Alfred Eisenstaedt, the man behind the camera that captured some of the most enduring images in modern history, was a great popular photographer of the twentieth century. He was a preeminent photojournalist of his time, a time that spanned eight decades, and has often been called ‘the father of photojournalism’.
Right up to the last years of a life that spanned almost the entire twentieth century, ‘Eisie’, as he was known, continued to shoot, adding to a stock of hundreds of thousands of negatives.
His last working days would begin at nine in the morning when his sister-in-law, Lulu Kaye, escorted him the five blocks from his apartment to the Time-Life building. Looking dapper in suspenders and often a bow tie, he answered letters and phone calls long before others arrived. His days were filled with supervising the printing of his photographs for the next exhibition or book project. His six-foot frame manoeuvred nimbly around an office crammed with books and papers and tidy yellow cardboard boxes of prints. His filing system was perhaps inefficiently simple: the boxes were simply labelled ”Germany”, ”Great Americans”, ”Great Englishmen”, ”Musicians” and ”Miscellaneous”. But he had no trouble finding the pictures. His memory was photographic.
Eisie’s final project, 95 for 95, which brought together 95 images in an exhibition for his 95th birthday, was exhibited nationally in 1993.
Alfred Eisenstaedt was born on 6 December 1898 in Dirschau, West Prussia (now part of Poland), one of three sons of Regina and Joseph Eisenstaedt, a merchant.
The family moved to Berlin when Alfred was eight and remained there until Hitler came to power. He might well have followed in his father’s footsteps had it not been for an uncle who gave the boy an Eastman Kodak nº3 folding camera, in 1912.
Interrupting his studies at the University of Berlin, Eisenstaedt was drafted into the German army in 1916 during World War I. He served at the front until April 1918, when gunfire crippled both his legs. During his year-long convalescence, he became fascinated by the local art museums and studied the paintings of the masters.
in 1922, he used the money he had saved to buy photographic equipment. Developing the pictures in his bathroom, Eisenstaedt had yet to learn that there was such a thing as an enlarger.
In 1927, while on holiday with his parents in Czechoslovakia, he photographed a woman playing tennis. Taken from a hillside 50 metres away, the photograph captured the long shadow cast by the woman on the tennis court. He wrote: “I took a picture of the scene with a Zeiss Ideal camera, 9×12 with glass plates. I was quite pleased when I showed it to a friend. Why don’t you enlarge it?’ he asked. And he showed me a contraption consisting of a wooden box with a frosted light bulb inside, attached to a 9×12 camera, just like mine….When I saw that you could enlarge and eliminate unnecessary details, the photo bug bit me and I saw enormous possibilities.” (Eisenstaedt 1985)
These possibilities included making a living from his pictures. In 1927 Eisenstaedt sold his first photograph of this tennis player to Der Weltspiegel for three marks, about $12 at the time. By 1929, at the age of 31, he had given up the belt and button business to become a full-time photographer. In doing so, he would come to define the profession.
As a pioneer in his field, Eisenstaedt had few rules to follow. He looked to the work of Martin Munkasci and Dr Erich Salomon, with whom he had the opportunity to work.
In 1928, Eisenstaedt worked as a freelancer for the Berlin office of Pacific and Atlantic Photos, which became part of the Associated Press in 1931. It was at this time that Eisenstaedt began to work with the innovative Leica 35mm camera, which had been developed four years earlier. His assignments included portraits of statesmen and famous artists, as well as social events such as the winter season in St. Moritz. In 1933 he was sent to Italy to photograph the first meeting of the fascist leaders Hitler and Mussolini. His aggressive yet invisible style allowed him to get close to the two dictators.
Despite his success in Europe, Eisenstaedt had heard that the greatest opportunity for photojournalists was now in the United States. In 1935, two years after Hitler came to power, Eisenstaedt emigrated to America. He sailed from Le Havre on the Ile de France, arriving in New York at the end of November with a portfolio overflowing with photographs of European politicians, entertainers and royalty, including Hitler, Mussolini, Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin, Arturo Toscanini and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Among the impressive variety of photographs in his portfolio was a photo essay Eisenstaedt took aboard the Graf Zeppelin, which impressed the editor the most.
In New York, he was soon hired by Time magazine founder Henry Luce, along with three other photographers – Margaret Bourke-White, Thomas McCoy and Peter Stackpole – for a secret start-up known only as PROJECT X. After six months of testing, the mysterious venture debuted as Life magazine on 23 November 1936.
The first 10-cent issue featured five pages of Eisenstaedt’s pictures. By the second week, Eisenstaedt – now nicknamed ‘Eisie’ by his colleagues – had his photo of West Point Military Academy on the cover. Other early assignments included America’s recovery as the country emerged from the Depression. He travelled to his new home and sent back images of cabins and abandoned cars in Oregon, skid row blight in Los Angeles and signs advertising beer for a nickel. Because he was not yet a citizen, Eisenstaedt could not be sent to cover the war, so instead he landed many celebrity assignments.
