As a methodical worker, Arnold yearned for a routine, but at some point in the
trip, she realised it would be impossible. She and her interpreter were
moving so much, by bus and train and car, and every region had a different
dialect, different smells. Even the facial characteristics of the people
changed drastically. “Their varied physiognomies kept me in a state of
bewilderment.”
But in the end, what Eve Arnold produced was remarkable: a record of a country
opening itself up, but also of a fast-disappearing world, filled with
peasants, city workers, government officials, teachers, Buddhist monks
studying sutras. Her highlights were Inner Mongolia, Hsishuang Panna,
Chongqing, Suzhou, Tibet. She dined on camels’ hooves, snow lotus and prawn
goldfish nest.
In five months, she had covered the vast country, but she learnt enough to
know the importance of sitting quietly, just watching young men playing
guitars or the old people living in a communal home. “It was so wonderful,”
she sighs happily, “to be in a new place, with a new language.”
I remember first talking with Arnold about China when I met her, more than 15
years ago, for an interview for this magazine. China was one of the
assignments she spent the most time discussing: how amazing it was, but also
how difficult. I remember being impressed by her age and her wisdom, and so
I asked her how old she was when she went to China.
Suddenly, this lovely, elegant woman turned feisty. “Would you ask a man that
question?” she demanded, her tone angry. “It’s irrelevant.” I changed the
subject quickly. I also stole her line, and would use it myself when people
asked me my age.
During that first meeting, she also talked about the lonelinessof the China
trip. Later, when I would return from my own lonely assignments as a foreign
correspondent, I would meet her for lunch at the Chelsea Arts Club, where
she had been a member for years. When you are lucky enough to meet a woman
such as Arnold, and you are young and impressionable, you ask their advice,
trying to build a kind of map of living. And Arnold, along with Lee Miller
and Martha Gellhorn, was one of my great heroines.
Unlike Gellhorn, who notoriously did not like other women, Arnold was very
generous. She would ask me about what I had seen in Bosnia, or Chechnya, or
Africa. We talked about the new generation of Magnum photographers whom I
often worked with; and we would discuss the difficulty women faced doing
this often solitary work. But she never whined or moaned. Like the China
assignment, she got on with things in a methodical way, lugging her own
equipment, cleaning her own cameras, editing, writing and producing.
Her feisty attitude remains at 95. When I ask her a question about her gender
in regard to her trailblazing career, she is quick to challenge me: “Woman
in a man’s world?” she says. “Man in a woman’s world.” But there are things
that men do not encounter. I remember her once telling me that she had
locked herself in a loo at Heathrow before a particularly long assignment,
weeping at being parted from her only child, Frank. I did not understand
what she meant at the time, but I do now.
I had not seen her since I was heavily pregnant four years ago. At the time,
we had lunch, and afterwards I helped her into a cab. She was in her early
nineties. “It’s wonderful about the baby,” she said, “but
keep working.” One of the first things she did when I saw her again was to
ask about my son (and also to chastise me slightly for cutting my hair –
Arnold has always kept her long, long hair wound neatly into a bun).
Looking through those China pictures from nearly three decades ago, Eve still
remembers particular women she photographed – the young dancers, the
wrinkled face of an old woman surrounded by darkness. Eve had encountered
the old lady on one of the mornings after she had spent a week in bed with
pneumonia. She had bundled up in the freezing cold and gone out wandering.
She thought the “magnificent woman” – this magazine’s cover image – had a
face “with seams like the pleats on a Fortuny dress”.
“She was peeking around a corner and I caught her at the moment she saw me.”
(The old woman would turn to Eve’s translator and say: “What a strange
looking woman she is.”) She would later write that while a beautiful young
woman in China is a joy to be expected, a beautiful old woman “is a work of
art”. Bob Gottlieb would choose it as the cover for her book, In China.
Then there is the gentle, lovely iconoclastic photo of the young Mongolian
militiawoman sprawled in the grass with her white horse. Eve takes the book
in her hands and touches the page as though she can bring back that early
morning. The young woman, if she is still alive, would be well into middle
age. But Arnold immortalised the youth, the beauty, the passion and the
pride in that single image of a young fighter.
She also remembers that trip as being a time of generosity. “In Mongolia,
they gave me my own tent. And they usually slept 27 to a tent. And they
would walk ten miles to get me toilet paper.”
Arnold will leave an enormous body of work behind her. But what is her
favourite photo? Arnold tells me that she thinks people will remember her
most for her pictures of Marilyn. The touching, slightly melancholic photos
of a vulnerable and beautiful Marilyn Monroe, taken on the set of John
Huston’s The Misfits, are justly famous. (And, she adds, Monroe really was
reading James Joyce’s Ulysses in the photos: “She was very smart.” ) But
those are not her favourite images. “Mine is of the new mother reaching for
her son’s hand,” she says of the famous black-and-white shot. “It’s the
first five minutes of a baby’s life.”
But China will undoubtedly be a part of her legend. Some time ago, Eve found
one of her China diaries. It was a beautiful Indian notebook, and she had
written on the flyleaf, China Diary: For My Grandson Michael, who was then
just two years old.
It contained only a single entry for January 31, 1979, the date of her night
flight from London to Beijing. It refers to a kind of game she always played
as she waited in “bureaucratic anterooms in the USSR; fly-spattered hotels
in India; on risky Land Rover rides in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, and
sleepless, breath-catching moonlit nights in Zululand – to say nothing of
unnumbered hours of flying time back and forth to London”. But the words, to
me, sum up the extraordinary life and career of Eve Arnold:
“What do you hang on the walls of your mind?”
The exhibition In China – Photographs by Eve Arnold runs at Asia
House, New Cavendish Street, London, until January 12 (020-7307 5454; www.asiahouse.org)
