Upcoming Shows

A Portfolio by Inge Morath
Opening reception Saturday November 20th
2-4pm

Ingeborg Morath (May 27, 1923 – January 30, 2002) was an Austrian-born photographer. Morath relocated in the 1930s with her family to Berlin where she first was introduced to avant-garde art in 1937 at an exhibition organized by the Nazi Party, which sought to inflame public opinion against modern art.  "I found a number of these paintings exciting and fell in love with Fran Marc's Blue Horse", Morath later wrote. "Only negative comments were allowed, and thus began a long period of keeping silent and concealing thoughts."

After the Second World War, Morath worked as a translator and a journalist. In 1949 she was invited to join Magnum Photos in Paris. While at Magnum she worked with contact sheets sent in by founding member Henri Cartier-Bresson. "I think that in studying his way of photographing I learned how to photograph myself, before I ever took a camera into my hand.” 

In 1951 she married a British journalist and moved to London. During a visit to Venice latter that year she began to take photographs. As 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. She sold her first photographs, of opening nights, exhibitions, inaugurations, etc., under the pseudonym "Egni Tharom", her name spelled backwards.

In 1953 she was asked Robert Capa asked her to work as a Magnum photographer and suggested she work with Cartier-Bresson as a researcher and assistant. Her first assignments were stories that did not interest "the big boys." She went to London on an early assignment to photography the residents of Soho and Mayfair. Morath's portrait of Mrs. Eveleigh Nash, from that assignment, is among her best-known works. Like many Magnum members, Morath worked as a still photographer on numerous motion picture sets.  Morath met ArthurMiller, who wrote the screenplay, while working on The Misfits. They married on February 17, 1962.

Some of Morath's signal achievements are in portrature, including posed images of celebrities as well as fleeting images of anonymous passersby. Her pictures of Boris Pasternak's home, Pushkin's library, Chekov's house, Mao Zedong's bedroom, as well as artists' studios and cemetery memorials, are permeated with the spirit of invisible people still present.

Inge Morath died on January 30, 2002.