Eve Arnold (1912-2012) was born in Philadelphia into a poor family of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. In 1943, she married Arnold Arnold, a Jewish refugee from Hitler Germany.
"Although Eve was never overtly political, her passion for social justice and her curiosity about people's lives made her a perfect witness to the emerging currents and trends of the time."
Eve Arnold photographed the Davis family, descendants of early settlers and US-American prototypes, at meetings, having a church supper, ... and after a while suggested that she also photograph the migrants working for them in their fields picking strwaberries, sorting potatoes, living in overcrowded camps without toilet facilities and water. The living conditions shocked Arnold, her photographs were called "another step in Eve's development as a photojournalist with a deep social conscience". She was ready to tackle social injustice, "not a popular subject then".
"As a second-generation American, daughter of Russian immigrants, growing up during the Depression, the reality I knew well was poverty and deprivation. So I could identify easily with laborers who followed the potato crop north along the Eastern seaboard, settling in each new area as the harvest was ready for them." Eve Arnold
Once, Arnold came up with the controversial idea to photograph hearings at the House Un-American Activities Committee. "As the daughter of parents who had escaped the horrors of the Russian pogroms, she felt deeply for anyone who suffered for their religious of political beliefs". In order to understand the situation better, she researched and found people who had suffered at McCarthy's hand and were still living in fear. When she went to Washington, she was the only woman reporter, McCarthy singled her out, went to her, rested his hand on her shoulder. Reporters were watching her, other journalists thought McCarthy had befriended her, hence ignored her.
Aged 70, she travelled across her homeland where she found the social and political climate troubling: homelessness, HIV epidemic, mortgage foreclosures... She decided not to take black-and-white photographs since she was afraid they would make the images too bleak. At the beginning of the journey she visited the Navajo Nation, then continued photographing miners, strippers, construction workers, prisoners, church choirs, immigrants, queer transvestite nuns, and the Ku Klux Klan ... the last one she called her worst experience (de Giovanni, 2015).
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- de Giovanni, J. (2015). Eve Arnold. Magnum Legacy.
Prestel.
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SMASHING!!
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