Robert Capa

It's not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian. (Robert Capa) 

Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, Segovia Front, Spain 1937

Robert Capa (1913-1946) was born as Endre Friedmann in Budapest, Hungary. Aged seventeen, because of his and Kati Horna's leftist student activities, Friedmann was arrested by the Hungarian secret police but released the following day on the condition that he leave Hungary after finishing the school year. In July of 1931, he moved to Berlin, where he enrolled at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik as a student of journalism. Only a couple of months later, he learned that because his parents' dressmaking business had been badly hurt by the worldwide economic depression, they could no longer send him money for tuition, room, and board.

Robert Capa, Retreat of the International Brigades, Montblanch, near Barcelona, October 1938

In 1932, a friend helped him obtain a job as darkroom assistant at Dephot, the first cooperative photojournalist agency. The agency's director, Simon Guttmann, was a friend of Walter Benjamin, and, since 1928, also was the employer of Otto Umbehr (Umbo). Guttmann, recognized Capa's talent and, in December, sent him to Copenhagen to photograph Leon Trotsky delivering a lecture to Danish university students. Capa smuggled his inconspicuous Leica into the stadium, positioned himself near to where Trotsky was speaking, and clandestinely snapped a series of photographs that captured the energy of the drama of the moment, so much so that Berlin’s Der Weltspiegel devoted a full page to Capa's photographs. It was his first published story.

Robert Capa, Leon Trotsky lecturing on the Russian revolution, Copenhagen, 27 November 1932

After Hitler had assumed dictatorial powers in 1933, Capa fled Berlin for Paris, where he would struggle for several years before becoming a successful photojournalist. In 1934, Capa met Gerda Taro, a German Jewish refugee who became his lover and business manager. During this time, Friedman began calling himself Robert Capa. In August of 1936, he and Gerda Taro set out for Spain to document the two-week-old Spanish Civil War from the perspective of the Anarcho-Syndicalists. Capa photographed in Barcelona and on the Aragon front, then went on to the Huesca front, until he finally arrived at Cordoba, where he took the picture that would be his most famous. It shows a  Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) Militiaman who had just been shot and is in the act of falling to his death:

Robert Capa, Falling Republican Militiaman, Spain 1936

It appeared in Vu, No. 447, on 23 September 1936. The picture occupied the upper left half of a double-page spread entitled La Guerre Civile en Espagne. Responsible for the layout was Alex Liberman, later art director of the American Vogue, who thus was the first to recognize the visual power of the photograph. In July of 1937, while Capa attended to business in Paris, Taro covered the fighting at Brunete, west of Madrid. During a confused retreat, she was fatally injured by a Loyalist tank. In September, Capa made his first trip to the United States, to visit his mother and brother Cornell in New York and to negotiate a contract with Life magazine. In 1938. Capa spent seven months in China with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens documenting Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion.

Robert Capa, Departure of Chiang Kai-shek's German military advisors. Hankow, 1938

In 1938, Capa covered the fall of Barcelona. After the end of the Spanish Civil War, in March, he photographed the defeated and exiled Republican soldiers in internment camps in France. He then worked on various stories in France. After the outbreak of World War II, he sailed for New York, where he began to work on miscellaneous stories for Life.  After the United States had entered the war, Capa crossed the Atlantic in a convoy carrying American planes to England, and worked on numerous stories about the Allied war effort in Britain. In 1943, Capa covered the Allied victories in Tunisia, the conquest of Sicily, and the liberation of Naples.

Anom., Robert Capa in Naples, 1943, with Contax II 

Capa's most famous work occurred on June 6, 1944 (D-Day) when he swam ashore with the second assault wave on Omaha Beach, armed with two Contax II cameras. He took 106 pictures in the first couple of hours of the invasion. However, a staff member at Life in London made a mistake in the darkroom, and only eleven frames were recovered. Capa never said a word to the London bureau chief about the loss of three and a half rolls of his D-Day landing film.

