In Aosta there is an exhibition entirely dedicated to the famous photographer Inge Morath

In Aosta, at the Saint-Bénin Center, the exhibition Inge Morath. Photography is a Personal Matter curated by Brigitte Blüml Kaindl, Kurt Kaindl and Daria Jorioz, an exhibition project produced by Suazes with the collaboration of Fotohof and Magnum Photos.

The Saint-Bénin Center hosts, until March 16, 2025, a major exhibition dedicated to Inge Morath, the first photographer to be named a member of the famous Magnum Photos agency, a reality this one founded in 1947 in New York by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Seymour, George Rodger and William Vandiver. A new exhibition project that will make it possible to interface with the work and sensibility of this author, but above all to get to know, for the first time in Italy, new parts of her work never exhibited before, some of them of close relevance.

Through more than 150 images and original documents, the exhibition traces Morath’s human and professional journey, from her beginnings alongside Ernst Haas and Henri Cartier-Bresson to her collaboration with prestigious magazines such as Picture Post, Life, Paris Match, Saturday Evening Post and Vogue, through her major travel reports.

The chosen title Photography is a Personal Matter is taken from a statement by the author and is intended to highlight the close correlation between her human and professional journey.

Whether celebrities or ordinary people, individuals or communities, her images know how to capture the deepest intimacies of her subjects. Her photographs reflect her human sensibility even before the professional one, but at the same time they can be likened to real pages of her life diary. Indeed, she herself wrote, “Photography is essentially a personal matter, the search for an inner truth.” Her work also succeeds in immortalizing the soul of places, through her major travel reports, which she prepared with maniacal care, studying the language, traditions and culture of each country where she went, whether Italy, Spain, Iran, Russia, China, to the point that her husband, the famous American playwright Arthur Miller, had this to say, “As soon as she sees a suitcase, Inge begins to pack it.”

Curator Daria Jorioz writes in the catalog, “I was struck to learn that Inge Morath spoke seven languages, but basically I believe that this was her way of being in the world: studying, observing, deepening, knowing and placing the human being at the center of her investigation, with respect and simplicity, according to the philosophy shared by the members of the Magnum agency and with an approach that unites her with other humanist photographers of the 20th century.”

The exhibition project, created specifically for the Saint-Bénin Center, develops through fourteen thematic sections that trace Inge Morath’s main professional experiences: it starts with her early photographs taken in Venice in 1955, where her passion and relationship with photography were born, to her famous reportages in Spain, England, Iran, France, Austria, Mexico, Ireland, Romania, the United States of America and China. An additional section will be devoted to the Mask series, the result of a collaboration with illustrator Saul Steinberg. The path within these sections will be enriched by many color photographs that will dialogue with the black and white production of this author.

In addition, the exhibition will be enriched with two new sections never before exhibited in Italy, with color snapshots taken from the reportages that the photojournalist, originally from Graz, made in 1959 in Tunisia and the one the following year at the Gaza Strip.

Visitors will thus be able to delve into Inge Morath’s work through a selection of works that will activate a dialogue between her black-and-white and color production. A relationship, this one, that will be analyzed within the exhibition itinerary with the use of period documentation and publications, thus allowing visitors to grasp the importance of color in her work. As John P. Jacop, first director of the Inge Morath Foundation and author of one of the texts in the catalog, points out, “Despite an apparent preference for black and white, evidence of the importance of her work in color for Morath herself is supported both by the high concentration of color images she selected for inclusion in the Magnum Photos database and by the extensive collection of color material she kept in her personal archive.”

The exhibition, produced by Suazes with the collaboration of Fotohof and Magnum Photos, is accompanied by a bilingual (Italian-French) catalog published by Dario Cimorelli Editore, with reproductions of the works and critical texts by John P. Jacop, Kurt Kaindl and Brigitte Blüml-Kaindl, Daria Jorioz and Marco Minuz. The catalog will be available for purchase at the exhibition for 30 euros.

Inge Morath was born in Graz in 1923. She studied languages at the universities of Berlin and Bucharest and worked as an interpreter for the U.S. Information Service. In 1953 she joined the famous Magnum Photos Agency, becoming an official member in 1954. During those years he worked, as an assistant, for photographers Ernst Haas and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1955 he published his first collection of photographs; by the end of his career there were 30 monographs. On February 17, 1962, she married celebrated writer Arthur Miller, who had previously been married to actress Marilyn Monroe. The couple had two children, Rebecca (who would become a celebrated film director and screenwriter) and Daniel. His photographs have the power to delve into the intimacy of the people portrayed and are always the fruit of a journey of knowledge and closeness. He died at the age of 78 in 2002 in New York City. In the 2000s, the Inge Morath Foundation was established in the United States of America and her archives were preserved at Yale University.

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Image: Inge Morath, Marilyn Monroe, Reno, Nevada, 1960

In Aosta there is an exhibition entirely dedicated to the famous photographer Inge Morath

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