 In 2012, Eve Arnold passed away at the age of 99. By the end of her career, she was rightly regarded as one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. However, her career didn't get off to the most auspicious start. How's it, how's it? If you look up Compassion in a photographic dictionary, then you will see a photograph of Eve Arnold because she is that poster child for the photographer, for the photojournalist who is caring, compassionate, is thoughtful, is thinking about the subject, is going beyond the everyday. She is quoted as saying that it is the hardest thing in the world to take the mundane and to try to show how special it is. If you look at her photographs of film stars and celebrities and great figures in history, then you will see she's actually done the opposite. She takes these larger-than-life figures, these so-called special people, and shows us the banality, the everyday humdrumness of their existence, the person behind the mask. This is her special skill. This is what makes her photography so, so emotionally impactful. I did myself a great disservice when I was younger by not looking at Eve Arnold's photographs. I was drawn more to those larger-than-life figures in photojournalism who were all about the lifestyle. But Eve Arnold just went about her career quietly, unassumedly, and I feel that now her work speaks far more much to me than, say, the work of Robert Frank. It was in the late 1940s that Eve Arnold first picked up a camera at the behest of her husband who suggested that if she was going to be a photographer, she probably should go and take some photographs, which seems like a good idea, right? So she went off and she photographed some things and without much direction, I think like most of us, trying to find our feet. Unfortunately for Eve, she was able to enroll under the tutelage of Aleksa Brodojevic, who was a very famous figure. He was the art director for Harper's Bazaar at the time. To give her photography a little bit of a focus, a purpose. And she went off to this meeting and, you know, and was with a friend of hers and, you know, Aleksa stood up and said, look, you know, we are all going to learn from each other. We are going to, you know, use ourselves to teach ourselves. And then said, has anybody brought along any photographs that they can show us? Now Eve's friend kind of nudged her and said, look, look, look, you've brought some pictures along. Why don't you, why don't you hold them up? And she says, and recalls in her book, The Unripe Touch Woman, that the feedback from the class was brutal. That it was the hardest thing that she has ever been subjected to. And in that class, I believe there was the likes of people like Avedon. So you can imagine the sort of people that she's surrounded with. But she did say that despite being felt like she'd been flayed alive, she learned more about photography in that single night than she had since. In my mind, there is one subject that is intertwined with Eve Arnold and that is Marilyn Monroe. Arnold had met Monroe in the early 1950s when Monroe had approached her to take some photographs. I love this clip from a BBC documentary where Eve recalls that first meeting. What happened was Marilyn had seen a set of pictures I'd done for Esquire on Marlena Dietrich. You must remember that in the 50s, this was I think 1952. And in those days, practically everything was front lit, retouched, very carefully organized. And I didn't know about any of that. And I was a documentary photographer. And I had done this series on Marlena Dietrich singing the songs that she had made famous during the war, Lily Marlene, Mrs. Otis Regrets and all of those. I simply took her as she was. There was no posing, no setup, no lighting, no tripod, just me and Marlena singing. And there we were working on this and we were both at a party for John Houston, given a 21 in New York. And Sam Shaw, the mutual friend, brought her over and introduced us. And she looked at me and she said, if you did that well with Marlena, can you imagine what you can do with me? Which I thought was quite wonderful because she had naive quality, but she also had a great sense of showmanship and self-promotion. And she could see herself, I was sure, in what she was gonna look like in that square. It's interesting when you listen to Eve talk about her early forays into the world of let's say proper photography, is that she's not aware of a lot of rules, of kind of unwritten guidelines about how you're supposed to behave. And what I draw from this is that, I think had she been aware of certain ways of you're supposed to do X, Y and Z things, then possibly her relationship with Monroe wouldn't have been as deep, as thoughtful as it ended up being because she would have probably held herself back, probably stood one remove from Marlena. Because of course, this is not in Eve Arnold's nature, not at all because she says, you know, if a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, there's that word again, much is given and it is the photographer, not the camera that is the instrument. Then if you are careful with people that they will offer you part of themselves and that is the big secret to photography. And you see this with Marilyn Monroe. We are all aware now of the struggles that she was going through, that inner turmoil, the tragic story of her. But at the time, you have to sort of put these things in context and she was one of the biggest stars in the world. She had a personality that was completely divorced from her true self and it's these photographs that Eve Arnold has put together that show a glimpse of what's going on inside Marilyn's mind or Norma Jean's mind. She's showing us Norma Jean, she's showing us the real girl inside Marilyn Monroe. It's telling that when the whole of the magnum group were invited along to photograph on the set of the Misfits, that the photographs that have stuck, that have stayed from this period, are the ones of Eve Arnold. That despite all those other names who came and went and photographed things, it's the photographs of Eve Arnold that cut through everything, that cut to the chase. The photographs that Eve took on the set of the Misfits are not the result of just taking an image on a whim. They're a result of waiting, of building up trust with the people who you knew are photographing. By this point, she had known Marilyn for a good number of years. They saw each other socially. So you can see how these photographs are in a way, images that I don't think would ever happen with another photographer, had there been another photographer present, they are just purely the result of the subject. Subject sounds like a terrible word. It's like you're analyzing people, but it is the sound or it is the look of the people being photographed at totally at ease, so comfortable with Eve being there taking photos. This is the true skill of Eve Arnold's photography, is to immerse herself into the people, into them, to really reach out, to feel so much for the people who she's photographing. It doesn't matter that if it's a film star or a Zulu woman in Africa or a tribal woman in China, all these sort of things, it doesn't matter. She is involved with these people. She cares so much. That's why I keep coming back to the word compassion. She is wonderfully compassionate. Just listen to her talking about what happened after Marilyn Monroe's death. After she died, there was a set of pictures of Bert Stern taken of her and they were wild and almost out of control when he shot them. I don't know whether she was hyped up from sheer excitation or whether she'd been drinking and what had happened to her, but she was absolutely wild during that session. And they were semi-nudes, nudes with scarves, diethnoscarves that she was playing with. And she hated, most had great many of those pictures and she had agreed that she would go through them and that they would have to go along to her choices. And in the end, what happened was that Bert Stern sent her only about a third of the pictures and what she returned to them had been gouged with some kind of sharp instrument, a hairpin or something like that. She hated them. And in the end, he used them in his book. And I feel that that kind of invasion of somebody lends you their face, I think you owe them the courtesy of trying to make them, you know, you don't have to flatter them, you don't have to retouch them, you don't have to do any of that. But I do think you owe them the courtesy of having them look as well as they could. And I suppose for me, and maybe one of the reasons that I finally decided to do this book was the ultimate in horror for me of what can happen to a picture. In the Summers book, he uses the picture taken of her and the mord and that hurt because all of us who worked with her and respected her and loved her cared about her, wanted her to come off as nice, as intelligent, as wonderful as she was. And it hurt when that was used. I mentioned at the beginning of the video that when I was younger, I was too wrapped up in stoking my own ego to realize the true importance of Eva Arnold's photography, of the message of this idea of compassion. And she says it best in her book, Unretouched Woman. Over the years, the women I photographed talked to me about themselves and their lives. Each had their own unique story to tell, uniquely female, but also uniquely human. Themes recur again and again in my work. I have been poor and I have 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 25 years, I have been searching for myself, my time and the world I live in. There is a fantastic BBC documentary on YouTube about Eva Arnold and Marilyn Monroe. If you're interested in seeing the thought process or hearing the thought process about how Eva developed this relationship, then I would highly recommend that you go and check it out. I'll link to it here and in the description box below. Thank you ever so much for watching. Have a great weekend.