She was the first woman to become a full member of the storied Magnum Photos cooperative — not quite a feminist, but someone who believed that women saw the world through a different lens. Petite but powerful, she will be remembered for her generous spirit and her compassionate eye.
Eve Arnold, who joined the cooperative as a full member in 1957, died peacefully on Wednesday. She was 99.
“It’s important to imagine what it was like to be who she was when she first came into Magnum, and the world she grew up within,” said Susan Meiselas, a Magnum photographer who joined in 1976 and met Ms. Arnold shortly afterward.
“She spoke from the point of view of a woman.”
Ms. Arnold, who was then living in London, helped ease Ms. Meiselas into the Magnum world. Although there were other women in the group at the time, Ms. Arnold was the elder female photographer, very aware of what it meant to be a part of the community and what it meant to be a woman in a male-dominated group.
Robert Penn Eve Arnold on the set of “Becket.” 1963.“Eve was a dynamo,” Ms. Meiselas said. “She might have been small and compact, but she was just unbelievably productive and hugely generous.”
She was outspoken, too. “She didn’t hold back in a gang of men. She was very present and encouraging and generous, in a sense — to me as a young woman, but also in a collective spirit.”
Ms. Arnold was born in Philadelphia in 1912. In the late 1940s, she studied with Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in New York, alongside Richard Avedon. In the 1950s, she documented the Harlem fashion scene, attracting the attention of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Within Magnum, she was deeply involved with the “In Our Time” project and with “Magna Brava: Magnum’s Women Photographers.”
She was dedicated to her work, more out of curiosity for her subjects — including fashion in Harlem, Malcolm X and Marilyn Monroe, with whom she had a close relationship — than out of a need to produce.
“She was someone who I look at as having that strength to step out,” Ms. Meiselas said. “To not be inhibited.”
A complete obituary will be published in The New York Times on Friday.
A caption on a photograph on an earlier version of this blog post incorrectly spelled the first and last names of the actor Clark Gable.
