Inge Morath: First Color

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Chinese Encounters: Photographs by Inge Morath, Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao Retrospective – Neue Galerie Linz, Austria ;America House, Frankfurt, Germany; Hardenberg Gallery, Velbert, Germany; Galerie Fotogramma, Milano, Italy; Faced with such a daunting task, John and his team limited themselves to searching only the 1950s and ’60s archives. Realising the way the colour images had been stored would make it difficult to locate and piece together the photo stories in their entirety, their aim was to retrieve as many images as they could and retrace – as far as possible – Inge’s movements as a colour photographer during this period. Inge Morath (1923–2002) was born in Graz, Austria. Her parents were scientists whose work took them to different laboratories and universities in Europe during her childhood. Educated in French-speaking schools, Morath and her family relocated to Darmstadt in the 1930s, and then to Berlin. With the publication of Inge Morath by Linda Gordon (Prestel, November 2018), Magnum Foundation continues its series of illustrated biographies about the lives of Magnum photographers behind their well-known photographs. This book is the first ever full-length biography of Austrian-born American photographer Inge Morath, tracing her life through the prism of her work and archives.

And to Cecil Beaton, who photographed her again and again, it was this innate sadness, above and beyond any gamine quality of her appearance, that made her such a rich character to capture on film. “She is a wistful child of a war-chided era, and the shadow thrown across her youth underlines even more its precious evanescence. But if she can reflect sorrow, she also seems to enjoy the happiness life provides for her with such bounty,” he wrote in Vogue, in November 1954.Coal mining had once attracted countless people from all over Germany, as well as migrant workers from Turkey, Greece and Poland, all with the hope of a better life.

Andrews, Suzanna (September 2007). "Arthur Miller's Missing Act". Vanity Fair . Retrieved 26 December 2010.Spain in the fifties, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Madrid, Spain; Museo de Navarra,Pamplona, Spain. The recovery of Inge Morath’s color work provides the opportunity to greatly expand our knowledge of Morath’s working techniques as a photographer. In some cases, although their original sequences have been lost, it is now possible to restore photo-essays from which the color pictures had been removed. In so doing, we gain a deeper insight into Morath’s method as we watch her decide when and where to use color film. We see when she recognized that only color could relay the message she wanted to send.

Inge was, to some extent, influenced by Ernst and his experiments in colour, but she didn’t work in an abstract way like he did,’ says Jinx. ‘I think she felt if you photographed in colour you could faithfully show how the scene looked at the time. She worked hard to make sure the colours were genuine.’Born in Graz, Austria, a century ago on May 27, 1923, Morath lived in several countries throughout her life. Her parents were Nazi sympathizers, and as scientists their work took them to labs and universities all over Europe. She grew up in the shadow of Nazi Germany, and her first encounter with modern art was in 1937 at the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibition organized by the Nazi Party in Munich, consisting of 650 pieces of ‘Degenerate Art’.