Robert Capa, Men of the 16th Infantry Regiment seek shelter from German machine-gun fire in shallow water behind "Czech hedgehog" beach obstacles, Easy Red sector, Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944

Capa then accompanied American and French troops until the liberation of Paris. In December of 1944, he covered the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes. In 1945, Capa parachuted with American troops into Germany, and chronicled the Allied capture of Leipzig and Nuremberg. Some months later Capa became the lover of Ingrid Bergman, who was travelling in Europe entertaining American soldiers. In December 1945, Bergman tried to persuade him to marry her, but Capa didn't want to live in Hollywood, and their relationship ended in 1946.

Robert Capa, Spanish Civil War, Barcelona 1936. The boy is wearing a cap of the Steel Battalions, of the "Union de Hermans Proletarios" (Union of Proletarian Brothers), an anarchist militia.

After the war, Capa became an American citizen. In 1947, together with his friends Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger, and William Vandivert, Capa founded Magnum, a photo agency run as a photographers' cooperative. He spent a month traveling in the Soviet Union with his friend John Steinbeck, and also visited Czechoslovakia and Budapest. Between 1948 and 1950, Capa made three trips to Israel. On the first, he photographed the declaration of Israel's independence and covered the fighting that followed. On the two subsequent trips, he concentrated on the plight of refugees arriving in the country. He also visited Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia and photographed the former concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Robert Capa, Ain Karin, a Transylvanian Jew who had spent nine years in Nazi concentration camps, arriving in Israel in 1949

From 1950, Capa lived in Paris and served as president of Magnum, devoting much time to the agency's business and to the recruitment and promotion of young photographers. Because of allegations that he had been a communist, the U.S. government suspended his passport for several months in 1953, during which time he was unable to travel on work assignments.

Robert Capa, Vietnam, 1954

In 1954, while travelling in Japan, Capa received a request from Life to fill in for its photographer in Indochina. He arrived in Hanoi early in May. From there he travelled to Luang Prabang, Laos, to photograph the wounded French soldiers who had been captured at Dien Bien Phu and released by the Vietminh. On May 25, he accompanied a French convoy whose mission was to evacuate two indefensible outposts in the Red River delta. While the convoy was halted at one point, Capa wandered with a detachment of soldiers into a field beside the road. He stepped on a landmine, and was killed with his camera in his hand. "This war is like an actress who is getting old. It is less and less photogenic and more and more dangerous", Capa had said before.

Vilho Lampi

 Vilho Lampi, Self-Portrait, 1932

Vilho Henrik Lampi (1898-1933) was born in Oulu, Finland, from where he moved with his family to Liminka a decade later. In 1921, Lampi went to Helsinki to study at the Drawing School of the Finnish Art Association. He soon was granted scholarships and won first prizes in competitions.

Vilho Lampi, Limingan joki [View of Liminka], 1934

After his art studies, in 1925, Lampi returned to the North to his home farm. In Liminka, Vilho painted still lifes, portraits and landscapes of familiar objects, models and landscapes from his home area. By the turn of the decade, he took part in domestic and international joint exhibitions. He also joined the Finnish Artists' Association.

Vilho Lampi, Yö Retuperällä, 1930

Lampi held the only solo exhibition during his lifetime in Oulu in 1931. Almost half of the works were sold. The same year, Lampi travelled to Paris for two months, financing his trip with a grant. In 1933, Lampi took part in both domestic and international exhibitions receiving recognition in the form of prizes and scholarships. His future looked bright. But, on March 17th, 1936, he threw himself into the River Oulujoki and drowned. His body was found later that spring.

Vilho Lampi, Hevoshuijarit, 1930

Today, The Vilho Lampi Society is active in Liminka, researching and promoting Lampi's legacy, and maintaining a museum dedicated to Lampi. In the course of past decades Vilho Lampi has become a significant part of Finnish art history. 

