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Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
Morath’s curiosity, compassion, and bravery show vividly in this biography featuring
stunning images from every stage of her career. Biographer Linda Gordon presents
Morath traveling across the globe, often as a woman alone, quietly but firmly defying
the conventions for what was appropriate for women at the time. Her photographs
show her cosmopolitanism, which arose from her love of literature, her fluency in
many languages and her revulsion against Hitler’s Germany, where she spent her
teenage years. Her respect for all the world’s cultures, from Spain to Iran to China,
made her a kind of visual ethnographer. One of the first women to join the Magnum
collective, Morath was a superb portraitist, particularly drawn to artists, such as
painter Saul Steinberg, sculptor Louise Bourgeois, and writer Boris Pasternak. She
worked mainly in black-andwhite but also used colour film, even early in her career.
Through Magnum assignments to document film sets she met Arthur Miller and their
subsequent marriage lasted for forty years. Despite a variety of subject matter,
Morath’s work is unified by an intimacy and comfort with the world’s many cultures. Truly a citizen of the world, her
images are simultaneously universal and personal.
Inge and Ernst Haas during their first reportage for Magnum Photos, Capri, Italy, 1949, photographer unknown.
Pahlevani exercise in zoorkhaneh, a domed structure used for practice, Tehran, 1956.
© Inge Morath/Magnum Photos
A llama in Times Square, New York, 1957.
© Inge Morath/Magnum Photos
Dustin Hoffman during the filming of Death of a Salesman, New York, 1985.
© Inge Morath/Magnum Photos
Louise Bourgeois in her studio, New York, 1991.
© Inge Morath/ Magnum Photos