"I was green and awed by the male founder members. I hated the 'there-there little girl' pat on the head attitude of a few of my colleagues." When, a great many years later, she was asked what it had been like to be a woman in a man's world, she replied: "It's man in a woman's world!" In fact, she felt that being a woman was an advantage, "a marvelous plus to photographing".
At the time she arrived, photo-journalism was dominated by men. She helped opening the door for women and beacme "a role model for the legion of women phtographers who came after her" (de Giovanni, 2015)-
Twenty-five years ago, when I became a photojournalist, I was looked on as someone apart—a “career lady,” a “woman photographer.” My colleagues were not spoken of in inverted commas; they were not “career men” or “men photographers”. I was not happy about it, but realized as have women before me that it was a fundamental part of female survival to play the assigned role. I could not fight against those attitudes. I needed to know more about other women to try to understand what made me acquiesce in this situation.
It was then that I started my project, photographing and talking to women. I became both observer and participant. I photographed girl children and women; the rich and the poor; the migratory potato picker on Long Island and the Queen of England; the nomad bride in the Hindu Kush waiting for a husband she had never seen, and the Hollywood Queen Bee whose life was devoted to a regimen of beauty care. There were the Zulu woman whose child was dying of hunger and women mourning their dead in Hoboken, New Jersey. I filmed in harems in Abu Dhabi, in bars in Cuba, and in the Vatican in Rome. There was birth in London and betrothal in the Caucasus, divorce in Moscow and protest marches of black women in Virginia. There were the known and the unknown—and always those marvelous faces.
I am not a radical feminist, because I don’t believe that siege mentality works. But I know something of the problems and the inequities of being a woman, and over the years the women I photographed talked to me about themselves and their lives. Each had her own story to tell- uniquely female but also uniquely human.
Themes recur again and again in my work. I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.
I realize now that through my work these past twenty-five years I have been searching for myself, my time, and the world I live in. Eve Arnold
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- de Giovanni, J. (2015). Eve Arnold. Magnum Legacy.
Prestel.
- photograph (Havana, 1954) via
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ReplyDeleteThanks, Wim!!
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