Inge Morath, 78; Magnum Portrait Photographer

Photographer Inge Morath, whose artistry elevated portraits of the famous as well as images of foreign cultures and sights as commonplace as a person at a piano, died Wednesday of lymphomic cancer at a New York City hospital. One of the first women admitted to the international photo agency Magnum, she was 78.

Best known as a portraitist whose works hang in the permanent collections of many museums, Morath photographed notables as diverse as Jean Cocteau, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Eleanor Roosevelt and Marilyn Monroe.

She married one of her subjects, playwright Arthur Miller, after his divorce from Monroe. She and Miller collaborated on several books during their nearly 40-year marriage.

Among her most famous shots is one of Monroe in a black cocktail dress, lost in thought and kicking up leaves in the Nevada desert. She traveled through Iran in the 1950s, cloaking her cameras beneath a chador, and talked her way into a Spanish matador’s dressing room before a crucial fight, armed only with her Leica and straightforward charm.

“She has a brilliant sense of place, of the surprising couched in the commonplace, whether it be Africa or Russia or New England,” Ralph Pomeroy wrote in the book “Contemporary Photographers.”

Morath was born in Graz, Austria, the daughter of two scientists. She grew up in Berlin during the rise of Hitler and studied Romance languages in college. After World War II started and she refused to join the Nazi student movement, she had to leave school and assemble plane parts at a Berlin factory while bombs rained down.

When the Russians entered Berlin, she joined a stream of refugees out of the city and walked to Salzburg to find out if her parents were still alive. She found them, but nearly died in the process.

After the war, Morath moved to London and married British journalist Lionel Birch. She also began to learn photography from Simon Guttman, art editor of Picture Post.

By 1953 she had divorced Birch and was working at Magnum’s Paris office with Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, two of the founding members of the cooperative that was turning photojournalism into art.

Her first job was editing contact sheets for various members, but particularly for Cartier-Bresson. He taught her to look at images upside-down, as painters do, to judge their composition.

From Capa she learned that a photo “comes from inside.” This was an important discovery, she said, “because I was ashamed to speak German after the war, a millstone of guilt, so a picture was like daring to say ‘love.’”

She joined Magnum as a full-fledged member in 1955. She and Eve Arnold became the first women admitted to the intensely macho club.

“A lot of them did say, ‘Here comes a woman, how dare she take pictures,’” she recalled. “But I was very single-minded then and I didn’t give a damn what the others thought.”

In time, she proved she was as tough and resourceful as the others.

In Spain to photograph the running of the bulls, she won rare permission to enter a famous matador’s dressing room. It was considered bad luck for a woman to see the fighter before the fight, but she convinced him that when she was taking pictures she was not looking at him “with womanly eyes” but doing a job.

In Iran in the 1950s, she was allowed to photograph Muslim men at ritual exercises after winning their favor with gifts of Polaroid shots.

During Ramadan, she sneaked inside a grand mosque to photograph the worshiping men, prostrate on the floor. One man sat up and alerted the others, who began throwing stones at her. Fortunately, she said, “there weren’t too many [stones] on the floor there ... and I just got out very fast.”

Unlike Cartier-Bresson, who clicked his shutter at a decisive moment in the action, Morath often waited until the drama passed and her subject was at ease. A well-known portrait of Cocteau shows the natty poet, artist and filmmaker nearly reclining on a ledge near a fireplace, distractedly pointing his finger one way and looking another. The shot came after a period of antic posing nearly everywhere else in the room. “It is so him,” Morath recalled many years later, “because he is almost in flight, already on to the next thing.”

Her moxie would be unquestioned after an event in early 1959. She had been assigned to shoot the filming of John Huston’s “The Unforgiven” in Mexico. She was with the director on a duck hunting trip to Durango when she spotted two men struggling in a nearby lake. One of the men was the movie’s star, World War II hero Audie Murphy. Stripped to her underwear, Morath plunged in and towed Murphy back to land by her bra strap. In thanks he gave her the watch he had carried throughout the war.

In 1961, Magnum sent Morath to the location of another Huston film, “The Misfits.” Written by Miller, the movie starred Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Monroe.

Her famous shot of Monroe caught the actress reciting lines to herself when she thought no one was looking. Of all the famous shots of the 1950s icon, many seem exploitative, but Morath’s focus is elsewhere. “I liked her,” Morath said. “I liked that kind of dreamy quality she sometimes had.”

Monroe, according to Miller, took to the photographer immediately, “appreciating her kindness and the absence--remarkable in a photographer--of all aggression. She doted a little on the pictures Inge Morath had taken of her, sensing real affection in them.”

Morath said she took little more than a professional interest in Miller then. But he had noticed the “slender, noble-looking young woman with bobbed hair and European accent, who seemed,” he wrote in his 1987 memoir, ‘both shy and strong at the same time.” After his marriage to Monroe disintegrated, he married Morath in 1962.

They traveled extensively together and turned some of their experiences into the books “In Russia” (1969) and “Chinese Encounters” (1979), for which Morath spent four years learning Mandarin. When Morath wanted to stay closer to home to raise their daughter, Rebecca, he wrote and she photographed “In the Country” (1977), about rural Connecticut.

Morath, who lived in New York and Roxbury, Conn., is survived by her husband, their daughter and a grandson.