South Africa broke photographer Eve Arnold’s heart


From Financial Times profile of Eve Arnold, the brilliant American photographer who died in January 2012:

One of her toughest assignments was in South Africa, in 1973, where she saw apartheid at its worst. She sneaked inside hospitals where black children were dying from malnutrition and disease; she witnessed the separation of black families, the men forced to work in mines or in cities living in compounds hundreds of miles away. When she got back to London she was ill for months: her doctor said it was not a medical ailment, it was caused by what she had seen; he diagnosed it as heartbreak.

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