Marianne Greenwood, 2005 Women of Discovery Lifetime Achievement Award

"Live in the present." — Marianne Greenwood

Author and Photographer

Born: 1916-01-01

Hometown: Gallivare, Lapland, Sweden

Education: Art & Trade School of Design and Hotel School

Achievements

Discoveries: Discovering humanity and discovering the present.

Expeditions: Traveled around the world eight times--on foot and on a sailing boat. Photographed flights over the antiquities of Peru, Egypt, Turkey, Yukatan, Greece and Sweden.

Biography

"The greatest art is the art of living," Marianne Greenwood

Marianne Hederstrom Greenwood (1916 - 2006) was born in northern Sweden where her father was the forest warden, and growing up in such a rural area (Lapplanders follow their herds of reindeer across the Arctic tundra) gave her an appreciation and understanding of people whose lives are very different from those in cities. As a young girl, her mother took her to a different part of Europe every year. Marianne borrowed a camera and began to record the faces of the people she met in Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Austria. In her early twenties, she was caught up in the pre-war chaos of Europe and just before the war ended, she moved to Stockholm to attend a school of art and design. After various jobs she moved to Switzerland and attended a hotel school in Lausanne. In 1951, at the age of 35, Marianne bought her first professional camera and moved to southern France where she lived in the Musée Picasso with Pablo Picasso and his family for seven years. At the museum, she became the "in-house photographer" for the collection, and photographer to Picasso and numerous visitors, including Matisse, Chagall, and Miroch Leger. She began a long friendship and collaboration with Evert Taube, a troubadour regarded as a national poet of Sweden. He stayed for a long period in Antibes and together they roamed the Camarque in Southern France. In 1963, Marianne resumed her travels, visiting the still-wild lands of the Americas, the Pacific Islands, Papua New Guinea and parts of Asia, where she lived for an extended period with indiginenous people.

Marianne Greenwood’s marvelous adventures have been recorded in six books of autobiography, the most famous of which is The Tattooed Heart of Livingston, an intensely personal account of a love affair and of encounters with bullfighters, artists, brigands and Indians. 

Some 30,000 of her extraordinary photographs are now held by the National Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm and the Musée Picasso Antibes.  Marianne has contributed her texts and photos in numerous books and magazines in France, Germany, the United States, Sweden and other countries.

Fun Facts

Favorite Item to have in the field: A camera

Heroes: Fritz Lang; filmmaker