The Budapest Photo Festival and Kunsthalle 2024 are organising the eighth edition of the festival’s opening exhibition, this time entitled Women in Focus. The five women in the Magnum Photos selection are emblematic of humanist photography, in keeping with the spirit of the agency. The three completed oeuvres – Eve Arnold, Inge Morath, Marilyn Silverstone – and two from a different generation – Susan Meiselas, Nanna Heitmann – all focus on issues of fame, power, religion, tradition, minority status and disenfranchisement. As committed creators, they approach their subjects with a feminine sensibility, empathy and situational awareness, both in portraiture and in social documentary series.
Inge Morath and Eve Arnold were the first women members of Magnum Photos, making a name for themselves and gaining recognition among the male-dominated collective early in their careers in the 1950s. Robert Capa and Ingrid Bergman’s love affair opened the doors of Hollywood to Magnum photographers: in 1960, they were both selected as one of nine Magnum photographers working on John Huston’s film Falling Men.
Eve Arnold’s behind-the-scenes, reportage photographs reflect an individual vision, with natural settings that differ from the usual actor portraits. And her unique portraits of Marilyn Monroe are a testament to the almost friendly relationship between the two women. The exhibition includes relaxed, intimate images of Sophia Loren, Charles Chaplin, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, among others.
Inge Morath’s choice of subjects, both personal and universal, reflects her interest in the arts and her love of unusual situations and different cultures. Her famous shot for Life magazine, a photograph of a llama peeping out of a car window, was captioned at the time, in 1957, ‘Linda the llama is on her way home from the A.B.C. studios on Broadway in New York. With her long neck, she casually gazes at the lights of the world’s most famous street.” The exhibition also features a number of his other notable photographs, including his masked portraits with Saul Steinberg.
Susan Meiselas spent several summers in New England in the early 1970s, documenting the lives of strippers on and off the stage. Magnum invited her to become a member after publishing an album of these photographs in 1976 under the title Carnival Strippers. His photographs go far beyond sensational media images. His choice of subjects is driven by a deep ethnographic, historical and political interest. In 1978, he photographed the civil war in Nicaragua, and his images of the bloody clashes have been in the world press. The current selection includes seven photographs from the Stripper Dancers series.
Nanna Heitmann’s long-form photo essays focus on the relationship between people and their environment: “I am attracted to people who are shaped by their environment, who choose to live or work in extreme conditions.” In 2019, she was accepted into Magnum Photography with two personal projects, both exploring physical and psychological isolation. Her images in the Women’s Focus exhibition follow one of the world’s longest rivers, offering a glimpse into the daily lives of people living along the Yenisei.
Marilyn Silverstone has been a professional correspondent since 1955. As a freelance photojournalist for a New York photo agency, she photographed in Europe, Asia, Central America, Africa and the Soviet Union. In 1959 he spent three months in India, an assignment that marked a turning point in his creative career. In the decades that followed, he documented with total dedication the multifaceted spirituality and milieu of the Buddhist religion and worldview. His photographs have been published in four albums and his images have been made into an award-winning film, Kashmir in Winter. He joined Magnum Photos in 1964. In 1977, she became an ordained Buddhist monk, researching the vanishing culture of Rajasthan and Himalayan history. The photographs in the exhibition are authentic portraits of religious leaders and teachers, as well as of ordinary people in Nepal and India.