Inge Morath (1923-2002) studied photography with Ernst Haas in Vienna, Simon Guttmann in London and Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris. She was the first female photographer to become a full member of MAGNUM Photos, the legendary agency for high-quality photo journalism, dominated by men until today.
The bilingual book in English and German Inge Morath. Hommage (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de) is published on the occasion of the photographer’s centenary and in conjunction with the exhibition Inge Morath. Hommage at Kunstfoyer der Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung in Munich from December 21, 2022 until May 1, 2023.
The exhibition and the catalogue are the work of the curators Anna-Patricia Kahn and Isabel Siben, conceived in collaboration with the Inge Morath Estate. In Munich, you can discover some 170 photographs by the outstanding artist. The catalogue features 212 illustrations (duotone and color), a foreword by Rebecca Miller, the daughter of photographer Inge Morath and playwright Arthur Miller, as well as Inge Morath’s autobiographical lecture “I Trust My Eyes” (Ich traue meinen Augen) held in German in Berlin on October 9, 1994; the English translation was written by the photographer herself.
Inge Morath was born in Graz and kept her Austrian accent all her life. Her parents, Mathilde (Wiesler) and Edgar Morath were scientists whose work took them to different laboratories and universities in Europe during her childhood. Her parents had converted from Catholicism (dominant in Austria) to Protestantism.
Educated in French-speaking schools, Inge Morath and her family relocated first to Darmstadt in the 1930s, and then to Berlin, where her father directed a laboratory specializing in wood chemistry, and her mother worked as his assistant.
Inge Morath’s first encounter with avant-garde art was at the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition organized by the Nazi party (NSDAP) in 1937, which toured all over Germany because the NSDAP sought to inflame public opinion against modern art. “I found a number of these paintings exciting and fell in love with Franz Marc’s Blue Horse,” Inge Morath stated in her 1994 lecture “I Trust My Eyes“. She added: “Only negative comments were allowed, and thus began a long period of keeping silent and concealing thoughts.”
After six months of Reich Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst), she entered Berlin University where she studied languages. In addition to her mother tongue, German, she became fluent in French, English and Romanian as well as, later, Spanish, Russian and Mandarin.
In her lecture, Inge Morath mentions that her three cousins were killed, each on a different front, within a relatively short period of time. They had been the dear playmates of her youth, and during their vacations in Austria, she had fallen in love, alternately, with two of them. Her father, a fighter pilot in World War I, was drafted into the reserve of the Air Force. Her brother was shot down during one of his first flights in his fighter-bomber by the English over the Mediterranean and remained on the “Missing” list until news came that he was in a prisoner of war camp in Egypt. Her mother continued to work in a laboratory.
After the Second World War, Inge Morath worked as a translator and journalist. In 1948, she was hired by Warren Trabant for Heute, an illustrated magazine published by the U.S. Office of War Information in Munich.
Inge Morath had encountered photographer Ernst Haas in Vienna and brought his work to Trabant’s attention. Working together for Heute, Inge wrote articles to accompany Haas’ pictures. In 1949, she and Haas were invited by Robert Capa to join the newly-founded Magnum Photos agency in Paris, where she started as an editor. Fascinated to be able to work with contact sheets by Magnum founding member Henri Cartier-Bresson , she wrote in “I Trust My Eyes”: “I think that in studying his way of photographing I learned how to photograph myself before I ever took a camera into my hand.”
Inge Morath was briefly married to the British journalist Lionel Birch and relocated to London in 1951. That same year, she began to photograph during a visit to Venice. In her 1994 lecture she wrote: “It was instantly clear to me that from now on I would be a photographer, I finally had found my language. As I continued to photograph, I became quite joyous, I knew that I could express the things I wanted to say by giving them form through my eyes. I remembered what Henri Cartier-Bresson had written somewhere: ‘A good photograph is made when the inner vision behind the closed eye corresponds with the vision of the open one behind the viewfinder in the moment of pressing the button.’” Morath divorced Birch and returned to Paris to pursue a career in photography.
