Inge Morath

Picture copyright: Magnum Photos

I came across Inge Morath’s legendary photograph of Marilyn Monroe on the sets of Arthur Miller’s The Misfits in a photo exhibition Leica, the great camera-making company, brought to Mumbai a few years ago. That exhibition also had some images from Henri Cartier Bresson, who always used a Leica 35mm camera for all his pictures. Two images - Morath’s Monroe, and Bresson’s painting like portrait of Kashmiri women dressed in traditional clothes on a hill top at the crack of first light – remained etched in my memory.

Like Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath has also captured some of the leading global thinkers, poets, artists, writers, film-makers and film stars in portraits. Born in Austria in 1923, she completed her studies in Berlin, and became first a translator and then a journalist. A friend of photographer Ernst Haas, she wrote articles accompanying his photographs. It was Robert Capa who invited Morath to join Magnum Photo agency as an editor. She began photographing in 1951, and later assisted Cartier-Bresson as a researcher for two years. In 1955, she became a full Magnum member.

Morath travelled extensively and worked for a number of world’s leading magazines. She shot photographs on the sets of John Houston films. Her photographs of Marilyn Monroe on the sets of Houston’s 1961 film The Misfits (which was scripted by playwright-writer Arthur Miller) brought her instant fame. In 1962, she married Miller. Her initial work is black and white, but she continued shooting in colour right up to 2002, when she passed away.


Thanks to the wonderful re-design by Magnum Photos recently, about 12 different features of Morath’s work are now available for us to see on their website. Apart from portraits of Houston and Miller, her camera has captured painters like Pablo Picasso, Francoise Gilot, writers Francois Sagan, John Updike, Anais Nin and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, playwright Harold Pinter, fashion legend Yves St Laurent, French couturier Pierre Cardin among others.

Apart from the Marilyn Monroe series, Morath has captured pictures of Hollywood legends like Yul Brynner, Audrey Hepburn, Peter Houston, Ingrid Bergman, Elia Kazan, Dustin Hoffman (who starred in Miller’s Death of a Salesman), Liam Neeson (who acted in Miller’s play The Crucible in 2002). There is also a beautiful portrait of Anthony Quinn shot in 1959 at a café. Quinn’s two companions can’t get their eyes of the star!

Since her death in 2002, Magnum Photos gives away the Inge Morath award for women photographers below the age of 30 who want to work on a long term documentary photography project. Please also check the work of Olivia Arthur , the 2008 award winner.

Striking opening lines

Like John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, I found some striking opening lines of novels. The first one hit me like a slap when I first read it. Camus brings you face to face with his character immediately. I haven't obviously read all of these, but the first lines promise much.


********** *************** *****************


Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
- Albert Camus, The Stranger.


It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
-Geroge Orwell, 1984

Lolita, the light of my life, the fire of my loins.
-Vladimir Nobokov, Lolita.

Erendira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of her misfortune began to blow. The enormous mansion of moonlike concrete lost in the solitude of the desert trembled down to its foundation with the first attack. But Erendira and her grandmother were used to the risks of the wild nature there, and in the bathroom decorated with a series of peacocks and childish mosaics of Roman baths they scarcely paid any attention to the caliber of the wind.
The grandmother, naked and huge in the marble tub, looked like a handsome whale. The grand-daughter had just turned 14 and was languid, soft-boned, and too meek for her age.
- Gabriel Gárcia Marquez, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eight-four days now without taking a fish.
- Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man


Courtesy: icarus.townhill.com
They're out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.
- Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

An ash-gray dog with a white blaze on its forehead burst on to the rought terrain of the market on the first Sunday in December, knocked down tables of fried food, overturned Indians stalls and lottery kiosks, and bit four people who happened to cross its path. Three of them were black slaves. The fourth, Sierva Maria de Todos los Angeles, the only child of Marquis de Casalduero, had come there with a mullata servant to buy a string of bells for the celebration of her twelfth birthday.
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Of Love and Other Demons


It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two cities

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, General Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

- Gabriel Gárcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude


"Who is John Galt?"
- Ayn, Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina


"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
- JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye

It was inevitable: The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
- Gabriel Gárcia Marquez, Love in the time of Cholera

"Yes, Sir. Certainly, it was I who found the body. This morning, as usual, I went to cut my daily quota of cedars, when I found the body in a grove in a hollow in the mountains."
- Ryūnosuke Akutagawa,In A Grove (made into Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

They say when trouble comes, close ranks and so the white people did.
- Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Which of these do you find the most striking to open the book? If you know of more, do write in.