On April 21, the 91st birthday of pioneering photojournalist Eve Arnold, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale announced the acquisition of the first of two parts of the photographer's archive.
Arnold entered the male-dominated field of photojournalism in the early 1950s, as the genre came into its own in such magazines as Life and Colliers. With little formal training, Arnold went on to a celebrated career in photography that took her to China, the Soviet Union, South Africa and the Middle East, as well as to the heartland of America. She documented the lives of ordinary people around the world, but also photographed celebrities, from Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Thatcher to Malcolm X and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
Included in this first section are several hundred vintage photographs and correspondence with professional and personal friends, including photographers, actors and members of the fashion world. Diaries, notes and manuscripts document Arnold's interviews with her photographic subjects and research for her articles and books. Posters from exhibitions and television films about her and her work, as well as copies of her books and articles, accompany the archive. In 2004, the library will acquire Arnold's negative and contact sheets and color transparencies from more than 50 years in the field.
The acquisition was arranged by Patricia C. Willis, curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature in the Beinecke Library. "Eve Arnold has brought to her career both intrepidity and intelligence that led her to remarkable subjects and sites. Her photographs bespeak an aesthetic awareness in the service of precise documentation," says Willis. "A picture of her, crouching camera in hand, suggests her remarkable ability to become invisible to her subjects while bringing them unaware into the exacting focus of her lens."
An American of Russian descent who was raised in Philadelphia, Arnold became interested in photography when, as a young woman, she was given a $40 Rolleicord camera. She enrolled in a six-week course at the New School for Social Research, where Alexei Brodovitch, renowned art director of Harper's Bazaar, was her first mentor. A sequence of photographs made at a fashion show in Harlem led eventually to membership in Magnum Photos, the international co-operative founded in 1947 by a group of photographers wishing to work independently and retain copyrights of their images.
The output of her long career includes work for magazines -- notably Life and the Sunday Times color magazine in London (she has lived for much of her life in England); stills for films (her friendship with John Huston covered many years); photographs for advertising campaigns; and extended research projects that often yielded exhibitions, films and books. Among the latter are the volumes "In China," "In America," "The Great British," and the BBC film "Behind the Veil," for which she gained access to a harem in Dubai.
Arnold is especially noted for her photographs of women. Her first book, titled "The Unretouched Woman" (1976), features photographs of women from around the world. Her best-known subject is probably Marilyn Monroe. "Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation" was published in 1987. Although she trained her lens on the famous -- Joan Crawford, Mamie Eisenhower, Marlene Dietrich, Indira Gandhi, Nina Krushchev, the Queen of England, Vanessa Redgrave and Angelica Huston among them -- she also focused on anonymous women: at work, in families, poor and affluent.
I am "a storyteller with a camera," Arnold wrote in her autobiographical "In Retrospect" (1995). "Photography is often misleading," she wrote. "It might not lie, but certainly it is unable to tell the whole truth. ... I feel it is my responsibility to provide words ... for me a photo without clarification falls short." In her archive, manuscripts and other textual materials form an abundant frame of reference for the photographs, notes Willis.
Arnold's archive joins the Yale Collection of American Literature, a collection already rich in photographs, from authors' snapshots to portraits by Carl Van Vechten and the work of Alfred Stieglitz. The images of writers and theater personalities in the new archive also include those of Arthur Miller, William Carlos Williams and Harold Pinter among others.
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