Exhibition Review

All about Eve: the Photography of Eve Arnold : Art Sensus, London SW1 until 27 April 2012

For someone who was primarily self-taught, the American-born Eve Arnold went a long way in the competitive world of post-war professional photography but that was because she was a single-minded, determined, documentary photographer who, winning the trust of her mainly famous subjects, was able to capture intimate moments unreachable to lesser mortals. Her most iconic shots were of arguably one of the 20th Century biggest icons, Marilyn Monroe, but Arnold was so much more than just a chaser of Hollywood royalty, for even in her 70s she was travelling the globe in pursuit of the original, the quirky and the unknown.

Born in 1912, Eve Arnold took up photography comparatively late in life, but after the war she was invited to join Magnum Eve Arnold at Magnum an honour for a woman in what was then very much a man's world. Although her work with the famous film stars and politicians is legendary, this exhibition also includes much of her commission work undertaken in places like Cuba, Russia, China and Inner Mongolia from where the image below of training horses for the militia was taken in 1979.

This exhibition is a true, wide-ranging retrospective broken up into the different genres of her work and there is plenty of substance to grab attention. The sinister shot of the American Nazi Party attending a Black Rally in 1961 reminds us of the race problems that have haunted America since the civil war while the portrait of the little Cuban girl who's parents at the time tried to get Arnold to adopt her becomes even more poignant after she returned some 40 years later to trace her and then photograph her grandchildren. There is a humanity in virtually everything on show and if you listen to the taped programme on Arnold's life that plays on a loop you will understand why for she comes across as a curious, intelligent down-to-earth woman who simply loved doing what she did best. Accessing the inaccessible, pointing her camera and pressing the shutter.
This exhibition, coming just two months after her death at the age of 99, is an observational record of the second half of the last century, from the famous to the infamous, from the good to the bad and from the close-to-home to the lives of those far away.

"It is a big wide-ranging show, selected from the vast archive of one anonymous private collector" says Sean O'Hagan writing in the Observer, the week of the exhibition launch, and so, if you want to know "all about Eve" then the Art Sensus gallery is a good place to start as any.