"It's the hardest thing in the world to take the mundane and try to show how special it is."
Eve Arnold had died leaving a photographic legacy of her work as a photojournalist with "the poor, the old and the underdog" as well as the stars.
Extracts from the obituary from Amanda Hopkinson
Arnold was the first woman to join the Magnum photographic agency, and much of her work fell within its tradition of in-depth editorialphotography. She held characteristically trenchant views on the minority – and at times marginalised – status of female photojournalists, while being acutely aware of the role played by female stars as well as by unrecorded women the world over. The whole of the Magnum agency went on location to shoot John Huston's filming of The Misfits (1961), but it was Arnold's intimate portraits of Marilyn Monroe, fragile and poised by turn, (including one incredible image, where she emerges from the black of a nightclub into the white glare of the spotlight, boogying uncertainly with a smiling Arthur Miller) that endured. Arnold not only befriended many of her subjects, including such greats as Monroe, Joan Crawford, Isabella Rossellini and Dietrich, but increasingly wrote about them as well as photographing them
It was Picture Post's publication of the story in 1951 that launched her career. The effects were immediate. She joined Magnum, becoming a full member in 1957, and covered such high-profile news stories as Republican conventions and the McCarthy hearings, as well as conducting a 10-year study of a founding family of Brookhaven Township, and photographing the then largely taboo subject of births. (Later, Arnold was to say that this assisted her own recovery from the trauma of miscarriage.) Her marriage did not survive, however, and she gradually transferred to a London base, ostensibly for the sake of her son's education. She lived in the same flat in Mayfair until ill-health forced her to move to a nursing home in her 90s.
In the 1960s and 70s Arnold travelled back to the US, where she documented the civil rights movement, and to such "closed" regions as the Soviet Union and China. In 1971 she made a film, Women Behind the Veil, going inside Arabian hammams and harems. Regular features continued for Look, Life, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, Geo, Stern, Epoca, Paris-Match and – especially – the Sunday Times colour supplement, under the picture editorship of Michael Rand.
In 2003 she was made OBE. Eve Arnold's People, edited by Brigitte Lardinois, was published in 2009. In 2010 she received a lifetime achievement prize at the Sony World Photography awards in Cannes, accepted by her grandson, Michael, on her behalf. Her negatives, films and videos are now at Yale University and the Tosca Fund has acquired the vintage prints, all signed and dated. She is survived by Frank and grandchildren, Michael, Sarah and David.Eve Arnold's most memorable shots – in pictures
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