After the runaway success of the Robert Doisneau exhibition, from 25 February to 4 June 2023, CAMERA proposes another legend of 20th-century photography: Eve Arnold, the American photographer who knew how to recount the world with a ‘passionate personal approach’: the only tool she considered indispensable for a photographer.

To understand her importance in the history of photography, suffice to recall that, together with Inge Morath, Eve Arnold was the first woman to join the prestigious Magnum Photos agency in 1951.
Determination, curiosity and above all the desire to avoid any stereotyping or pigeonholing enabled her to produce an eclectic body of work: from portraits of the great stars of the silver screen and show business to investigative reportages in which she tackled themes and issues absolutely central to the public debate both of yesterday and today.
The exhibition, curated by Monica Poggi and staged in collaboration with Magnum Photos, consists of around 170 images, many of which have never been exhibited before, and covers the photographer’s complete oeuvre from her early black-and-white shots of New York in the 1950s to her last colour works, taken at the age of 85, towards the end of the century. The works selected deal with themes and issues such as racism in the United States, women’s emancipation and the interaction between different cultures around the globe. Her worldwide fame is also undoubtedly linked to her numerous shoots on the sets of unforgettable films, where she portrayed the great stars of the day, from Marlene Dietrich to Marilyn Monroe, and from Joan Crawford to Orson Welles.

About the Author

Eve Arnold was born in Philadelphia (1912), Pennsylvania to Russian immigrant parents. She began photography in 1946 while working in a photo retouching plant in New York City, and then she studied photography in 1948 with Alexei Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Arnold was first associated with Magnum Photos in 1951 and became a full member in 1957. She lived in the United States in the 1950s, but went to England in 1962 to send her son to school; except for a six-year gap where she worked in the US and China, she lived in the UK for the rest of her life.
Her time in China led to her first major solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1980, where she showed the resulting images of her. That same year, she received the National Book Award for In China and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers.