Eve Arnold’s ‘First Five Minutes of a Baby’s Life’

Eve Arnold

American (1912–2012)

First Five Minutes of a Baby’s Life, New York City, 1959

Gelatin silver print

Gift of William R. Thompson ’91 (2010.004)

Eve Arnold was the first woman to join Magnum Photos, the photographers’ cooperative founded in 1947. She became a full member of the agency in 1957. Like her colleagues, she traveled the world and published widely, bridging the realms of photojournalism, documentary photography, fashion, and celebrity, as well known for documenting the Black Power and Civil Rights movements as for her portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, American first ladies, and Queen Elizabeth II.

In her first book, The Unretouched Woman (1976), Arnold wrote:

I photographed girl children and women; the rich and the poor; the migratory potato picker on Long Island and the Queen of England; the nomad bride in the Hindu Kush waiting for a husband she had never seen, and the Hollywood Queen Bee whose life was devoted to a regimen of beauty care. There were the Zulu woman whose child was dying of hunger and women mourning their dead in Hoboken, New Jersey. I filmed in harems in Abu Dhabi, in bars in Cuba, and in the Vatican in Rome. There was birth in London and betrothal in the Caucasus, divorce in Moscow and protest marches of black women in Virginia. There were the known and the unknown—and always those marvelous faces. …

Themes recur again and again in my work. I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.

I realize now that through my work these past twenty-five years I have been searching for myself, my time, and the world I live in.

Eve Arnold was 64 years old when she published these words. This is the first photograph that appears in the book, which she dedicates to both her mother and her son. She died in 2012 at the age of 99.