Inge Morath: On Style , livre ebook

Inge Morath

On Style

Inge

Morath

On

Style

Introduction by Justine Picardie

Edited and with an Afterword by John P. Jacob

Abrams, New York

Contents

Introduction

007

Justine Picardie

Plates

027

Afterword

273

John P. Jacob

Index of Names

285

Acknowledgments

287

7

Introduction

Justine Picardie

Inge Morath photographed during her first reportage trip with Magnum

Photos, Capri, 1949, photographer unknown

In 1998, Inge Morath was interviewed by the New

York Times on the occasion of a retrospective com-

memorating her seventy-fifth birthday. During the

interview Morath told a story about her life in Berlin

during the Second World War, when, having refused

to join the Hitler Youth, she was drafted to work in an

airplane factory alongside Ukrainian prisoners of war.

The forced labor brought her into constant danger,

as the factory was a frequent target for Allied attacks.

Between the bombings, said Morath, someone once

gave me a bouquet of lilacs and I held them up over my

head and ran through the bombed-out city.

Though this memorable image was created in words

rather than pictures, it might also be a clue to under-

standing the profound depth and subtlety of Morath s

photographs, even when she appears to be exploring

the beautiful surfaces of style. For all her wit and light-

ness of touch, there is often a sense of darkness beyond

the edge of the frame. How could it be otherwise, given

what she witnessed during the war?

Born in Austria in 1923, Ingeborg Morath was the

child of liberal Protestants, both research scientists. The

family was living in Germany at the outbreak of war,

and the horror and suffering that Morath witnessed

thereafter was to have a profound and enduring effect.

In the same interview with the New York Times (con-

ducted less than four years before her death), Morath

offered another telling image of her wartime experi-

ence: Everyone was dead or half dead. I walked by

dead horses, by women with dead babies in their arms.

I can't photograph war for this reason.

After the war, Morath's linguistic expertise led to

jobs as a translator and journalist in Munich and Vien-

na (she studied languages at university, and became

fluent in French, English, and Romanian as well as her

native German; to these, she later added Italian, Span-

ish, Russian, and Mandarin). By 1949, she was working

with the young Austrian photojournalist Ernst Haas,

and their talents were such that they attracted the

attention of Robert Capa, the legendary war photog-

rapher and co-founder of the Magnum agency (estab-

lished in 1947), who invited them to join him in Paris.

Interviewed by Alex Kershaw for his biography of Capa,

Morath recalled that she arrived in Paris on Bastille

Day 1949, and went straight to the Magnum office

on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honor . That night, Capa
8

took Morath out to dinner, and suggested that she

should acquire some stylish clothes; this she man-

aged soon afterwards, when she met the Spanish

couturier Crist bal Balenciaga at a party. I think he

liked me because I was doing this dicey stuff, and he

gave me a couple of suits, with pockets everywhere

for cameras and film. They were so elegant-I still

have one! Anyway after that, Balenciaga made all

my clothes for a long time.

There are several different ways that one might

interpret this story. It could be cited as evidence of

sexism (a macho war photographer telling a brave

young woman to dress in a more ladylike manner)

or of practical necessity (a smart suit would allow

Morath to make her way in the world). More likely

is that Capa-born Endre Friedmann in Budapest in

1913-was possessed of an innate understanding of

style, since his parents had been successful dress-

makers. But what is also striking is the degree to

which Morath must have charmed the famously shy

Balenciaga, for he not only dressed her but subse-

quently allowed her to photograph him at home in

1959, at his country home, La Reinerie, near Paris.

By this point, a decade after her arrival in Paris,

she was a distinguished photographer in her own

right, and had been recognized as such by Mag-

num. (Having first joined the agency as a writer and

researcher, assisting its co-founder Henri Cartier-

Bresson, she became a full member in 1955).

Unlike her mentor Capa-who died in 1954 after

stepping on a land mine while on assignment in

Vietnam-Morath continued to eschew war pho-

tography. But her courage and adventurous spirit

was never in doubt; her many foreign assignments

included a trip to Iran in the mid-fifties, where she

travelled alone for most of the time, dressed in a

traditional chador.

