From Marilyn Monroe flaked out in an armchair, resting her swollen feet, to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor sitting in a pub with a pound of sausages, Eve Arnold’s photographs are knitted into the celebrity mythology of the 20th century. They showed even those who had no idea who the photographer was that it was hard work being Marilyn, and that Hollywood’s starriest couple weren’t strangers to a fry-up after a night on the booze.
Decades after the deaths of their subjects, these pictures are enriched by the histories that stand between them and us. They read like the warnings of a benign clairvoyant. Arnold herself died in 2012, weeks before her 100th birthday. The quality that shines out from this luminous career retrospective is just how totally her subjects trusted her with the backstage of their lives.
