Eve Arnold Papers

July 2, 2012

A new guide to the Eve Arnold Papers is now available online: Guide to the Eve Arnold Papers (YCAL MSS 611); a brief description of the collection is available in Orbis: Eve Arnold Papers.

Eve Arnold, American photographer and photojournalist, was born in Philadelphia on April 21, 1912, and died in London on January 5, 2012. She joined with Magnum Photos in 1951, became an associate member of the photographers’ collective in 1955, and in 1957 its first female full member in New York. Arnold traveled around the world photographing events, politics, personalities, society, and material culture in locations including Afghanistan, Africa, Cuba and the Caribbean, India, Europe, Egypt, the Soviet Union/Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yugoslavia, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom. She also documented American celebrity culture through her images of film stars Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and others at work, play, and home, and was the official photographer on more than 35 movie sets, most notably The Misfits, a 1961 American drama directed by John Huston. Eve Arnold photographed groups as diverse as the1952 American Republican National Convention, Malcolm X and his Muslim followers, and Mikhail Baryshnikov and the American Ballet Theatre dancers. Arnold wrote more than a dozen books including her autobiographical work In Retrospect (1997), and produced and directed a film, Behind the Veil (1972), which examined harem life in eastern Arabia.

The Eve Arnold Papers contains her photographs, contact sheets, negatives, slides, transparencies, diaries, film production files, correspondence, writings by and about Arnold, printed materials, and ephemera that document her career as a member of the Magnum Photos cooperative. In addition, the collection contains audiovisual materials including motion picture film, videocassettes, sound recordings, and computer media. (SM)

Image: Eve Arnold, photograph of Silvana Mangano at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, undated (copyright Estate of Eve Arnold).