© Eve Arnold, 1961, Three sets of hands
(left to right): American Nazi, Nation of Islam member and a Nation of Islam money collector at a rally, Washington, D.C.
In 1960, LIFE magazine assigned Arnold, who died in January 2012 at the age of 99, to document the days and nights of Malcolm X, the controversial and intensely charismatic public face of the Nation of Islam. For nearly a year, she followed the thug-turned-devout Muslim and activist from Washington to New York to Chicago.
At the very first NOI rally she attended, at the Uline Arena in Washington, D.C., Arnold photographed George Lincoln Rockwell, head of the American Nazi Party, who had formed an unlikely alliance with the Nation of Islam (and who, like Malcolm X, would be assassinated before the decade was over). Arnold wrote later that, as she raised her camera to photograph Rockwell and his brownshirt-clad henchmen, he hissed at her, “I’ll make a bar of soap out of you.”
“I hissed back, ‘As long as it isn’t a lampshade,’” Arnold wrote of the moment, “and kept photographing.”
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© Eve Arnold, 1960, School for black civil rights activists
Young girl being trained to not react to smoke blown in her face.
(thanks to / via: firsttimeuser)
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© probably Eve Arnold, ca. 1979, Peasant Farmer, China
(thanks to / via: yama-bato)
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© Eve Arnold, 1958, Children at a party to introduce mixed schools, Virginia
Very sad news to hear that the extraordinary photographer Eve Arnold passed away peacefully on 4th January 2012. In 2010 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from WPO in Cannes.
Related article: The British Journal of Photography about Eve Arnold
“You can’t make a great musician or a great photographer if the magic isn’t there.”
(Eve Arnold)
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© Eve Arnold, 1954, Bar girl in a brothel in the red light district, Havana / Cuba
“If a photographer cares about the people before the lens and is compassionate, much is given. It is the photographer, not the camera, that is the instrument.” (Eve Arnold)
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