’ with certain prejudices about the position of women in the Arab states and was surprised to find there were no female film or sound technicians. The few she did find were not part of any union, and the UK-based union refused to approve the team. She recalls her conversation with the union: ‘Well, give me female members. We haven’t any. Then make these four members. This wrangle took days, but the union finally broke down and we were made the first female members of the Association of Cinema and Television Technicians.’ Discrimination against women was but thinly veiled in the West, too.
[15] Quoted in ibid. p.206.
[16] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jan/05/eve-arnold, accessed June 2023.
[17] Eve Arnold: In Retrospect, p.15.
[18] Interview with Michael Arnold, 1 June 2023.
[19] Gene Baro, quoted in Eve Arnold: In Retrospect, p.16.