Through Her Lens by Iconic Images Eva Sereny

The film was Catch-22 and when Eva shared her photos with director Mike Nichols, she was asked to stay on for the last two weeks of shooting as a paid ‘Special Photographer’.Įva’s first encounter with Hollywood soon led to subsequent opportunities and started a career that would last several decades. Nevertheless, she got the call to go to the Piazza Navona where she spent a few days quietly taking photographs and developing them at home at night.

The publicist warned that it might be difficult, as the director was very particular about photographers. So much so, they ran in The Times soon after.Īfter her images were printed in such a prominent publication, Eva approached a film publicist in Rome about whether or not it was possible to shoot stills on the set of a film she knew was shooting nearby. She met with the picture editor who liked the photographs Eva presented.

Those photographs inspired Eva to take a leap of faith and she flew to London where she walked into the offices of The Times. A friend happened to be the president of the Italian National Olympic Committee and suggested that Eva photograph young children participating in various sporting disciplines in the newly developed Italian sporting centres. After working with her husband’s Rolleiflex, she purchased a 35mm Nikon and started taking pictures of her friends’ children. I knew I had artistic inclinations but couldn’t draw and that thought brought me to photography.”Įva proceeded to immerse herself in photography books and built her own darkroom in her basement. As she remembered in an interview for her book, Through Her Lens: The Stories Behind the Photography of Eva Sereny, published in 2018, “I’ve got nothing. Eva’s husband had been in a car accident and as she sat with him during recovery, it occurred to her how luck was on their side, but it got her thinking. It was an utterly unexpected twist of fate that set her photography career in motion. Born to Hungarian parents and raised in England, Eva’s early life took her to Italy and she arrived at the height of ‘la dolce vita.’ She married and began raising a family.

Through Her Lens by Iconic Images Eva Sereny