Inge Morath

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Born: 1923

Died: 2002

Hometown: Graz, Austria

Website: www.ingemorath.org

Education: Berlin University, 1944

Inge Morath Bio

About The Artist

Inge Morath was born in Graz, Austria, in 1923. After studying languages in Berlin, she became a translator, then a journalist and the Austrian editor for Heute, an Information Service Branch publication based in Munich. All her life Morath would remain a prolific diarist and letter-writer, retaining a dual gift for words and pictures that made her unusual among her colleagues.

A friend of photographer Ernst Haas, she wrote articles to accompany his photographs and was invited by Robert Capa and Haas to Paris to join the newly founded Magnum agency as an editor and researcher. She began photographing in London in 1951, and joined Magnum Photos as a photographer in 1953. While working on her own first assignments, Morath also assisted Henri Cartier-Bresson during 1953-54, becoming a full member in 1955.

In the following years, Morath traveled extensively in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Her special interest in the arts found expression in photographic essays published by a number of leading magazines. After her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller in 1962, Morath settled in New York and Connecticut. She first visited the USSR in 1965. In 1972 she studied Mandarin and obtained a visa to China, making the first of many trips to the country in 1978.

Morath was at ease anywhere. Some of her most important work consists of portraits, but of passers-by as well as celebrities. She was also adept at photographing places: her pictures of Boris Pasternak's home, Pushkin's library, Chekhov's house, Mao Zedong's bedroom, artists' studios, and cemetery memorials are permeated with the spirit of invisible people still present. Inge Morath died in New York City on 30 January 2002.

Courtesy of Magnum Photos

Inge Morath Permanent Collections

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Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
The Galerie CLAIR, Munich and Saint Paul de Vence
The Inge Morath Foundation
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara