Eve Arnold, a globe-trotting photojournalist who captured iconic images of Marilyn Monroe, has died, the Magnum photo agency said Thursday. She was 99.
Magnum spokeswoman Fiona Rogers said Arnold died peacefully Wednesday in a London nursing home.
Born in Philadelphia in 1912 to Russian immigrant parents, Arnold began working as a photographer in the 1940s and took pictures for Life magazine during a golden age of magazine photojournalism.
Her subjects included New York bartenders, Cuban fishermen and Afghan nomads; celebrities such as Joan Crawford and Elizabeth Taylor; and political figures including Jacqueline Kennedy, Malcolm X and Margaret Thatcher.
Her most famous shots include portraits of Monroe taken throughout the actress's career and collected in her book "Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation."
"Themes recur again and again in my work," Arnold once said. "I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women."
Arnold joined the Magnum agency in the 1950s — the first woman admitted to the collective — after her images of fashion shows in Harlem caught the attention of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Arnold settled in London in the 1960s, working for the Sunday Times newspaper. In the 1970s she traveled to the United Arab Emirates, photographing and filming Dubai's ruling family for "Behind the Veil," and was one of the first American photographers to work in China.
The photos she took there were exhibited in her first solo show, at the Brooklyn Museum in 1980, and published as "In China."
Arnold was a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and in 1995 was named Master Photographer by New York's International Center of Photography.
In 2003 she was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire, or OBE, by Queen Elizabeth II for services to photography.
She is survived by her son, Frank, and three grandchildren. Funeral details were not immediately available.
Here are two clips of Arnold in a 1987 interview about her Monroe work