 Vilho Lampi, Self-Portrait, 1934

Sasha Stone

Drawing and colouring, for the painter, correspond to the violinist's production of sound; the photographer, like the pianist, has the advantage of a mechanical device that is subject to restrictive laws, while the violinist is under no such restraint. (Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography)

Sasha Stone, Untitled [Berlin girl], 1920s

Sasha Stone (1895-1940) was born Aleksander Serge Steinsapir in St. Petersburg, Russia, of Jewish parents.  He lived and worked in Europe and America between the wars and is best known for his portraits, nude studies, photographs of Berlin and for his photojournalism. Stone studied engineering in Warsaw, and then spent several years in New York, where he obtained American citizenship and chose the pseudonym Sasha Stone. After a sculptor and painter education in Paris and Berlin, Stone described himself as an expert in the fields of advertising, architecture, illustration, film, and stage design.

Sasha Stone, Erwin Piscator Entering the Nollendorf Theater, Berlin, 1929

Cami Stone (1898-1975) was born Wilhelmine Schammelhout in Belgium. After a stay in New York, where she founded an import-export company and, in 1918, married a wealthy banker (who disappeared without trace a few months later), she moved to Berlin and joined the circle around Sasha Stone. Influenced by the Bauhaus aesthetics and New Objectivity, both became pioneers of photo journalism and advertising photography.

Sasha Stone, Street Sweepers on Wittenberg Platz, Berlin 1929

In the 1920s, Sasha Stone worked as a professional photographer in Berlin, primarily for the illustrated magazines published by the Ullstein publishing house. He belonged to the circle around the constructivist periodical "G", which included Moholy-Nagy, Mies van der Rohe, El Lissitzky and Walter Benjamin. He created the photomontage for the original book jacket of Benjamin's famous Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street) - which is still used for the English Penguin edition:

In 1929, Stone published Berlin in Pictures, which is extremely difficult to find today. Both, his and his wife Cami's photographs were published in the German photography annual Das Deutsche Lichtbild. Threatened by the rising Fascism, they fled Germany in 1932 and moved to Brussels. Their studio was located at 18 rue de Naples until the German invasion of Belgium in 1940. Sasha Stone's nude work appeared in Les Femmes, and was published by Editions Arts et Metiers Graphiques, Paris, in 1933. His nudes are usually in poses that are quite modernist in sensibility, and the lighting emphasizes their sculptural shapes and angles.

Cami or Sasha Stone, Female Nude (Marie Louise Lebeau), 1933

 

The couple separated in 1939. Cami again assumed her maiden name. Sasha died in 1939 during his flight to the United States in Perpignan. 800 photos of the archive of Cami and Sasha Stone, lost until recently, were auctioned in Argenteuil, France, in 2009. Cami Stones nephew had rescued the archive during World War II and stored it until last year.

Alexander Kanoldt

 Alexander Kanoldt, Self-Portrait, 1930

Alexander Kanoldt (1881-1939) was born in Karlsruhe as the son of the classicistic landscape painter Edmund Friedrich Kanoldt. He began an apprenticeship as a decorative painter at the local "Kunstgewerbeschule" (Arts and Craft School) at the age of eighteen, but decided to join the Academy in 1901. He took drawing lessons with Ernst Schurth, and began a life-long friendship with the painter Adolf Erbslöh.

Alexander Kanoldt, Telegraph Wires, 1921

During this time Kanoldt closely studied Neo-Impressionist techniques, which inspired his technically sophisticated colour lithographs. In 1904, Kanoldt continued his studies in Friedrich Fehr's painting class and became his master student between 1906 and 1909. Kanoldt moved to Munich in 1908, where he founded the Neue Künstlervereinigung - a forerunner of the "Blauer Reiter" - together with Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Werefkin and others.

Alexander Kanoldt, Thr Red Belt, 1929

Kanoldt also took part in the first exhibition of the Neue Künstlervereinigung at Heinrich Thannhauser's Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1909. In 1913, Kanoldt became a member of the "Münchener Neue Sezession". His artistic career was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War - from 1914 to 1918, Kanoldt was drafted as an officer. After the war, he developed a close relationship with Georg Schrimpf. Both representeded the more romantic trends of the New Objectivity.

