Eve Arnold, 1912–2012

When Eve Arnold was sent to take pictures of Joan Crawford in the 1950s, the aging Hollywood icon greeted her by stripping off her clothes and demanding that Arnold photograph her naked. Arnold took pictures of the plainly inebriated Crawford—but then gave her the negatives a few days later. The decision not to publish them, Arnold confessed, was as much for her own sake as for her subject’s. “I didn’t think they would do me credit,” she later said. “I had in mind a long career.”

Born Eve Cohen to an immigrant family in Philadelphia, she moved to New York City at 28 and began taking pictures after a boyfriend gave her a camera. “Her first picture was of a bum on the New York waterfront,” said The New York Times. Arnold began her professional career photographing fashion shows in Harlem in the late 1940s. Unable to find an American publication that would feature black subjects, she sold her photos to the British magazine Picture Post.

Arnold began freelancing for the Magnum photo agency in 1951, said Time.com, and soon earned a reputation for her intimate portraits of Hollywood celebrities, including Crawford, Paul Newman, and Elizabeth Taylor. But she will “probably be best remembered” for her many photos of Marilyn Monroe. One of Arnold’s most famous photos shows Monroe in the Nevada desert on the set of The Misfits, “going over her lines for a difficult scene she is about to play.”

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Arnold’s subjects “went far beyond the boundary of celebrity,” said the London Telegraph, ranging from “American migratory potato pickers” to civil-rights leaders. Taking photographs at a Malcolm X rally, Arnold ended up with clothes “polka-dotted with cigarette burns” from the hostile crowd. She also traveled the world to photograph political prisoners in the Soviet Union, Muslim women in the harems of Dubai, and Mongolian horsemen on the steppes of China.

Arnold emigrated to Britain in the 1960s, and went on working well into her 70s. The key to a good portrait, she once said, was compassion for the subject. “It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.”