In 1942, Eisenstaedt finally became a US citizen and was able to travel overseas to document the effects of the war. In Japan in 1945, he accompanied Emperor Hirohito on tours to see the destruction caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He recalls one particularly memorable experience in Hiroshima. “A mother and child were looking at some green vegetables they had grown from seeds and planted in the ruins.
When I asked the woman if I could take her photograph, she bowed deeply and posed for me. Her expression was one of bewilderment, anguish and resignation… all I could do, after taking her photograph, was to bow deeply before her.”
To capture what has become perhaps his most reproduced image and one of the iconic images of the twentieth century, popularly known as The Kiss in Times Square on V-J Day, 1945. Eisenstaedt had followed the sailor as he ran down the street, grabbing every girl in sight. It didn’t matter if she was a grandmother, fat, thin, old. “None of the possible images appealed to me. Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse.”
In 1991, he told a New York Times reporter: ”Although I am 92, my brain is 30 years old”. To prove it, he recalled that to shoot the victory kiss he used an exposure of 1\125 seconds, aperture between 5.6 and 8, on Kodak Super Double X film.
But this image, he said, was not his personal favourite. That honour goes to a photograph of a young woman in a box seat at La Scala in 1933. The editors of Die Dame, who had assigned Eisie to the opera, did not think so. They never printed the picture.
In 1949 he married Kathy Kaye, a South African he had met in New York. The 1950s took him to Korea with the American troops, to Italy to highlight the plight of the poor, and to England, where Winston Churchill sat for him. Portrait assignments like these often revealed little-known secrets about his subjects.
For the Fourth of July issue of Life in 1952, actor Charles Laughton was asked to choose his favourite American poem to read aloud. Eisenstaedt illustrated these verses by travelling across the country – to Minnehaha Falls for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, to the Hudson Valley for Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, and on a riverboat for Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.
He documented the lighter side of life with a no less serious approach. “You learn something from every picture you take,” he said after shooting a story on women’s lingerie for Life. In all, he shot nearly 92 covers for the magazine and some 2,500 assignments, amassing some 10,000 prints.
Portraiture remained a constant: Marlene Dietrich smoldering in top hat and tails; Marilyn Monroe vamping in her garden; John F Kennedy clowning with his young daughter Caroline; Albert Einstein lecturing to a class of Princeton physicists; Sophia Loren – Eisie’s favourite model – wearing a negligee in a cover shot that caused some Life readers to cancel their subscriptions. However famous or infamous the subject, Eisenstaedt was at ease with it. “In 1938, our picture editor, Wilson Hicks, said to me: ‘Alfred, I’m sending you to Hollywood. Don’t be afraid and don’t be in awe of these queens – you are a king in your profession. I’ve never forgotten that.”
He did, however, allow himself a few autographs and cherished a collection that included notes from artist Norman Rockwell, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and actress Lillian Gish.
In 1979, at the age of 81, Eisenstaedt returned to Germany for the first time. An exhibition of 93 photographs of German life from the 1930s to that year toured Europe and the United States. Remarkably, Eisenstaedt’s first major retrospective did not take place until 1986, at the age of 88, when the International Center of Photography in New York presented 125 of his prints.
Eisenstaedt has received numerous awards for his work, including the National Medal of the Arts, the International Understanding Award for Outstanding Achievement, the Photographic Society of America Achievement Award, and Photographer of the Year, Encyclopedia Britannica.
Time named Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day, Times Square, 1945 one of the 10 greatest images in the history of photojournalism.
The city of New York named an Alfred Eisenstaedt Day in his honour, and the International Center for Photography (ICP) honoured Eisenstaedt with its Master of Photography Award in 1988. President George H.W. Bush awarded him the National Medal of Arts in 1989. Far from resting on his laurels, Eisie continued to take commissions: when President Clinton holidayed on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where Eisie has a home, in 1994, he was there to photograph the First Family and present them with prints of their choice. Bill Clinton chose Drum Major at the University of Michigan in 1951 and his daughter Chelsea chose Future Ballerinas of the American Ballet Theatre in 1936.
In 1994, Life and Vanity Fair published portraits of Eisie on the Brooklyn Bridge by Annie Leibovitz. He was telling me what to do throughout the shoot,” Leibovitz recalls. ”But then he’d say “This is your picture, do whatever you want.” Eisie chose the location, however, ”because I am younger than the Brooklyn Bridge,” he told the New York Times.
A fellow photographer and later Life’s director of photography, John Loengard, explained Eisenstaedt’s enduring success: ”He never tries to please editors. He just takes pictures that he likes.”
For some 60 years, Life readers were the beneficiaries of these pictures, a life’s work that was also his joy. Alfred Eisenstaedt died in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, on 23 August 1995. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Royal Photographic Society, London; the International Center of Photography, New York; the International Museum of Photography and Film, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
