The Kunstfoyer der Versicherungskammer Bayern pays homage to the American photographer Eve Arnold with a retrospective exhibition that is also Arnold’s first exhibition in Germany. It showcases her reportages such as New York by Night, Harlem Fashion Show (1950), The First Five Minutes of a Baby‘s Life, Voodoo in Haiti, Malcolm X, and Vogue Fashion Show (1977); as well as her travel photographs from Afghanistan (from the late ‘60s), China and India (circa 1980), and her legendary portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Isabella Rossellini, Clark Gable, Orson Welles, Peter O’Toole, and Anthony Quinn. She became particularly close to Marilyn Monroe, whom she accompanied and photographed over a period of ten years.
Eve Arnold was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1912 to Russian immigrant parents. She began photographing in 1946, while working at a photo-finishing plant in New York City, and then studied photography in 1948 with Alexei Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in New York. Eve Arnold first became associated with Magnum Photos in 1951, and became a full member in 1957. She was based in the US during the 1950s but went to England in 1962 to put her son through school; except for a six-year interval when she worked in the US and China, she has lived in the UK ever since. Her time in China led to her first major solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1980, where she showed the resulting images. In the same year, she received the National Book Award for In China and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers.
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