Eva Sereny entered the world of photography in the era of David Bailey and Lewis Morely-a time when women in the field were extremely rare. However, it didn't take long for her to quickly establish herself as one of the most respected photographers in the medium, contributing images of major Hollywood stars to magazines, as well as eventually directing films of her own.
Explore our collection of Eva Sereny photography here.
Born in Hungary, Eva Sereny launched her career during the late sixties, photographing legendary figures from the era, from Marlon Brando and Paul Newman to Audrey Hepburn and Raquel Welch. The quality of her images enabled her to travel the world, her work being featured on the cover of major international magazines like Life,
Vanity Fair, Newsweek and Time. Indeed, she once told Michael Palin that her globetrotting career meant that she was "never in the same bed two nights running".
From photographing the stars of the golden age of Hollywood, Sereny quickly found her way into the inner sanctum of the movie industry, working as a "special photographer" for the most widely-acclaimed directors of the sixties and seventies. She is responsible for legendary on-set shots for the likes of Steven Spielberg, Federico Fellini and Werner Herzog, and acclaimed movies from The Great Gatsby to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Having spent so much time on set around directors and actors, Sereny developed a passion and an understanding for the art of cinema direction. Her first film, a thirty-minute short entitled The Dress, came out in 1984, starring Michael Palin and Phyllis Logan. Despite winning a BAFTA for The Dress, her second and most recent film, Foreign Student, only appeared a decade later.
More recently, Eva's images of the German cinema icon Romy Schneider were published as a lavish coffee table book in 1998; these images also formed the backbone of an exhibition in Paris dedicated to the actor. 2018 saw the release of her first career-spanning book, entitled Through Her Lens; a collection of around 100 unreleased photos of iconic seventies and eighties stars, the book complements these unseen photographs with Sereny's own commentary on the images.
Eva Sereny has since retired from photography, and lives in Rome, Sydney and London.