Eve Arnold

The Financial Times has the basics on Eve Arnold:

Eve Arnold, the American photographer who has died aged 99, was one of a small group of pioneering women who in the middle of the last century, following Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller, ignored the conventions of the time and became photojournalists.

She travelled, often alone, to remote and dangerous parts of the world to bring back stories for magazines such as Life, Picture Post, and, from the 1960s on, Sunday supplements. She was the first woman member of Magnum Photos, the international photo agency founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour and George Rodger in 1947. She joined the agency in New York in 1951, at about the same time that Inge Morath, 10 years her junior, joined it in Paris.

The Telegraph has this great story of her beginnings as a photographer:

Eve Arnold was self-taught, her only tuition being a brief course in 1948 with Alexey Brodovitch, the celebrated art director of Harper’s Bazaar, at the New School for Social Research in New York. The class, which included ambitious professionals such as Richard Avedon, mercilessly criticised Eve Arnold’s amateur efforts.

For the class assignment, however, Arnold ventured into Harlem to record the black fashion shows that took place daily in deconsecrated churches. On seeing her, the hitherto feline star model “Fabulous” Charlotte Stribling began to mince down the catwalk like a white model. “Lesson number one,” recalled Arnold, “pay attention to the intrusion of the camera.” In the next class, Brodovitch singled out her pictures for their freshness.

As no American magazine of the period would publish photographs of black people, Eve Arnold’s husband sent her pictures to Britain — to his friend Tom Hopkinson, the editor of Picture Post. The pictures were printed but the text changed, so that its tone was snide. Henceforth, vowed Arnold, everything she wanted to say would be in the photograph.