Eve Arnold born in 1912, was the first woman photographer to become associated with Magnum Photos, in 1951. She became a full member of the collective in 1957.

Her monograph, The Unretouched Woman was published in 1974, and brought together images from a quarter of a century of Arnold’s career. The book aimed to take an expansive look at the experience of being a woman, through a woman’s lens. The work was divided into several chapters, with photographic stories grouped together under themes – by region: on the USA, on South Africa; by topic: on the veiled woman, on monasticism; and included photo-essays on celebrities that Arnold had photographed using her uniquely intimate style: Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford.

Significantly, The Unretouched Woman was Arnold’s first book, published when she was 64. Despite Arnold’s many accomplishments which are evident in the book — working on assignments around the world and photographing stately individuals like Queen Elizabeth — her reflections reveal an initial reluctance to recognize herself as more than an amateur— “I lied and said I was a photographer” — telling both of her modesty and the difficulties of self-validation as an artist.
The book raises vital questions around the barriers that lay between women and their actualization as artists, photojournalists and professionals, both in the 20th Century and now.

“This is a book about how it feels to be a woman, seen through the eyes and the camera of one woman—images unretouched, for the most part unposed, and unembellished.
Twenty-five years ago, when I became a photojournalist, I was looked on as someone apart—a “career lady,” a “woman photographer.” My colleagues were not spoken of in inverted commas; they were not “career men” or “men photographers”. I was not happy about it, but realized as have women before me that it was a fundamental part of female survival to play the assigned role. I could not fight against those attitudes. I needed to know more about other women to try to understand what made me acquiesce in this situation.

It was then that I started my project, photographing and talking to women. I became both observer and participant. I photographed girl children and women; the rich and the poor; the migratory potato picker on Long Island and the Queen of England; the nomad bride in the Hindu Kush waiting for a husband she had never seen, and the Hollywood Queen Bee whose life was devoted to a regimen of beauty care. There were the Zulu woman whose child was dying of hunger and women mourning their dead in Hoboken, New Jersey. I filmed in harems in Abu Dhabi, in bars in Cuba, and in the Vatican in Rome. There was birth in London and betrothal in the Caucasus, divorce in Moscow and protest marches of black women in Virginia. There were the known and the unknown—and always those marvelous faces.
I am not a radical feminist, because I don’t believe that siege mentality works. But I know something of the problems and the inequities of being a woman, and over the years the women I photographed talked to me about themselves and their lives. Each had her own story to tell- uniquely female but also uniquely human.
Themes recur again and again in my work. I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.
Eve Arnold