Inge Morath

photographer

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 achievements 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 contribution 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’’.
Inge Morath was born in Graz, Austria in 1923 and grew up in Germany. She belongs to the so called Lost Generation who 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 autobiography, she gives an impressive description of meeting 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 assignments, 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 magazine Heute, 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 photojournalist Robert Capa’s invitation but soon relocated to London.
According to her own account, Inge Morath learned photography like writing in a foreign language.
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 photographer 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 anamorphic projection. A technique of photographic abstraction becomes an iconological sign; the distortion features a member of bygone classes just as the emphasis on the vertical characterises 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 Steinberg and his personal circle of friends, all of whose faces are hidden behind paper masks. Another series of this type was taken at the shooting of the film The Misfits, showing Marilyn Monroe as an ‘’ecstatic’’ 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 bigger and more complex and could no longer be squeezed into the confines of a magazine, she undertook books. Many of these projects were closely connected to Arthur Miller’s literary and political activities. During this period, Morath also proved herself to be an adept portraitist. Her method was to talk to people, alone and in groups, get close to them, then distance herself again to bring her camera
into the situation, camouflaging it with talk and other distractions. Only then would she begin to shoot, studying the first results, rejecting them, starting the process a second, a third, countless times – and often returning in the end to the very first shot.
The difference between her photographic process and the resulting photographs is significant, and it corresponds to the difference between talking and writing: photographing is the performative act; photos are written, corrected, and edited products of lengthy preparation. Inge Morath’s mastery developed fully when she employed her communicative competence to this process, and she achieved this at the side of that gifted communicator Arthur Miller. She accompanied him on trips to Russia, China, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. One of her most important photographs of this period is of Joseph Brodsky whom she persuaded to take a walk on the roof of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Leningrad in 1967. On one hand, the shock of the bright light is clearly felt as they step out onto the roof after climbing up through the protective darkness; on the other hand, she cleverly adapts the perspective of the spy from the Soviet government who was certainly present to monitor their actions.
Inge Morath’s pictures demonstrate how linguistic competence and artistic activity can be combined. And they also show qualities that photography as a medium and genre still has in the age of motion and electronic media. Inge Morath has added her photographic skill to her linguistic competence, and that has enabled her to achieve extraordinary things – not only in the act of talking and photographing, but more in the resulting pictures and texts.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Morath continued to pursue both commissions and independent projects. The film Copyright by Inge Morath, made by German filmmaker Sabine Eckhard in 1992, was one of several films selected for a Magnum Films presentation at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival. Eckhard filmed Morath at home and in her studio, as well as in New York and Paris with her colleagues, including Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt and others. In 2002, Morath and film director Regina Strassegger fulfilled a long-held desire to revisit the land of her ancestors along the Styrian-Slovenian border. This mountainous region, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had become the fault line between two opposing ideologies after the Second World War and until 1991, when attempts at rapprochement led to conflict on both sides of the border. The book Last Journey (2002) and Strasseger’s film Border Spaces (2002) document Morath’s visits to her homeland in the last years of her life.
Morath Miller died of cancer on 30 January 2002 at the age of 78.