Alexander Kanoldt, Still-Life, 1920s

During a lengthy stay in Italy in 1924, Kanoldt produced multi-perspective architectural landscapes and serene interiors. These works marked a new beginning in Kanoldt's work and resulted in an invitation to exhibit works in the famous "Neue Sachlichkeit" (New Objectivity) exhibition in 1924 at the "Kunsthalle Mannheim". His was the second largest group of works after Max Beckmann.

Alexander Kanoldt, Olevano, 1927

In 1925, Oskar Moll invited him to teach at the "Breslau Kunstakademie", a post that he gave up in 1931. Together with Karl Hofer, Kanoldt was the founder of the "Badische Secession" in Freiburg in 1927. In 1931, he opened a private painting school in Garmisch-Patenkirchen. During this period Kanoldt mostly painted still-lives and Italian landscapes. Even though he was appointed professor at the Kunstakademie in Berlin in 1933, his works were labelled "degenerate" during the Nazi regime and confiscated in 1937. For health reasons he had been forced to give up his post in Berlin one year before. Alexander Kanoldt died of a heart disease on 24 January, 1939.

Fortunato Depero

 Fortunato Depero, Riso cinico, 1915

Fortunato Depero (1892-1960) was born in Fondo in Trentino when this northeast corner of Italy belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was never one of Futurism's leading members, but he was the most persistent, the man whose work embodied many of the movement's best inclinations (combining disparate art forms) and worst prejudices (glorifying Fascism). Following a traditional craftsman's training, Depero was rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, ending up back in Fondo as a marble cutter's apprentice. And it's there that he might have settled, carving mausoleums for Austrians, had he not heard the distant call to "sing to the love of danger" (as the founding Futurist manifesto proclaimed) and create a genuinely new, militantly Italian culture.

Fortunato Depero, Il ciclista attraversa la città, 1945

After his mother's death in 1914, Depero moved to Rome, where he sought out one of Futurism's leading talents, Giacomo Balla, who immediately saw Depero's potential. It was with Balla in 1915 that he wrote the manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe). In 1919, Depero founded the Casa d'Arte Futurista (House of Futurist Art) in Rovereto, which specialised in producing toys, tapestries and furniture in the futurist style. In 1925, he represented the Italian futurists at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. The freedom with which he moved between media over the course of his five-decade career made him Futurism's common denominator. One of his masterpieces wouldn't be in painting but in architecture, specifically the pavilion for the 1927 Monza Biennale Internazionale delle Arti Decorative that had an immaculate white facade and larger-than-life block letters for walls:

Fortunato Depero, Pavilion for the Monza Biennale Internazionale delle Arti Decorative, 1927

As his pavilion proved, the erstwhile marble cutter had the brute ingenuity that Futurism prized as its most potent weapon against "passéist" complacency. Marinetti had recognized that from the day they met in 1915, inside Depero's studio on Rome's Via Cola di Rienzo. Depero showed Marinetti stacks of paintings, as well as machines built of cardboard. There were also his "abstract" poems written in colored inks on large polychrome sheets dangling from the ceiling. Marinetti read some of these aloud, recognizing his own influence: For several years, he'd been leading a revolt against adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, promoting what he called "words-in-freedom", a typographic onslaught to directly transcribe modern-world experience. For instance, he set the sounds of battle in verse with declamations such as zang-tooooomb-toomb-toomb and pacpacpicpampampac. By 1916, Depero had taken the concept to a new extreme with "onomalingua," a mechanical dialect (vroiii sioiii oiii) in which he claimed to converse directly with automobiles and trains.

Fortunato Depero, Grattacieli a tunnel, 1930

However, it was Depero's assemblages in cardboard - with geometric flowers stiff and artificial, such as might bloom in a robotic garden - that changed the course of his career. When he saw them, Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Ballets Russes, declared Depero "the new Rousseau". Diaghilev commissioned him to create Futurist scenery and costumes for Stravinsky's ballet, Song of the Nightingale.  Decades ahead of their time, Depero's experiments in mechanized movement were never to reach the stage. Stravinsky's ballet was delayed and reworked and ultimately staged years later with a set by Henri Matisse.

