INGE MORATH
German
Inge Morath’s life and work revolve around two
poles: literature and photography. She began as a
writer, photographed numerous authors, married
the playwright Arthur Miller, and for 25 years, she
has been a popular lecturer on her own achieve-
ments in photography. She considers herself a
photo journalist in the widest sense of the word,
and she clearly describes why photography is settled
in the vicinity of literature as her own personal con-
tribution to the world: ‘‘The power of photography
resides no doubt partly in the tenacity with which it
pushes whoever gets seriously involved with it to
contribute in an immeasurable number of forms his
own vision to enrich the sensibility and perception of
the world around him’’ (Kunsthalle Wien 1999).
Inge Morath was born in Graz, Austria in 1923
and grew up in Germany. She belongs to the so-
calledLost Generationwho were robbed of their
youth, future, and perspectives by the national-
socialist regime. As a twenty-year-old, she started
to study interpreting under war-time conditions,
looking for the only legal way to develop her
early-discovered linguistic ability. In her autobio-
graphy, she gives an impressive description of meet-
ing foreigners immediately after the end of the war,
receiving help from them, and her surprise at how
trustworthy they were after everything that she had
learned to the contrary through propaganda.
Inge Morath’s road to the renowned press bureau
Magnum Photos was shorter than her road to
photography. She accompanied Ernst Haas, with
whom she had worked in Vienna on his assign-
ments, but she was independent enough to take on
her own jobs, quickly advancing from translator to
critic, from interpreter to author. As picture editor
of the magazineHeute, she was able to provide
Ernst Haas with commissions and ideas for series
for over half a year. In 1947, she accompanied him
on further assignments at distinguished photo-
journalist Robert Capa’s invitation but soon relo-
cated to London.
According to her own account, Inge Morath
learned photography like writing in a foreign lan-
guage. In London, she was an unpaid assistant of
Simon Guttmann, who had pioneered the idea of
photo agencies in the 1920s, and she learned the basics
of daily shooting and work in the darkroom under
difficult conditions. When she returned to Paris in
1953, Robert Capa gave her the status of an associate
with Magnum. Henri Cartier-Bresson provided her
with expert advice on her early work and tips on
how to improve it. It is his transition to irony and
measured distance that impressed Inge Morath in him
above all others. In this way, he handed her the key to
emancipate herself from the social roles of woman
and the professional role of caption-writer by using
abstract picture compositions. The principle of this
technique can be seen in her early photographs.
In a 1955 image, Mercedes Formica stands on a
narrow balcony, looking past observers and photo-
grapher into the vague distance, while behind her
several Madrid streets are stacked up on top of each
other. The photograph is upright and, due to the
positioning of the woman on the extreme left-hand
edge, seems so narrow that it is only the car in the
lower third of the picture that stops one thinking it is
an anamorphotic projection. A technique of photo-
graphic abstraction becomes an iconological sign;
the distortion characterizes a member of bygone
classes just as the emphasis on the vertical charac-
terizes the slightly nervous tension of feminine self-
determination in Spain’s masculine society.
Inge Morath’s operational base moved to the
United States. With increasing distance from the
Magnum offices, her working methods changed:
the lonely journeys and series as direct commission
from the agency became rarer. Inge Morath became
more and more like a simultaneous translator of
actual events. The most important expression of
this new, original development is a series of staged
single and group portraits which Inge Morath
began in New York; she shows the artist Saul Stein-
berg and his personal circle of friends, all of whose
faces are hidden behind paper masks. Another ser-
ies of this type was taken at the shooting of the film
The Misfits, showing Marilyn Monroe as an ‘‘ecs-
tatic’’ but unpretentious dancer.
Morath’s career was interrupted, however, by her
marriage to Arthur Miller and the birth of her
daughter Rebecca Miller. She took up projects
again in the late 1960s. As her projects became big-
ger and more complex and could no longer beMORATH, INGE