INGE MORATH, Eleanor Roosevelt with Adlai Stevenson, United Nations, New York, 1961, 13.75x9.5" Gelatin silver print, Printed later, Titled in pencil on print verso; Inge Morath Magnum copyright stamp; miscellaneous notations in pencil.

Taken early in the Kennedy administration, Adlai Stevenson was the US Ambassador to the UN. Here Morath has captured has captured a quiet comment with high toned theater lighting and shadow lending gravity to the conversation.

Inge Morath (1923-2002) was born in Graz, Austria. After studying languages in Berlin, she became a translator, then a journalist and the Austrian editor for Heute, an Information Service Branch publication based in Munich. All her life Morath would remain a prolific diarist and letter-writer, retaining a dual gift for words and pictures that made her unusual among her colleagues.

A friend of photographer Ernst Haas, Morath wrote articles to accompany his photographs and was invited by Robert Capa and Haas to Paris to join the newly founded Magnum agency as an editor and researcher. She began photographing in London in 1951 and joined Magnum as a photographer in 1953. While working on her own first assignments, Morath also assisted Henri Cartier-Bresson from 1953 to 1954, becoming a full member in 1955.

In the following years, Morath traveled extensively in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Her special interest in the arts found expression in photographic essays published by a number of leading magazines. After her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller in 1962, Morath settled in New York and Connecticut. She first visited the USSR in 1965. In 1972 she studied Mandarin and obtained a visa to China, making the first of many trips to that country in 1978.

Morath was at ease anywhere. Some of her most important work consists of portraits, but of passers-by as well as celebrities. She was also adept at photographing places: her pictures of Boris Pasternak's home, Pushkin's library, Chekhov's house, Mao Zedong's bedroom, artists' studios, and cemetery memorials are permeated with the spirit of invisible people still present. Inge Morath died in New York City on January 30, 2002.

CREDIT: Howard Greenberg Gallery
http://www.howardgreenberg.com/artists/inge-morath

Excellent. Minor wear, edge wear.