MARILYN MONROE

During the half-century that her career spanned, Eve Arnold did portraits of the most diverse personalities. By far and away the most famous is undoubtedly Marilyn Monroe. The two met each other early in the 1950s. As Arnold sketched the situation later: ‘We were both at the beginning of our careers, and I believe that neither of us knew precisely what we were doing’. Like Monroe, Arnold, who in 1951 became the first woman to be nominated for membership in Magnum, was sharply aware of the effect that her being a woman had on the world around her. ‘We could make use of it, or we could let it be’. That is one of the reasons why her photographs, for the most part made on or around the film set, are among the best ever made of Monroe. They do not show the ‘sex object’ but the personality, which generally remained out of the picture.