Eve Arnold Retrospective to Open in Newlands House Gallery
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LONDON — The first major retrospective of renowned photographer Eve Arnold in the U.K. in a decade, “To Know About Women: The Photography of Eve Arnold,” is set to open on Saturday in the Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, West Sussex.
The exhibition will feature more than 90 of the photographer’s images, including her documentary of the fashion shows held in Harlem in the ’50s, as well as rarely seen photos that are being exhibited for the first time in 70 years.
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Maya Binkin, exhibition curator and artistic director at Newlands House, said Arnold is worth celebrating because she “changed fashion photography and helped define photojournalism alongside the forefathers of the medium. She should be a household name just as much as her colleagues, for example, Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson.”
Arnold was best known throughout her decades-spanning career for capturing some of the most famous figures of the time, such as Marlene Dietrich, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe, who she documented over a decade after she became the first American female photographer signed by Magnum at the age of 45 in 1951.
“She loved to photograph people and that passion shows up in her celebrity portraits,” Binkin said. “But it wasn’t just famous people that she pictured — in fact, at times it feels as though she was only doing the Hollywood shoots to pay the rent. She photographed people from all walks of life. She was always chasing the human-interest stories.”
Therefore, the exhibition will also include images she captured during the Civil Rights Movement in America during the ’60s, including the Nation of Islam rallies and meetings led by Malcolm X.
“They were not profitable so she couldn’t make a living on those stories alone, but in her heart she wanted to make a difference in people’s lives and, perhaps naively as she would later admit, she thought that her photography could make that difference,” Binkin added.
Later in her career, Arnold spent several months traversing China, and it led to her first major solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1980. In the same year, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Magazine Photographers.
Binkin believes that her work is still relevant to today’s social landscape because “the issues she was photographing in the 20th century have not gone away in the 21st.”
“She wanted to photograph the ignored, marginalized and forgotten, and to expose injustice and hypocrisy. Famine, racism and the objectification of women are still as prevalent now as they were then. The big difference is that now, we are talking about these issues — we are not silent. I would like to think that Arnold helped to start that conversation. In that respect, it was a brave leap,” she added.
Located 60 miles outside of London, Newlands House is a gallery inspired by the historic associations of Petworth and Sussex with artists, writers and designers from times past. It occupies a 7,500-square-foot Grade II listed Georgian town house and adjacent coach house in Petworth, West Sussex. Petworth boasts one of the country’s largest art collections, housed in the National Trust’s Petworth House and Park.
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