Inge Morath | |
|---|---|
| Born | Ingeborg Hermine Morath[1] (1923-05-27)27 May 1923 |
| Died | 30 January 2002(2002-01-30) (aged 78) |
| Known for | Photography |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 2, includingRebecca |
| Relatives | Daniel Day-Lewis (son-in-law) |
Ingeborg Hermine "Inge"Morath (Austrian German:[ˈɪŋɛbɔrɡˈmoːraːt]ⓘ; 27 May 1923 – 30 January 2002) was an Austrian photographer.[2] In 1953, she joined theMagnum Photos Agency, founded by top photographers in Paris, and became a full photographer with the agency in 1955. Morath was the third wife ofPulitzer Prize-winning playwrightArthur Miller; their daughter is screenwriter/directorRebecca Miller.
Morath was born inGraz, Austria, to Mathilde (Wiesler) and Edgar Morath,[3] scientists whose work took them to different laboratories and universities in Europe during her childhood. Her parents had converted from Catholicism to Protestantism.[4] First educated in French-speaking schools, Morath relocated in the 1930s with her family toDarmstadt, a German intellectual center, and then toBerlin, where Morath's father directed a laboratory specializing in wood chemistry. Morath was registered at theLuisenschule nearBahnhof Friedrichstraße.[5]
Morath's first encounter withavant-garde art was theEntartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition organized by theNazi Party in 1937, which sought to inflame public opinion againstmodern art. "I found a number of these paintings exciting and fell in love withFranz Marc'sBlue Horse", Morath later wrote. "Only negative comments were allowed, and thus began a long period of keeping silent and concealing thoughts."[6]
After finishing high school, Morath passed theAbitur and was obliged to complete six months of service for theReichsarbeitsdienst (Reich Labour Service) before enteringBerlin University. At university, Morath studied languages. She became fluent in French, English andRomanian in addition to her native German (to these she later added Spanish, Russian and Chinese). "I studied where I could find a quiet space, in the University and the Underground stations that served as air-raid shelters. I did not join theStudentenschaft (Student Body)."[7]
Toward the end ofWorld War II, Morath was drafted for factory service inTempelhof, a neighbourhood of Berlin, alongside Ukrainian prisoners of war.[8]
During an attack on the factory by Russian bombers, she fled on foot to Austria. In later years, Morath refused to photograph war, preferring to work on stories that showed its consequences.[9]
After the war, Morath worked as a translator and journalist. In 1948, she was hired by Warren Trabant, first as Vienna Correspondent and later as the Austrian editor, forHeute, an illustrated magazine published by the Office of War Information inMunich.[10] Morath encountered photographerErnst Haas in post-warVienna, and brought his work to Trabant's attention.[11] Working together forHeute, Morath wrote articles to accompany Haas' pictures. In 1949, Morath and Haas were invited byRobert Capa to join the newly foundedMagnum Photos in Paris, where she started as an editor. Working with contact sheets sent into the Magnum office by founding memberHenri Cartier-Bresson fascinated Morath. "I think that in studying his way of photographing I learned how to photograph myself, before I ever took a camera into my hand."[12]
Morath was briefly married to the British journalist Lionel Birch and relocated to London in 1951. That same year, she began to photograph during a visit toVenice. "It was instantly clear to me that from now on I would be a photographer", she wrote. "As I continued to photograph I became quite joyous. I knew that I could express the things I wanted to say by giving them form through my eyes."[13] Morath applied for an apprenticeship with Simon Guttman, who was then an editor forPicture Post and running the picture-agency Report. When Guttman asked what Morath wanted to photograph, and why, she answered that "after the isolation ofNazism I felt I had found my language in photography."[14] After Morath had spent several months working as Guttman's secretary, she had an opportunity to take photographs. She sold her first photographs - of opening nights, exhibitions, inaugurations, etc. - under the pseudonym "Egni Tharom", her names spelled backwards.[15]
Morath divorced Birch and returned to Paris to pursue a career in photography. In 1953, after Morath presented her first large picture story, on theWorker Priests of Paris, to Capa, he invited her to join Magnum as a photographer. Her first assignments were stories that did not interest "the big boys." She went to London on an early assignment to photograph the residents of Soho and Mayfair. Morath's portrait of Mrs. Eveleigh Nash, from that assignment, is among her best-known works. At Capa's suggestion, in 1953–54, Morath worked with Cartier-Bresson as a researcher and assistant. 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 asHoliday,Paris Match, andVogue.[16] In 1955 she publishedGuerre à la Tristesse, photographs of Spain, withRobert Delpire, followed byDe la Perse à l'Iran, photographs of Iran, in 1958. Morath published more than thirty monographs during her lifetime.
