Eve Arnold, Magnum's first woman
« American photographer (1912-2012), Magnum's first woman member, portraitist of Marilyn Monroe and Malcolm X. »
Born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant parents, Eve Arnold trained at the New School with Alexey Brodovitch. She joined Magnum in 1951, the first woman to enter the cooperative. Her first major series: a Harlem fashion show, sold to Picture Post.
She photographed Marilyn Monroe for ten years, from rehearsals of Misfits to intimate desert pictures. No manufactured glamour: complicity, work. She also photographed Malcolm X, Joan Crawford, Margaret Thatcher, Isabelle Huppert, Mongolia, Afghanistan, China.
Her book In China (1979) and the Antonioni film she accompanied fixed a state of the country in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Eve Arnold died at 99 in 2012, with 60 years of career, reportage on five continents, and a legacy on the possibility of news photography conducted at a human scale.