Eve Arnold (1912–2012)

Eve Arnold was born Eve Cohen in Philadelphia, one of nine children in a family of poor Russian-Jewish immigrants. She began her lifelong dedication to photography working at a photo processing plant, and took a class at the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1948. She became the first American woman accepted into Magnum Photos, the cooperative photography agency that included Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1948, she married Arnold Arnold, an industrial designer, with whom she had a son. She moved permanently to England in the early 1960s with her son. In 1971, she made a film called Women Behind the Veil; but preferred still photography and began to produce books of her photojournalism. They included The Unretouched Woman (1976), Flashback: The Fifties (1978), In America (1983), Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation (1987), Private View: Inside Baryshnikov’s American Ballet Theatre (1988), All in a Day’s Work (1989), In Britain (1990), The Great British (1994), Film Stars: Photographs of Magnum Photos (1998), Magna Brava: Magnum’s Women Photographers (co-author, 1999), Eve Arnold: Film Journal (2002) and Handbook with Footnotes (2004). Critics praised the written texts that accompanied her photographs. Her articles and pictures also appeared in a wide range of magazines, including Life, Look, Harper’s, Stern, Epoca, the Sunday Times of London magazine, and Paris Match. She had one-woman shows at the Brooklyn Museum, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the International Center of Photography in New York.