Like many Magnum members, Morath worked as a stills photographer on numerousmotion picture sets. Having met directorJohn Huston while she was living in London, Morath worked on several of his films. Huston'sMoulin Rouge (1952) was one of Morath's earliest assignments, and her first time working in afilm studio. When Morath confessed to Huston that she had only one roll ofcolor film to work with and asked for his help, Huston bought three more rolls for her, and occasionally waved to her to indicate the right moments to step in with her camera.[17] Huston later wrote of Morath that she "is a high priestess of photography. She has the rare ability to penetrate beyond surfaces and reveal what makes her subject tick."[18]
In 1959, while photographing the making ofThe Unforgiven, starringAudrey Hepburn,Burt Lancaster, andAudie Murphy, Morath accompanied Huston and his friends duck hunting on a mountain lake outsideDurango, Mexico.[19] Photographing the excursion, Morath saw through hertelephoto lens that Murphy's companion had capsized their boat 350 yd (320 m) from shore. She could see that Murphy was stunned, and the men were struggling. A skilled swimmer, Morath swam out, stripped down and used her bra straps to haul the two men ashore .[20]
Morath worked again with Huston in 1960 on the set ofThe Misfits, a film featuringMarilyn Monroe,Clark Gable andMontgomery Clift, with a screenplay byArthur Miller. Magnum Photos had been given exclusive rights to photograph the making of the movie, and Morath and Cartier-Bresson were the first of nine photographers to work on location outsideReno, Nevada during the process.[21][22] Morath met Miller while working onThe Misfits.
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Morath married Arthur Miller on 17 February 1962 and relocated permanently to the United States. Miller and Morath's first child,Rebecca, was born in September 1962.[23] The couple's second child, Daniel, was born in 1966 withDown syndrome and was institutionalized shortly after his birth.[24]Rebecca Miller is a film director, actress, and writer who is married to the actorDaniel Day-Lewis.
After re-locating to the United States, during the 1960s and 1970s Morath worked closer to home, raising a family with Miller and working with him on several projects. Their first collaboration was the bookIn Russia (1969), which, together withChinese Encounters (1979), described their travels and meetings in the Soviet Union and thePeople's Republic of China.[25]In the Country, published in 1977, was an intimate look at their immediate surroundings. For both Miller, who had lived much of his life in New York City, and Morath, who had come to the US from Europe, theConnecticut countryside offered a fresh encounter with America.[26]
Reflecting on the importance of Morath's linguistic gifts, Miller wrote that "travel with her was a privilege because [alone] I would never been able to penetrate that way."[27] In their travels Morath translated for Miller, while his literary work was the entrée for Morath to encounter an international artistic elite. The Austrian photographerKurt Kaindl, her long-time colleague, noted that "their cooperation develop[ed] without outward pressure and is solely motivated by their common interest in the people and the respective cultural sphere, a situation that corresponds to Inge Morath's working style, since she generally feels inhibited by assignments."[28]
Morath sought out, befriended, and photographed artists and writers. During the 1950s she photographed artists for Robert Delpire's magazineL'Oeil, includingJean Arp andAlberto Giacometti. She met the artistSaul Steinberg in 1958. When she went to his home to make a portrait, Steinberg came to the door wearing a mask which he had fashioned from a paper bag. Over a period of several years, they collaborated on a series of portraits, inviting individuals and groups of people to pose for Morath wearing Steinberg's masks. Another long-term project was Morath's documentation of many of the most important productions of Arthur Miller's plays.
Some of Morath's signal achievements are inportraiture, including posed images of celebrities as well as fleeting images of anonymous passersby. Her pictures ofBoris Pasternak's home,Pushkin's library,Chekhov's house,Mao Zedong's bedroom, as well as artists' studios and cemetery memorials, are permeated with the spirit of invisible people still present. The writerPhilip Roth, whom Morath photographed in 1965, described her as "the most engaging, sprightly, seemingly harmlessvoyeur I know. If you're one of her subjects, you hardly know your guard is down and your secret recorded until it's too late. She is a tender intruder with an invisible camera."[18]
As the scope of her projects grew, Morath prepared extensively by studying the language, art, and literature of a country to encounter its culture fully. Although photography was the primary means through which Morath found expression, it was but one of her skills. In addition to the many languages in which she was fluent, Morath was also a prolific diary and letter-writer; her dual gift for words and pictures made her unusual among her colleagues. Morath wrote extensively, and often amusingly, about her photographic subjects. Although she rarely published these texts during her lifetime, posthumous publications have focused upon this aspect of her work. They have brought together her photographs with journal writings, caption notes, and other archival materials relating to her various projects.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Morath continued to pursue both assignments and independent projects. The filmCopyright by Inge Morath was made by German filmmakerSabine Eckhard in 1992, and was one of several films selected for a presentation of Magnum Films at theBerlin International Film Festival in 2007. Eckhard filmed Morath at home and in her studio, and in New York and Paris with her colleagues, including Cartier-Bresson,Elliott Erwitt and others. In 2002, working with film directorRegina Strassegger, Morath fulfilled a long-held wish to revisit the lands of her ancestors, along the borderlands ofStyria andSlovenia. This mountainous region, once part of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, had become the faultline between two conflicting ideologies after World War II and until 1991, when attempts at rapprochement led to conflict on both sides of the border. The bookLast Journey (2002), and Strasseger's filmGrenz Räume (Border Space, 2002), document Morath's visits to her homeland during the final years of her life.
Morath Miller died of cancer on January 30, 2002, at the age of 78.[2]
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