Following the recent reissue of Eve Arnold’s book, Marilyn Monroe, a selection of her photos is currently on display in London.
“Iconic Images Gallery in Piccadilly will be exhibiting Eve Arnold: An Appreciation, showcasing the diversity and depth of the Eve Arnold archive. The exhibition will feature some of her most iconic and highly sought-after portraits of Marilyn Monroe, as well as highlights from her acclaimed photojournalistic work, covering Malcolm X and the vibrant community of 1950s Harlem, Queen Elizabeth II, and the landscapes and lives of peasant farmers in late-1970s China.”
Meanwhile, another of Eve Arnold’s photos of Marilyn is featured in a major new book, Magnum America: The United States. Shot in Los Angeles in 1960 to promote The Misfits, this was a rare venture into formal studio photography.
“This is Eve Arnold on the set of The Misfits. We are lucky to have that archive here at Yale. This is very much a post-war moment. Marilyn Monroe to me symbolises a kind of stereotypical ideal of femininity. One of the ways of organising the troops had been to give them that idea about the home front and the women they were fighting for. Arnold caught how Monroe is so deliberate in embodying it in her movements and expressions. If you watch her, you see how she’s performing these codes that by the later years of the decade would be met by a feminist challenge.”
– Laura Wexler, Yale News
And finally, Eve’s photos of Marilyn reading James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses, in 1955 are further explored by Lucy Harbron in Far Out Magazine, quoting the photographer’s original commentary from 1987.
“‘We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was visiting Norman Rosten, the poet. As far as I remember (it is some 30 years ago) I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it- but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph, she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her.”
The Marilyn Report 