The late playwright Arthur Miller, speaking of his wife Inge Morath, said “She made poetry out of people and their places over half a century.” Morath’s curiosity, compassion, and bravery show vividly in this biography featuring stunning images from every stage of her career. Biographer Linda Gordon presents Morath traveling across the globe, often as a woman alone, quietly but firmly defying the conventions for what was appropriate for women at the time. Her photographs show her cosmopolitanism, which arose from her love of literature, her fluency in many languages, and her revulsion against Hitler’s Germany, where she spent her teenage years. Her respect for all the world’s cultures, from Spain to Iran to China, made her a kind of visual ethnographer. One of the first women to join the Magnum collective, Morath was a superb portraitist, particularly drawn to artists. Morath was truly a citizen of the world, and her images are simultaneously universal and personal. This volume is the third in a series of illustrated biographies of Magnum photographers.

Carole Naggar is the series’ editor, and has worked on text editing, choice of photographs, archive research, picture sequencing. Text by Linda Gordon.

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