Fortunato Depero, The Chair's Party (tapestry), 1927

In 1925, Depero produced a gruesome tapestry, War=Festival showing soldiers slaughtering one another against a backdrop resembling a jubilant pyrotechnic display. Though morally appalling, it was a magnificent example of artistic propaganda - visually alluring enough to win a gold medal at that year's Paris International Exhibition of Decorative Arts. His Fascist political allegiance was duly forgiven by his countrymen following his vague post-war acknowledgment of "those human and justifiable mistakes committed in good faith."

Fortunato Depero, Martinetti, Patriotic Storm, 1924

Depero's compositional spareness led the way to the bold ads, posters and bottle designs he produced over the following decades for companies like Campari and San Pellegrino. In 1927, Depero published a personal portfolio, titled Depero Futurista (shown below). Bound with two large industrial bolts, the book included some of the potent graphics he had designed for Campari, interspersed with anarchic flights of typography that were essentially advertisements for himself.

Fortunato Depero, Campari Soda Bottle Design, 1932

In 1928, Depero moved to New York, where he produced costumes for stage productions and designed covers for magazines including Movie Maker, The New Yorker and Vogue. He also was active in interior working on two restaurants (which were later demolished to make way for the Rockefeller Center), did work for the New York Daily News and Macy's, and built a house on West 23rd Street. In 1930, Depero returned to Italy.

Fortunato Depero, Depero Futurista, 1927

 In the 1930s and 40, due to futurism being linked with fascism, the movement started to wane. One of the projects Depero was involved in during this time was Dinamo magazine, which he founded and directed. After the end of the Second World War, Depero moved again to New York. One of his achievements on his second stay in the United States was the publication of So I Think, So I Paint, a translation of his autobiography initially released in 1940. Between 1947 and 1949 Depero lived in a cottage in New Milford, Connecticut, working on his long-standing plans to open a museum. His host was William Hillman, an associate of then President Harry S. Truman.

Fortunato Depero, Table and Chair, 1962

In 1949, Depero returned to Rovereto, where he died in 1960. In 1959, Galleria Museo Depero opened, fulfilling one of his long-term ambitions. It is a division of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, Italy's only museum dedicated to the Futurist movement, containing more than 3.000 objects.

Bill Brandt

Bill Jay,  Bill Brandt at home in London, 1969

Hermann Wilhelm Brandt (1904-1083) was born in Hamburg. His English father, Louis Brandt, was the owner of one of Hamburg's traditional trading houses; his mother, born into the German-Russian merchant family von Oesterreich, came from St. Peterburg. Bill's older brother Walter later became the head of the family's private London bank Brandt, William & Co, and his younger brother Rolf was living as a painter also in London. With the rise of National Socialism the Brandt family returned to England. Shortly after the First World War, Bill contracted tuberculosis and spent much of his youth in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. (So far, Bill Brandt's story is surprisingly reminiscent of Hans Castorp's in Thomas Mann's famous 1924 novel The Magic Mountain).

Bill Brandt, After the Celebration, London 1931

In 1927, Brandt travelled to Vienna, where he was taken up by Eugenie Schwarzwald, an Austrian philanthropist and writer. She found him a position in a portrait studio, and also introduced him to Ezra Pound. Pound apparently gave Brandt an immensely valuable introduction to Man Ray whom he assisted in Paris for several months in 1930. Here he witnessed the heyday of Surrealism, and grasped the new poetic possibilities of photography.

Bill Brandt, René Magritte, 1963

Brandt travelled in continental Europe with Eva Boros, whom he had met in the Vienna portrait studio. They married in Barcelona in 1932. Night photography became one of Brandt's specialities and this may be his earliest experiment in the genre. Here he posed Eva Boros as a nightwalker in St. Pauli, the red light district of Hamburg. Family and friends were to play many roles in his social documentary scenes.

