Last week American photographer Eve Arnold passed away quietely during her sleep in her home in London. She was 99 years old. Arnold was born in 1912 in Philadelphia to Russian immigrants. Her career in photography started late, in the fourties, after a course of 6 weeks. After that she worked for magazines such as Time, Life and the British Sunday Times Magazine, shooting African Americans during the times of apartheid and racism in 1950s Harlem, migrant workers and Afghan nomads.

Arnold was the first woman to be added to the Magnum collective, despite the discrimination towards women (today less than 10% of the photographers on Magnum’s list are women). In the seventies she was one of the first western photographers who was allowed to work in China. Arnold was also known for her photos of celebrities such as Joan Crawford, Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. View a selection of her work in the gallery below.