The big picture: Inge Morath captures the joy of Spanish dance
Tim Adams www.theguardian.com
A Sevillan dancer’s skirt whirls in this image from the Austrian photographer, who sought moments of lightness after the horrors of war
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the Guardian
Inge Morath’s love affair with Spain began as apprentice and assistant to Henri Cartier-Bresson, on assignment to Madrid in 1953. She returned two years later as a photographer with the Magnum agency and, having befriended a Spanish duke, Gonzalo Figueroa, travelled the country with him in a pair of Cadillacs, one for them, and another filled with a library of books from which the duke’s valet would read aloud.

Morath was studying languages at university in Berlin when Hitler’s armies marched across Europe and had been press-ganged into a factory making aircraft parts, alongside prisoners of war. In 1945, aged 22, she walked the 455 miles through ruins to her parents’ home in Salzburg, Austria.

Those experiences gave her an eye not only for suffering, but a lifelong need to seek out compensating lightness. Her camera found a good deal of it in the festivals of Spain, to which she returned many times, long after she married the playwright Arthur Miller in 1962. This picture of a whirling dancer’s skirt, taken at a festival in Seville in 1987 – and included in Magnum’s latest 75th anniversary print sale – was typical of Morath’s enduring romance with the country. Having more than held her own in the very male world of photojournalism, she gravitated toward and celebrated strong women.

She characterised her early years on the road at Magnum as being the time when she was asked the question: “What does a pretty girl like you want in this profession?” Her persistent answer was to turn her camera on things that made her own heart quicken: “Pressing the shutter,” Morath said, “has remained a moment of joyful recognition, comparable to the delight of a child balancing on tiptoe and suddenly, with a small cry of delight, stretching out a hand toward a desired object.”