"It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument." Celebrated American Magnum photographer Eve Arnold has travelled the world - the Soviet Union, China, Afghanistan, the Arab Emirates and England, from factories, paddy fields and harems to film sets - capturing essential spirits, decisive moments. Helen Meany met Arnold, now in her 80s, in Dublin for the opening of an exhibition showing some of her work
By HELEN MEANY
A FAINT suspicion that she might not appreciate it smothers the impulse to fawn, starstruck, on the tiny figure of Eve Arnold, as she glances at her own iconic photographs of Marilyn Monroe with a nod of recognition. This distinguished American photographer, now in her 80s, exudes an air of self sufficiency, combined with the acute powers of observation that have fuelled her 40 years of documentation and interpretation of the world around her.
Curiosity, she says, is what has always driven her; the question: "what will I encounter around the corner?" has led her from her native US to the former Soviet Union, China, Afghanistan, the Arab Emirates and England, from factories, paddy fields and harems, to film sets graced by the most feted movie stars of the 1950s and 1960s.
With a minimum of professional training - from Alexei Brodovitch in New York, Arnold, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, felt her way, by instinct, into the kind of spontaneous, candid photography that in the late 1940s had a distinctive freshness and vividness. Distinctive enough, in fact, to enable her to join the Magnum photographic agency - "a wonderful institution" - when it opened a New York office in 1951. "I was lucky," she says.
Magnum had been established in Paris in 1947 as an international association, providing a base for photographers that would be independent of specific publications and editors. Robert Capa, the principal founder and acclaimed war photographer, insisted that Magnum photographers should retain the rights to their pictures, and control over their selection, cropping, context and captioning, which gave them a unique degree of autonomy.
Some of the most celebrated names in photography have been Magnum members: Henri Cartier Bresson, Elliot Erwitt, Inge Morath, Ernst Haas, Marc Riboud, Abbas, Sabastiao Salgado ... The birth of the agency coincided with the heyday of the picture magazine in post war Europe and the awareness of the reportorial potential of photography.
The first American woman to join, Eve Arnold was one of the few women members of Magnum in the early years, a position which did not cause her any particular difficulty, despite the generally macho culture of photojournalism. "In fact it was a plus to be a woman," she says. "Men liked to be photographed by women, and women liked it too. Occasionally I was patted on the head, but mostly I was encouraged and appreciated." Knowing that her interest in social issues might lead to her categorisation in the 1950s as "a woman photographer", Arnold deliberately began to tackle political subjects, such as McCarthyism, and later had to suffer the frustration of seeing her photographs of McCarthy given a generous spread in a German magazine, accompanied by pro McCarthy captions. After that, she became even more vigilant and insistent about providing her own captions and text. Working for Life magazine in London, followed by 10 years with The Sunday Times Colour Magazine - "an adventure playground" - she enjoyed enormous freedom. "Assignments were open ended. There was sufficient time allotted for thinking.
Having documented the American Civil Rights movement, apartheid, poverty, and the position of women in societies around the world, Arnold now gives a modest assessment of photography's capacity to be an instrument of social change, and is aware of the increased complexity of the photojournalist's role in the age of televised wars and compassion fatigue. "As a photographer, you think you can do much more than you can. You want to make a difference, no matter how small and, though I'm not sure how much good it does, it is important that it continues to be done, that accurate information is disseminated."
A significant body of Arnold's work, some of which is currently on exhibit in Dublin, is her record of 25 years of feature film making. Spending extended periods on film shoots in the US and England, she became accepted by the cast and crew as part of the film unit, which gave her the opportunity to take informal pictures of stars such as Clarke Gable, Paul Newman, Isabella Rossellini, Simone Signoret and Elizabeth Taylor, as well as her much reproduced series of portraits of Marilyn Munroe.
These were the product of a trusting, sympathetic relationship between the two women, which allowed Munroe the spontaneity and scope for unmediated self projection that the film making process had not given her. "Marilyn was in control of those pictures," Arnold says. "She was full of ideas and I just did what she wanted." The trust established between photographer and subject is crucial, Arnold says. "The way you approach people is important. They have to believe that you'll tell the truth, that you won't expose them or belittle them - then much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument."
ARNOLD has no difficulty reconciling these glitzy portraits with her social and political work. "Who's to say that both can't be shown? Glamour is part of life too," she says. "We grew up with all those Hollywood stars." Film documentation was also highly lucrative, and, like the advertising photography that she occasionally did, it supported her editorial projects. In fact, it was a type of advertising, ultimately helping to sell the finished film.
In the early 1970s, after making the documentary film Behind die Veil, for which she was given an unusual degree of access to an Arabian harem, Arnold considered moving into film making, excited by the potential of cinema, which, for a still photographer "was like a celibate discovering sex". After some deliberation she decided that her "cussed sense of independence" wouldn't allow her to, as she was "essentially a loner", who did not have patience with the dependency on others that film making demands.
She describes herself, simply, as a photographer, rather than a photojournalist or photographic artist, acknowledging the two very different approaches that have been discernable among Magnum photographers from the start, when Henri Cartier Bresson, with his background in visual art and Surrealism, seemed to be pursuing very different aims from those of his reportage oriented colleague, Robert Capa.
"Yes, these were polar opposites," Arnold says, but suggests that there is a position somewhere between the two. "I do journalism and I do portraiture." There is no doubt that Bresson's concern with the texture and form of a photograph, and with an intuitive sense of "the decisive moment" has influenced Arnold, and is evident in the formal beauty of her pictures, in the clarity of focus, lighting, and composition, both in black and white and colour.
The development of computer technology, which enables photographs to be stored on disks and to be composited and retouched, manipulated and combined with elements from other photographs, causes her a great deal of unease. While there has always been a debate about the relationship between the presentation of "the facts" and "the truth" in photography, the need for new definitions has been given extra urgency now that an image cannot automatically be viewed as a faithful mechanical recording, from reality, of basic visual facts. "We have got to be vigilant," Arnold says. "These manipulated images should be clearly labelled and not passed off as reality. In fact, they should have a separate name." Perhaps, as in the case of writing, photography could soon be labelled as fiction or non fiction.
Yet, Arnold is confident that the still photograph can compete and survive among the proliferation of images that surround us. "I think the relationship of photography to TV will be like that of radio and TV. It's another tool, another form. The photograph on the wall will become even more precious. I'm glad I had the purity that I had, but these things are always changing when we started out, no one took photography as seriously as it's taken today, with all these enormous prizes, and pictures hung in galleries." She admits that the Magnum agency itself has contributed to this. "Yes, we have been called precious," she grins, "and I wouldn't disagree with that."
Arnold herself could not be accused of being precious; in fact, in her work and in person there is a striking sense of integrity combined with compassion and humour. Having just written an extended autobiographical essay for the book that accompanies a major, touring, retrospective of her work, she is going to "sit down for a little while" and enjoy her grandchildren, who, she says, "give focus to my life". Focus, of one kind and another, is not something her life seems to have lacked.