Bill Brandt, Woman in Hamburg, St. Pauli District, 1933

Brandt and his wife settled in Belsize Park, north London in 1934. The majority of Brandt's early English photographs were first published in his book The English at Home (1936). He used his family contacts - for example, his banker uncles - to gain access to a variety of subjects. The book contained a number of pointed social contrasts, such as the high life presented on the front cover and the poor family shown on the back cover.

Bill Brandt, Belgravia, 1951

Taken in the house of one of Brandt's banker uncles, Brandt's photo-essay The Perfect Parlourmaid appeared in Picture Post, the Life magazine of the United Kingdom, in 1938. This photograph was first published, opposite a Matisse painting of a dinner table, in Verve magazine in 1938. Bill Brandt had met Tom Hopkinson, his editor at Picture Post in 1936. He described Brandt as having "a voice as loud as a moth and the gentlest manner to be found outside a nunnery".

Bill Brandt, Parlourmaids ready to serve dinner, 1933

Brandt's second book, A Night in London, was published in London and Paris in 1938. It was based on Paris de Nuit (1936) by Brassaï, whom Brandt greatly admired. The book tells the story of a London night, moving between different social classes and making use - as with The English at Home - of Brandt's family and friends. Night photography was a new genre of the period, opened up by the newly developed flashbulb (the Vacublitz was manufactured in Britain from 1930). Brandt generally preferred to use portable tungsten lamps called photo-floods. He claimed to have enough cable to run the length of Salisbury Cathedral.

Bill Brandt, Policeman in a Dockland Alley, 1938

Spurred by the Jarrow Crusade of 1936 and reading George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier and J.B. Priestley's book An English Journey (1934), Brandt visited the industrial north of England for the first time in 1937. Priestley described the condition of the north east, where the effects of the Depression and the closure of ship-building yards had resulted in 80% unemployment: "The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war". Brandt carefully documented coal-searching - the retrieval of small lumps of coal from spoil heaps - and the domestic life of the miners.

Bill Brandt, Miners Returning to Daylight, South Wales, 1931

The blackout photographs, probably Brandt's own idea, were made during the "phoney war" period, after war had been declared but before serious hostilities between Britain and Germany had begun, plus a second set in 1942. Elizabeth Bowen, one of Brandt's favourite writers, wrote in her story Mysterious Kôr: "Full moon drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon's capital - shallow, cratered, extinct. And the moon did more: it exonerated and beautified".

Anom., London Blitz, 1940

After the London Blitz began, Brandt was commissioned to record bomb shelters by the Ministry of Information. His photographs were sent to Washington as part of the British government's attempt to bring the US into the war on the allied side. From 1945 onwards, Brandt made a series of landscape photographs, accompanied by texts selected from British writers which appeared in Picture Post and the American magazine Harper's Bazaar. Brandt waited years for the opportunity to photograph Stonehenge under snow. His image provided the cover for the issue of Picture Post for 19 April 1947. This dealt with Britain in crisis, as post-war euphoria gave way to austerity.

Bill Brandt, Isle of Skye, 1947

Although Brandt's career began, decisively, with his close-up portrait of Ezra Pound in 1928, portraiture flowered in his career only in the 1940s. The portraits were commissioned by Lilliput, Picture Post and Harper's Bazaar. His portrait of Dylan Thomas, for example, appeared in Lilliput in December 1941. A Gallery of Literary Artists appeared in the same magazine in November 1949, including the Sitwells and Graham Greene. 

 Bill Brandt, Francis Bacon, 1963

Bill Brandt experimented with nude photography since the 1930s but made a decisive breakthrough in 1944 when he acquired a mahogany and brass camera with a wide-angle lens. He enthusiastically acknowledged a debt to the wide-angle, deep-focus cinematography of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941). The camera, a 1931 Kodak used by the police for crime scene records, allowed him to see, he said, "like a mouse, a fish or a fly".

