Arthur Strong freelanced for the Associated Press and Camera Press agencies. He is best known for his exclusive portrait photos of C S Lewis, the Christian apologist and author of the Narnia stories.
Strong experimented with colour photography in its early days. He was the sole British press photographer at the launch of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, and was the only photographer to take colour pictures of the opening ceremony. They were published around the world and were still being used 50 years later. One was of Lord Halifax, head of the British delegation, signing the treaty, and another was of the Soviet Foreign Secretary Vyacheslav Molotov with Andrei Gromyko, then ambassador in Washington DC.
In 1946 he married the Norwegian designer and landscape painter Signe Lund. He and Signe travelled in the 1950s throughout Africa, where MRA was extensively at work in helping to ease the transition to independence of African countries. In Ghana he took exclusive photos of President Kwame Nkrumah at the Independence Day celebrations in 1954.
His aim was always to illustrate the human factor and the importance of human relationships.
