Whilst scouring the shelves of the library, I stumbled across a book by photographer Eve Arnold, entitled ‘The Unretouched Woman’, and after skimming through I spotted this first image of Marilyn and the puzzling, but interesting passage detailing Arnold’s experience photographing Miss Monroe. At first, the photograph just shows a relaxed and casual ambient between subject and photographer, but after reading the passage I began to notice some inconsistency with my opinion from the first glance as opposed to when I put all the pieces together and understood the background context of what I was actually seeing. I seemed to fail noticing the distance and detachment shown so clearly in Marilyn’s eyes, the comfort displaced into a fidgety gesture, by holding her hair, the pursing of her lips, as if not quite sure how to rest her face appropriately, or perhaps she has something she would like to say. These are all things that I seemed to have overlooked but are the most important factors about the story of these photo’s.
I highlighted some key sentences from this passage that I deemed as important and that stood out to me about Marilyn’s overall demeanour and appearance, it led me to thinking deeper about the world’s expectations of such an iconic woman and how they might affect her in day to day life; something I never found myself thinking about before.
I began to understand the exhaustion in her eyes.
I wondered how I could develop this research and derive a photographic concept through these findings, with the help of my great-thinking tutor Geraint, we began formulating ideas about the natural emotion and quirky features of each individual person, and how paired with social interaction and influence of atmosphere and environment, these might diversify and become a really interesting subject for a photo series.
PHOTOGRAPHY WORKBOOK 