Inge Morath, life of the photographer now on display in Venice
Inge Morath, Audrey Hepburn, Durango, Mexico, 1958 ©Fotohof archive / Inge Morath / Magnum Photos
At the origin of everything there is an idea. Dazzling, lightning-fast, just like a moving photographic shot is. Why not celebrate a photographer’s career not so much in the place where she comes from, but in the one where her photographic electrocution took place? In this case Venicethe city where the Austrian photographer – later a naturalized American – Inge Morath was trained, i.e. the first female photojournalist of the famous Magnum agency, who on the occasion of the centenary of her birth is celebrated with a beautiful exhibition at Palazzo Grimani.
It was a gloomy November day, and partly by chance and partly for pleasure, and thanks to a proverbial phone call, Morath began to snap. And the shots featured in the new exhibition Inge Morath. Photographing from Venice onwards – from 18 January to 4 June, curated by Kurt Kaidl and Brigitte Blüml, with Valeria Finocchi – tell an artist whose story is to be discovered in more than two hundred different photographs: shots of great refinement and vitality, such as the bellabella portrait by Audrey Hepburn or the blacks and whites of a Piazza San Marco submerged by pigeons or again, those in which his gaze rests on a small group of Venetian girls who have just left school while they are talking to each other while walking.
But what made Inge Morath’s photography great? Probably her ability to capture everyday life in all its precarious beauty. She was born in Austria in 1923 and lived in Germany during the Second World War, after the conflict she began working as a journalist and translator between Vienna and Munich, collaborating from 1949 with the photojournalist Ernst Haas. The two soon entered the radar of Robert Capa – among other things the founder of Magnum – who wants them to work for him in Paris. Morath began in the agency as an editor and researcher for Henri Cartier-Bresson – one of the masters of the twentieth century – becoming a few years later, also following the “Italian shock” in fact, herself a photographer of the stable. A world made almost entirely of men, and so at the beginning she was mainly assigned subjects deemed ‘feminine’ or rejected by her male colleagues: debutante balls, high society events, carnivals and dog shows. But she needed much more to stop her, and so always with greater resourcefulness and curiosity, in 1952 she photographed the set of the film Moulin Rouge by John Huston, on the life of Toulouse-Lautrec and a few years later that of The Misfitsalways from Huston: on that occasion she met the playwright Arthur Miller, by now already the ex-husband of Marilyn Monroe, with whom they fell in love and married in 1962.
And in that November of which we spoke earlier, something in the light of Venice, in the glare of its streets in the rain, bewitched her, so much so that she rushed to a public telephone and called Capa himself, to suggest that he send a photographer there immediately. able to capture the magic that so amazed her. Capa replied that there was already a Magnum photographer in Venice. It was her with her camera. All that was left was to buy a roll of film, load it and start photographing.
In addition to the eye and instinct, the vocabulary of great photographers is made up of a fundamental ingredient: culture. And in fact her Venetian aesthetic apparatus had been formed even before her travels in the lagoon, embroidered on the study and absorption primarily on her art, since out of passion, as she herself confided, she had devoured entire painting books over time Veneta, Tiepolo, Bellini and Carpaccio above all.
But there is not only Venice: the exhibition will in fact present to the public photographs taken in every corner of Europe, and which show without gossip the behind-the-scenes life of the then rich and famous, with grace and delicacy, as when portraying a very young and awkward Yves Saint Laurent after his first important fashion show or the secluded shyness of his great friend Cristóbal Balenciaga while smoking a cigarette. But there is also room for major international reports: Spain, Iran, France, England and Ireland, the United States of America, up to China and Russia. Unlike his mentor Capa, who died in 1954 after stepping on a mine while on assignment in Vietnam, Morath kept quite a distance from war photography. But her courage and adventurous spirit were certainly beyond doubt: her many overseas assignments also included a trip to Iran in the mid-1950s, not quite a field trip, in which she traveled alone for the most part of the journey, armed only with a camera and a chador.