Inge Morath: The Road to Reno

Inge Morath's first trip across the United States followed a red grease-pencil line drawn by her traveling companion, Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1960 the two drove from New York through Gettysburg, Memphis, and Albuquerque to Reno. They were among 18 photojournalists commissioned by Magnum to document the Nevada set of Arthur Miller's The Misfits. The destination was momentous for Morath--she took remarkable photographs, and later married Miller after his divorce from Marilyn Monroe--but it is the trip, the 18 days she spent traveling, as documented in both photographs and journal entries, ("written each night at the table in a motel room that was always in a different place but always looked the same"), that in its casualness can unfold for readers her carefully observed, insightful, and compassionate approach to reportage. Traveling westward, Morath combines a foreigner's awe of alien terrain with the curiosity of small-town life, offering glimpses into rather than encapsulations of her experience at each stop. This is the first publication of her work to include her writing alongside her photographs, and it includes an afterword by Arthur Miller.

Inge Morath was born in Graz, Austria, in 1923. A friend of photographer Ernst Haas, she wrote articles to accompany his photographs and was invited to Paris with Haas by Robert Capa to join the just-founded Magnum agency as an editor. She began photographing in London in 1951, and after assisting Henri Cartier-Bresson as a researcher for two years and working independently throughout that time, became a member of the agency in 1955. Throughout her life, Morath was a prolific diarist and letter writer, and in her extensive travels in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, China and the USSR, she kept copious written entries along with her many photographs. She married Arthur Miller in 1962 and settled in New York and Connecticut, though she continued to travel and publish photographic essays, pursuing both assignments and independent projects until her death in 2002. She has won numerous awards, including being presented with a Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Connecticut, the Austrian State Prize for Photography, the Gold medal of the National Art Club, and the Medal of Honor in Gold of the City of Vienna.