Inge Morath

Born in Graz, Austria in 1923, after studying languages ​​in Berlin, she worked as a translator and journalist. Friend of the photographer Ernst Haas, she creates texts for his reportages. She was thus invited by Robert Capa to join the Magnum agency as an editor and researcher. He began taking photographs in 1951 in London and in 1953 he joined the Magnum agency. Between 1953 and 1954, Morath was also Henri Cartier-Bresson's assistant. In the following years he traveled to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The series of curious photographic portraits with masks by the designer Saul Steinberg dates back to 1958. On the set of John Huston's film "The Misfits" she met Arthur Miller, whom she married in 1962. In 1965 she went to the Soviet Union for the first time. In 1978 he made his first trip to China. Among his most popular subjects are portraits of important twentieth-century personalities such as Henri Moore, Pablo Picasso, André Malraux, Doris Lessing, Yul Brynner, Marilyn Monroe, Gloria Vanderbilt and Fidel Castro. In 1999 Inge Morath obtained the Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis, a prestigious honor from the Austrian government and in 1984 she received an Honoris Causa degree in Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut. He died in New York on January 30, 2002.

Inge Morath

In 1945, a Russian air raid forced Inge Morath to flee Germany on foot. She had moved to Berlin to study linguistics, but was conscripted to work in a munitions factory alongside Ukrainian prisoners of war. Morath, who was 22 at the time, joined thousands of refugees, walking 455 miles to her parents' home in Salzburg, Austria, an arduous journey that brought her to the brink of suicide. Morath would not become a photographer for another decade, but when she did, she refused to photograph war. “Her experience of the tremendous ugliness of what human beings can do to each other marked her for the rest of her life,” says Rebecca Miller, recalling her mother's legacy on the occasion of her centennial. “It also made her really appreciate what art can do, which is to give meaning to life, to find coherence in an image that seems chaotic.”

Arthur Miller, Inge Morath e la loro figlia Rebecca Miller.

Morath's archive is vast, "like a great treasure," Kahn says. “Every time you dig into it, you find something new.” After her death in 2002, her family established the Inge Morath Foundation, to care for the physical archive until its eventual acquisition by the Beinecke Library at Yale University in 2014. Morath's negatives and a series of her contact sheets and caption books are still in use at Magnum Photos, where she is still represented. Today, her legacy is continued by the Inge Morath Estate, which coordinates exhibitions, publications and events, and the Inge Morath Award, established by members of Magnum Photos in tribute to their colleague. Funded by photographers, the annual $7,500 prize is awarded to a woman or non-binary photographer under the age of 30, in partnership with the Magnum Foundation. A significant part of Morath's archive is her work as a still photographer. In 1960, along with Cartier-Bresson and seven other Magnum photographers, she was commissioned to shoot on set for The Misfits, a hit film starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, with a screenplay by Arthur Miller.

© Fotohof archiv / Inge Morath Foundation / Magnum Photos