Bill Brandt, Hampstead, 1945

Brandt published Perspective of Nudes (with a preface by Lawrence Durrell) in 1961. It featured nudes in domestic interiors and studios, as well as on the beaches of East Sussex and northern and southern France. Brandt used professional models, but also sometimes family and friends as models for his nudes. His second wife, the journalist Marjorie Beckett, modelled for the following photograph - one of my all-time favorites:

Bill Brandt, Campden Hill, 1949

Brandt's last years were spent reissuing his work in a series of books. He taught Royal College of Art photography students and continued to accept commissions for portraits. He was working on a show, Bill Brandt's Literary Britain, when he died in London after a short illness in 1983. The exhibition became a memorial tribute to Brandt the following year. You can see many more of his photos in the Bill Brandt Archive.

Inge Morath

 Inge Morath, Self-Portrait, Jerusalem 1958

Inge Morath (1923-2002) was born in Graz, Austria. Her parents were scientists whose work took them to different laboratories and universities in Europe during her childhood. Educated in French speaking schools, Morath and her family relocated to Darmstadt in the 1930s, and then to Berlin, where Morath's father directed a chemical laboratory. Morath was registered at the Luisenschule near Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse.

 Inge Morath, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, Reno, 1960

Morath's first encounter with avant-garde art was the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition organized by the Nazi party in 1937, which sought to inflame public opinion against modern art. "I found a number of these paintings exciting and fell in love with Franz Marc's Blue Horse", Morath later wrote. "Only negative comments were allowed, and thus began a long period of keeping silent and concealing thoughts."

 This is the 39th production black Leica M2. It was owned by Inge Morath.

After finishing high school, Morath entered Berlin University. At university, She studied languages, and became fluent in French, English, and Romanian in addition to her native German (to these she later added Spanish, Italian, Russian, and Chinese). Towards the end of the war, Morath was drafted for factory service in Berlin-Tempelhof, alongside Ukrainian prisoners of war. During an attack on the factory by Russian bombers, she fled - walking hundreds of miles to Austria.

 Inge Morath, A Llama in Times Square, 1957

Morath encountered photographer Ernst Haas in post-war Vienna. Working together for Heute, Morath wrote articles to accompany Haas' pictures. In 1949, Morath and Haas were invited by Robert Capa to join the newly-founded Magnum Photos in Paris, where she would work as an editor. In 1953, Morath presented her first large picture story, on the Worker Priests of Paris, to Capa, and he invited her to join the agency as a photographer. One of her earliest assignments took her to London for a story about the inhabitants Soho and Mayfair. Morath's portrait of publisher Eveleigh Nash, from that assignment, is among her best known photographs: 

 Inge Morath, Mrs. Eveleigh Nash, The Mall, London, 1953

In 1953-54, Morath worked with Henri Cartier-Bresson as a researcher and assistant, and in 1955 she was invited to become a full member of Magnum Photos. During the late 1950s Morath traveled widely, covering stories in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the United States, and South America for such publications as Holiday, Paris Match, and Vogue. 

Inge Morath, Marilyn Monroe in Misfits, 1961

Having met director John Huston while she was living in London, Morath worked on several of his films. Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) was her first time working in a film studio. Morath worked again with Huston in 1960 on the set of The Misfits. Morath met Arthur Miller while working on The Misfits, and - following Miller's divorce from Marilyn Monroe - they were married in 1962. Their first collaboration was the book In Russia (1969), which, together with Chinese Encounters (1979), described their travels in the Soviet Union and China. Another long-term project was Morath's documentation of many of the most important productions of Arthur Miller's plays.

 Inge Morath, Sibiu (Hermanstadt), Romania 1958

During the 1980s and '90s, Morath continued to pursue both assignments and independent projects. The film Copyright by Inge Morath was made by German filmmaker Sabine Eckhard in 1992, was one of several films selected for a presentation of Magnum Films at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007. Inge Morath Miller died of cancer in 2002, at the age of 78. The Inge Morath Foundation was established by Morath’s family, in 2003, to preserve and share her legacy.