All In A Day’s Work - Eve Arnold
October 30, 2019I enjoy trying to take ‘Environmental portraits’ - portraits of people in their environment, that give them some context and help to tell their story. So it was nice to find, in a rather higgledy-piggledy second-hand bookstore, a book of photographs of people at work taken over many years by Magnum photographer Eve Arnold (you can learn more about her here). The book has 150 images of people in their working context in China, Egypt, England, Canada, the US, South Africa and many other places. The shots are natural, candid, largely unposed, and primarily of ordinary people (with a few celebs thrown in). Most look to be taken in natural light (something Eve Arnold was noted for), and those that are most striking, for me, are those where the light is highlighting the face or producing nice ‘chiaroscuro’ contrast on the face. A great collection of environmental portraits that show the characters of her subjects and the world of their work.
