Eve Arnold: Film Journal

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Robert Capa, the most famous of the Magnum agency photographers, once told fellow Magnum-ite Eve Arnold that her world fell between Marlene Dietrich's legs and the bitter lives of migratory potato pickers.

What is most surprising is not that a serious documentary photographer such as Arnold should have been so good at the rather more frivolous job of Hollywood photojournalist, but that she should have managed to keep both her integrity and her subjects' trust, with very few exceptions, over 50 years.

Arnold was a good writer with an ear for the intriguing and the salacious in an era when Hollywood stars were both more real and yet more glamorous, and certainly more candid with journalists, than they are today, and the stories accompanying these pictures in the book, published by Bloomsbury, make for fascinating reading. But she is foremost a great photographer and her ability to remain at once unobtrusive and authoritative makes for some lovely shots: Dietrich recording her World War II musical hits; a young, ludicrously beautiful Vanessa Redgrave with her two infant daughters; Paul Newman hunched in concentration at an Actors Studio class.

All combine a tousled informality with the strictures of monochrome and familiar faces to startling effect. Our current crop of stars, petrified by tabloid outrage and obsessed with privacy, should pay close attention: sometimes a picture is worth far more than a thousand words.

Today until Aug 26, Barbican, Silk Street EC2, Mon to Sat 9am to 11pm, Sun noon to 11pm, free. Tel: 020 7638 8891. www.barbican.org.uk Tube: Barbican/Moorgate

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