The Female Gaze: Eve Arnold’s intimate portrait of Marilyn

In 1950, an intox­i­cat­ing ingénue named Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe set the sil­ver screen ablaze with bit parts in Hol­ly­wood block­buster films All About Eve and The Asphalt Jun­gle, quick­ly sky­rock­et­ing to stardom. 

Mon­roe saw a 1952 sto­ry on Mar­lene Diet­rich in Esquire and fell in love with pho­tog­ra­ph­er Eve Arnold’s extra­or­di­nary gift for por­trai­ture. They soon met at a par­ty, and Mon­roe made her move, stroking the photographer’s imag­i­na­tion with her sig­na­ture blend of inno­cence and sin: ​“If you could do that well with Mar­lene, can you imag­ine what you can do with me?”

It was the begin­ning of a beau­ti­ful friend­ship. The actress and pho­tog­ra­ph­er col­lab­o­rat­ed on six pho­to shoots over the course of a decade, until Monroe’s untime­ly pass­ing in 1962. Her death sparked a media feed­ing fren­zy. In response Arnold kept all but a few images from their decade togeth­er locked in the vault. 

But in 1987, on the 25^th anniver­sary of Monroe’s death, Arnold decid­ed the time had come to revis­it their extra­or­di­nary col­lab­o­ra­tion with a mono­graph that revealed the com­plex psy­che of the Hol­ly­wood icon. Now the book is back in print as Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe By Eve Arnold (ACC Art Books), with a new intro­duc­tion by Michael Arnold, Eve’s grand­son and one of the trustees of the Arnold estate and archive.

“I nev­er knew any­one who even came close to Mar­i­lyn in nat­ur­al abil­i­ty to use both pho­tog­ra­ph­er and still cam­era,” Eve Arnold wrote in 1987. ​“She was spe­cial in this, and for me there has been no one like her before or after. She has remained the mea­sur­ing rod by which I have— uncon­scious­ly — judged oth­er subjects.”

Arnold intu­itive­ly under­stood Mon­roe: an ambi­tious woman who could be at once over­flow­ing and with­hold­ing, trans­par­ent and opaque, cre­at­ing an air of inti­ma­cy and mys­tery with an allure that seem­ing­ly nev­er fades. She was just the pho­tog­ra­ph­er to chron­i­cle a woman who was often por­trayed by the main­stream media as a tem­pera­men­tal bimbo.

”Eve Arnold had a nat­ur­al curios­i­ty about peo­ple and she was an amaz­ing lis­ten­er,” says Michael Arnold. ​“She had this integri­ty, pres­ence, and non­judg­men­tal­ness. You knew that you could trust her with what was real for you.”

In Mon­roe, Arnold saw a woman who cre­at­ed a glit­ter­ing pub­lic fig­ure, one that won the love and adu­la­tion she nev­er found at home. In Arnold, Mon­roe had a col­lab­o­ra­tor who didn’t need to be seduced or cod­dled, and could sim­ply be as she was.

Dur­ing their final encounter on the set of The Mis­fits, Mon­roe was in a frag­ile state, and asked if Arnold could stay on longer. A two-week assign­ment stretched into two months, the women bond­ed in their dai­ly col­lab­o­ra­tion on set.

​“Eve was one of the few peo­ple that Mar­i­lyn could turn to and con­fide in, and she want­ed to show some of that vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty in the pho­tographs,” Michael Arnold says. ​“At the time, Hol­ly­wood pho­tog­ra­phy was very ide­al­ized and glam­orous, and Eve want­ed to do some­thing dif­fer­ent — to show who women are, as people.”

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