Morath was equally adept at discovering new

stories in more familiar places. In 1951, she moved

to London, where she started working for

Picture

Post and was briefly married to one of its journal-

ists, and subsequent editor, Lionel Birch. (She was

his sixth wife, and though the marriage lasted only

briefly, Birch, undaunted, went on to marry for a

seventh time.) Her atmospheric photographs of

London in the early fifties are a glimpse into a lost

world that was still clinging to the vestiges of tradi-

tion, such as the debutantes presentation at Court

and the customary rituals of the social season. Thus

one of Morath s most famous portraits, that of the

redoubtable Mrs. Eveleigh Nash (an Edwardian

beauty turned society dowager), dates from this

early stage of her career; as do the evocative scenes

from Mayfair tailors, dressmakers, cocktail parties,

and balls.

Another notable reportage story from Brit-

ain chronicled the couturier Christian Dior, who

had been invited by the Duchess of Marlborough

to stage a fashion show in aid of the Red Cross at

Blenheim Palace in 1954. Morath takes us behind

the scenes, to the Red Cross nurses in starched

white uniforms and the Dior models in black

couture dresses and pearls; both sets of women in

their working attire, all of them graceful, while the

great designer himself sits at a table, looking gently

unassuming, as was his wont. (As Dior s friend Cecil

Beaton observed, His egglike head may sway from

side to side, but it will never be turned by success. )

After Dior s untimely death from a heart attack

in 1957, Morath was on hand to document the

debut of his brilliant young assistant, Yves Saint

Laurent, who was promoted to head designer at the

age of twenty-one. Her portraits of Saint Laurent-

taken on the day before his first Dior collection,

when he looks like a shy, studious schoolboy in his

shirt and tie, intent on the task before him-were

commissioned by Harper s Bazaar . My guess is that

Morath had first come into contact with the maga-

zine via its influential Paris editor, Marie-Louise

Bousquet (a long-standing friend of Coco Chanel
9

Morath adjusts her Leica camera, London, 1954,

photographer unknown

and early champion of Dior, described by Beaton as the

brilliant Florence Nightingale of fashion ). Morath pho-

tographed Bousquet in 1955, animated as always, with

her habitual cigarette in one hand, the other gesticu-

lating to a copy of Harper s Bazaar . Bousquet s hands

appear again the following year, having her palm read

by Balenciaga s colleague Ram n Esparza, her oblique

reflection only just visible in a crystal ball beside them;

a reminder, perhaps, of how fashion must constantly

look to the future, whilst also reflecting the past. (Which

might explain why several of its most famous practi-

tioners have been so superstitious; Dior, for example,

would make no important decision without consulting

his fortune-teller.)

This was also the period when Morath first started

working with the director John Huston; one of her

earliest assignments was to photograph the stills for his

film Moulin Rouge in London in 1952, which was to be

the start of a lifelong friendship. Hence the wonderful

sequence of pictures in this book of Huston dancing on

Christmas Day at home in Ireland; including one with

Morath in which I m almost certain that she is wearing

a Balenciaga dress.

Huston would later describe Morath as a high

priestess of photography, a woman with the rare ability

to penetrate beyond surfaces and reveal what makes her

subject tick. But her camera is not simply a means to

uncover a hidden truth, for these subtle images explore

the relationship between polished veneers and what

lies beneath; between darkness and light; freedom and

confinement; convention and rebellion. (All of which is

evident in her 1954 story of the Beauty and the Beast

fashion contest in Paris, featuring couture-clad models

with an array of dogs and other animals, some less com-

pliant than others.)

Morath s friendship with Huston was to play an

important part in her personal life, as well as her career.

In 1959, she travelled to Mexico to photograph the mak-

ing of his film The Unforgiven , starring Burt Lancaster,

Audrey Hepburn and Audie Murphy, a famously coura-
10

Morath, Vallauris, 1953, photographer unknown
11

Morath, Paris, 1950s, photograph by David Seymour (CHIM)
12

Morath in Balenciaga, Bingen, 1956, photographer unknown.

Morath first discovered Balenciaga at a party in Madrid, and the

designer s clothing quickly became a favorite of hers.

14

Morath, Somme, 1957, photographer unknown
15

geous American war hero turned actor. (Morath s

own bravery was called upon when Murphy fell out

of a boat on a duck shooting expedition with Hus-

ton; after spotting him through her camera lens,

dazed and in danger of drowning, she dived into the

lake and hauled him ashore with her bra-strap.)

The following year, Morath visited the set of

another of Huston s films, The M