Eve and Marilyn: Making an Icon – Emily Brady

Tuesday 2 July | 6pm

In 1951, Marilyn Monroe saw a photograph that Magnum’s first female photographer – Eve Arnold – had taken of Marlene Dietrich in Esquire. Immediately struck by Arnold’s talent with the camera, and aware of her power as a photographic subject, Monroe coyly remarked: If you could do that well with Marlene, imagine what you could do with me. What followed was a decade-long collaboration. As Marilyn became an icon, Eve Arnold lamented the ways in which Monroe had been mistreated and misrepresented by the media.
In 1987, she published Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation – a volume that spoke back to lewd representations of Marilyn Monroe and explored the woman behind the icon. As Arnold grappled with what it meant to be a ‘woman photographer,’ she also grappled with both her own legacy and the legacy of one of Hollywood’s most tragic figures.
Dr Emily Brady is a cultural historian, interested in the intersections of race, gender and class in visual protest cultures.
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