Art Gallery of Western Australia

This exhibition displays over 200 photographs by Eve Arnold, which show her use of black and white in the 1950s, her development of colour, on which she concentrated in the 1970s, and her return to black and white in the 1980s.

Born in Philadephia in the United States, Eve Arnold has, through the course of a wide-ranging career, become one of the world's leading photographers. Virtually self-taught, her work was nevertheless rapidly acclaimed, and by the time she moved to London in the 1960s, where she has been based since, her photographs had already been published extensively in magazines in many different countries. She has photographed the stars, including Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford, focused on subjects at the heart of 1950s America in the home and on the street, and tackled the political and social tensions of the McCarthy era in penetrating sequences of images.

Throughout her career, Eve Arnold has used the picture story to relate to a human history. Her curiosity and endless fascination for life around her stimulated the photographs she made during the 1960s and 1970s, as she uncovered layers of British society with an empathy sharpened by humour. Her explorations have also taken her much further afield - to Russia in the Cold War years, inside harems in the Middle East, to South Africa, to China and once again to America, with all its complexity and contradictions.

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