Inge Morath Books

In 1956, Inge Morath (1923-2002) traveled to the Middle East for Holiday magazine. She wore the traditional chador and traveled alone most of the time. "It was difficult to photograph there as a woman," she later recorded. In this body of work, Morath's subjects range from politics and religion to work and commerce, from the shah's palace to the nomad's tent to Zoroaster's sacred shrine. She photographed Iran with the keen vision of an anthropologist, examining religious rituals, costuming, work, sport, music, art and theater in order to document "the continuity--or lack of it--between past and present," as she later put it. Morath's work in Iran presaged her later work in Spain, China and Russia, creating an extensive document of the clash between modernity and tradition in the postwar Middle East. Retrospectively, Inge Iran recalls a land and a culture that have been profoundly transformed since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It is a window into the past that provides a singular and timely perspective on Iran in the present.

„Die Donau ist ein Experiment, das die ganze Welt betrifft - was hier missrät, kann überall scheitern, was hier gelingt, lässt auch für anderswo hoffen.“ Karl-Markus Gauß Ungezählte Völker haben an diesem mächtigen Strom gesiedelt, der alles gesehen und erlitten hat, was europäische Völker zuwege gebracht und was sie einander angetan haben. Die Donau ist ein europäischer Strom, mehr noch: der Strom Europas. Die weltberühmte Fotografin Inge Morath ist in den Jahren 1958/59 und dann wieder nach dem Fall des Eisernen Vorhanges 1993 bis 1995 der Dona bei mehreren Reisen über weite Strecken gefolgt - von der Quelle im Schwarzwald zur Mündung ins Schwarze Meer. Was sie an der Donau gesehen hat, Menschen und Menschenwerk, Natur und Naturzerstörung, ist in diesem Band in einer repräsentativen Auswahl und überwältigenden Vielfalt gesammelt. In seinem Essay „Die Lehre der Donau“ lotet Karl-Markus Gauß die historische Tiefe und Besonderheit des Donauraums aus. „Die Einführung von Karl-Markus Gauss ist ein Meisterstück der Essayistik; auf knappstem Raum vermag er es, Mythos, Geschichte und Realität der Donau zu veranschaulichen, dieses Stroms, der allem Nationalstaatentum widerspricht, selbst wenn er nicht mehr wie einst Abendland und Morgenland verbindet.“ Taja Gut, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Inge Morath's first trip across the United States followed a red grease-pencil line drawn by her traveling companion, Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1960 the two drove from New York through Gettysburg, Memphis, and Albuquerque to Reno. They were among 18 photojournalists commissioned by Magnum to document the Nevada set of Arthur Miller's The Misfits. The destination was momentous for Morath--she took remarkable photographs, and later married Miller after his divorce from Marilyn Monroe--but it is the trip, the 18 days she spent traveling, as documented in both photographs and journal entries, ("written each night at the table in a motel room that was always in a different place but always looked the same"), that in its casualness can unfold for readers her carefully observed, insightful, and compassionate approach to reportage. Traveling westward, Morath combines a foreigner's awe of alien terrain with the curiosity of small-town life, offering glimpses into rather than encapsulations of her experience at each stop. This is the first publication of her work to include her writing alongside her photographs, and it includes an afterword by Arthur Miller.

Like many of her colleagues, Inge Morath carried one camera loaded with black-and-white film and another loaded with color. Possibly influenced by the legendary hostility of Henri Cartier-Bresson (her mentor) to color photography, Morath's own ambivalence is reflected in the contradiction between the sheer volume of color film that she exposed during her lifetime and its complete absence from her exhibited and published works. Following Morath's death in 2002, more than 10,000 hitherto unknown and uncataloged color originals were recovered from storage in Paris, where Morath had been based from 1954 until 1962. As this volume demonstrates, Morath's color vision matured around 1958, while documenting the Danube River; by the late 1960s and during the 1970s, when she worked extensively in Russia and China, Morath's color production would at times exceed her work in black and white, and several projects done late in her life were made exclusively in color.

A final project from photographer Inge Morath. Fulfilling a dream to discover the land of her ancestors, Morath travelled to the borderlands of Styria and Slovenia in 2001, camera in hand. The photographs in this volume depict joy and sorrow, youth and age, bucolic splendour and numbing ugliness.

Das Lebensbild einer Stadt und ihrer Menschen, weitab von den touristischen Motiven der Sightseeing-Fotografie. Die sorgfältigen Beobachtungen des venezianischen Alltags der fünfziger Jahre sind künstlerisch hervorragend und gleichzeitig ein seltenes Dokument der Zeitgeschichte. Inge Morath hat das Porträt einer Stadt, ihrer Bewohner und Besucher festgehalten, wie es heute nicht mehr zu finden ist.

Fotoband mit Texten von Arthur Miller, Robert Delpire und Anna Farova „Fotos aus vier Jahrzehnten. Ein Lebenswerk aus Künstlerporträts, Reportagefotos aus Spanien und dem Iran, Backstagefotos von dem Film “The Misfits„ mit Marylin Monroe, New York gestern und heute, Inszenierungen von Mneschengruppen und Einzelpersonen. Das Mini-Universum unseres Jahrhunderts in Bildern.“ Die Welt