In London, Inge Morath was on the lookout for someone who could teach her more about photography. She approached Simon Guttmann, once the director of the famous German photoagency Dephot, the first to practise the idea of the photo essay. Among the photographers who had worked for Guttmann at the time was Robert Capa—but she did not know that yet. In 1942 or 1943, Simon Guttmann had arrived in England and become adviser to the best English illustrated magazine of the time, Picture Post. He also founded his own agency, Report. Inge Morath said in her 1994 lecture that she approached Simon Guttmann to become his assistant. She showed him three contact sheets of her first films taken in Venice. He looked at them, not making the slightest commentary. Then he asked: “What do you want to photograph and why?” She mumbled something to the effect that she was mostly interested in people, in the variety of their lives, and she added that she was certain that after the life in the isolation of Nazism and war she felt she had found her language in photography, or at least the best way to express what she felt she had to say. He told her that she could start to work with him.
Inge Morath spent several weeks typing Simon Guttmann’s letters. On Saturdays, she answered his phone and dropped coins in his gas heater to heat his shaving water, things his strict Judaism forbade him to do on the Sabbath. Occasionally, she swept the rooms, careful not to topple over any of the piles of newspapers on the floor. “When are you going to teach me how to photograph?” she finally ventured to ask. “That’s exactly what I am doing,” he answered impatiently. “Why don’t you really pay attention to what I say in my letters? I only gave you the ones addressed to editors or photographers to type. Everything you can learn about photography and how to make a picture story is in them.” And he was right, Inge Morath said in her lecture.
Robert Capa was the most generous of all photographers, Inge Morath stated in her 1994 lecture. He for instance sent her to London to do a story on the set of Moulin Rouge, a film John Huston was directing in Shepherds Bush Studios. Originally, Capa meant to do this story himself. When he passed it on to her, he warned, “You’d better be good.” Inge Morath said that she had never been in a film studio before. John Huston noticed her bewilderment and decided to be of help, organized her three film rolls (because she had only arrived with one, rare to find at the time). It worked out fine, and Inge Morath even got a couple of double pages in several European magazines.
At Robert Capa’s suggestion, in 1953–54, she worked with Henri Cartier-Bresson as a researcher and assistant; in 1954, Robert Capa was killed by a landmine in Vietnam. In 1955, Inge Morath was invited to become a full member of Magnum Photos. During the late 1950s, she travelled widely, covering stories in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the United States and South America for publications such as Holiday, Paris Match and Vogue. In 1955, together with Robert Delpire, Inge Morath published Guerre à la Tristesse, photographs of Spain. In 1958 followed the photo book De la Perse à l’Iran, photographs of Iran.
Like many other Magnum members, Inge Morath worked as a still photographer on numerous motion picture sets, including on several films directed by John Huston, whom she had met while living in London, and portrayed in many photographs durig her career. Notably in 1960, Inge Morath was on the set of The Misfits, a blockbuster picture featuring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, based on a screenplay by Arthur Miller, then Marilyn Monroe’s husband. Following the divorce of the famous couple, Inge Morath became the playwright’s third wife on February 17, 1962. They remained married until her death in 2002.
Many critics have written of the element of playful surrealism that characterizes Inge Morath’s work during her first decade as a photographer. It was motivated by a fundamental humanism, shaped as much by the experience of the Second World War as by its lingering shadow over post-war Europe.
According to the catalogue Inge Morath. Hommage (Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de), this motivation grows, in Morath’s mature work, into a motif as she documents the endurance of the human spirit under situations of extreme duress as well as its manifestations of ecstasy and joy.
Ingeborg Morath Miller died of cancer in 2002, at the age of 78. In honour of their colleague, the members of Magnum Photos established the Inge Morath Award in 2002. The Award is administered by the Inge Morath Foundation in cooperation with the Magnum Foundation, New York. The Inge Morath archive was acquired by the Beinecke Library at Yale University in 2014, and the material is open for research.
This and much more can be found in: Inge Morath. Hommage. Edited by Anna-Patricia Kahn and Isabel Siben. With a foreword by Rebecca Miller, the daughter of photographer Inge Morath and playwright Arthur Miller. English/German edition, Schirmer/Mosel Verlag, December 2022, 280 pages with 200 illustrations, 24 x 31 cm. Order the book from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de.
This exhibition catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Inge Morath. Hommage at Kunstfoyer der Versicherungskammer Kulturstiftung in Munich from December 21, 2022 until May 1, 2023.
P.S. added on February 10, 2023: since 1996, Inge Morath’s daughter Rebecca Miller is married to actor Daniel Day-Lewis who, therefore, was Inge Morath’s son-in-law.
For a better reading, quotations and partial quotations from the book about the outstanding female photographer Inge Morath are not always put between quotation marks.
Book review added on February 9, 2023 at 20:08 German time.
