Alfred Eisenstaedt was one of the masters of the candid photograph in the twentieth century. He lived through a time that spans eight decades of the twentieth century, and he was the greatest photojournalist of his time. Called "the father of photojournalism," Eisenstaedt perfected certain techniques for capturing the spontaneous moment that has given the world some of the most enduring photographic images. He covered European royalty, German leaders, American celebrities, and captured landscapes from St. Moritz to Martha's Vineyard (Eisenstaedt 5). But his acclaim came from his more spirited images; the ones that refined everyday life to its essential environment. Eisenstaedt said “the camera was a means of instilling pure joy into the hearts of mankind” (Eisenstaedt 7).
Alfred Eisenstaedt was born December 6, 1898, in Dirschau, West Prussia (now part of Poland). He was one of three sons of Regina and Joseph Eisenstaedt. His father was a merchant. The family moved to Berlin when Alfred was eight, and remained there until Hitler came to power. He may well have followed in his father's footsteps, were it not for an uncle. When Eisenstaedt turned fourteen, his uncle gave him an Eastman Kodak No. 3 Folding Camera with roll film (Eisenstaedt 8).
At age seventeen Eisenstaedt was drafted into the German Army and served on the Flanders front. On April 9, 1918 during the second western offensive, shrapnel tore through both his legs. He was sent home as the only survivor of his artillery battery. It was a year before he was able to walk again unaided. During his recuperation, his interest in photography renewed. Walking first with crutches, later with a cane, Eisenstaedt attended museums to study light and composition. He became a belt-and-button salesman by trade in 1922. With the money Eisenstaedt was able to save, he bought photographic equipment. Developing the pictures in his bathroom, Eisenstaedt had yet to learn there was such a thing as an enlarger (Eisenstaedt 12).
At the time Eisenstaedt had no idea that professional photography even existed, because photojournalism was at its very beginning stages. In 1927, while vacationing with his parents in Czechoslovakia, he photographed a woman playing tennis. Taken from a hillside fifty yards away, the photo captured the long shadow the woman cast on the tennis court. Eisenstaedt wrote in his book Witness to Our Time:
I took one picture of the scene with a Zeiss Ideal camera, 9 x12 with glass plates. I was rather satisfied when I showed it to a friend of mine. 'Why don't you enlarge it?' he asked. And he showed me a contraption of a wooden box with a frosted light bulb inside attached to a 9x12 camera, same as mine.... When I saw that one could enlarge and eliminate unnecessary details, the photo bug bit me and I saw enormous possibilities (17).
This discovery also included the possibility of making a living out of his hobby of photography. His tennis player photo sold to Der Welt Spiegel for three marks, about twelve dollars at the time.
By age thirty-one, he quit the belt-and-button business to become a full-time photographer. In doing so, he would come to define the profession. Eisenstaedt began his free-lance career for Pacific and Atlantic Photos' Berlin office in 1928, which was taken over by the Associated Press in 1931. As a pioneer in his field, Eisenstaedt had few rules to follow. "Photojournalism had just started," Eisenstaedt has remarked "and I knew very little about photography. It was an adventure, and I was always amazed when anything came out" (Eisenstaedt 6).
One famous photograph from 1932 depicts a waiter at the ice rink of the Grand Hotel. This photograph was one of the few that Eisenstaedt ever set up beforehand. "I did one smashing picture," Eisenstaedt has written, "of the skating headwaiter. To be sure the picture was sharp, I put a chair on the ice and asked the waiter to skate by it. I had a Miroflex camera and focused on the chair" (Eisenstaedt 54).
Using cumbersome equipment with tripods and glass plate negatives, Eisenstaedt produced many photos on assignment of musicians, writers, and royalty (Eisenstaedt 12). While others rendered the American century in similarly uplifting photos, no one before or since has surpassed Eisenstaedt in using a still camera to convey such a cheerful moment. At that time Eisenstaedt began working with the innovative Leica 35mm camera, which had been invented four years prior. His assignments included portraits of statesmen and famous artists, as well as social events. By 1933 he was sent to Italy to shoot the first meeting of Hitler and Mussolini (17).
In 1934 Eisenstaedt had acquired a Rolleiflex camera and immigrated to America. By now, he was a master of the candid photograph. A year later, in New York he was soon hired with three other photographers—Margaret Bourke-White, Thomas McAvoy and Peter Stackpole—by Time founder Henry Luce, for a secret start-up known only as "Magazine X." After six months of testing the mystery venture, it premiered as LIFE magazine on November 23, 1936. The first ten-cent issue featured five pages of Eisenstaedt's pictures. The second week Eisenstaedt—now dubbed "Eisie" by his peers—had his photo of WestPoint on the cover.
Some of Eisenstaedt’s other early assignments included the recovery of America as the country pulled out of the Depression. He traveled his new homeland sending back images of shacks and abandoned cars in Oregon, skid row derelicts 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, and so landed a good deal of celebrity coverage instead (Eisenstaedt 8).
Eisenstaedt became known to millions worldwide through his work for LIFE Magazine. His eighty-six covers and over twenty-five hundred assignments for LIFE have portrayed the earth-shaking events and influential people of the twentieth century, from the dignity of royalty to the elegance of movie stars, from the passion of scholars to the determination of diplomats. John F. Kennedy, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, and Winston Churchill are just a few of the luminaries captured forever through Eisenstaedt (Eisenstaedt 88).
In 1942 Eisenstaedt became a U.S. citizen and traveled overseas to document the effects of the war. In Japan, he accompanied Emperor Hirohito on tours to see the destruction caused by the atom bomb. Eisenstaedt recalls a particularly stirring experience in Hiroshima:
A mother and child were looking at some green vegetables they had raised from seeds and planted in the ruins. When I asked the woman if I could take her picture, she bowed deeply and posed for me. Her expression was one of bewilderment, anguish and resignation ... all I could do, after I had taken her picture, was to bow very deeply before her (118).
Short in stature, Eisenstaedt stood only slightly over five feet tall. He used a 2 1/4" Rolleiflex "because you can hold a Rolleiflex without raising it to your eye; so they didn't see me taking the pictures" (Eisenstaedt 9). Eisenstaedt was speaking of the time he photographed American soldiers saying farewell to their wives and sweethearts in 1944 on assignment for LIFE. "I just kept motionless like a statue,” he said. "They never saw me clicking away. For the kind of photography I do, one has to be very unobtrusive and to blend in with the crowd" (9).
VJ Day in Times Square on August 15, 1945 provided the opportunity for Eisenstaedt to photograph the image for which he is possibly most famous. He remembers:
I saw a sailor running along the street grabbing any and every girl in sight,” he explained. "Whether she was a grandmother, stout, thin, old, didn't make any difference. I was running ahead of him with my Leica looking back over my shoulder...Then suddenly, in a flash, I saw something white being grabbed. I turned around and clicked the moment the sailor kissed the nurse (112).
Eisenstaedt was very gratified and pleased with this enduring image. To shoot that victory kiss he used 1/125 second exposure, aperture between 5.6 and 8 on Kodak Super Double X film. "People tell me that when I am in heaven they will remember this picture," Eisenstaedt said (111).
His classic, the VJ Day kiss, embodied the joy of victory after years of war. So universal has the photograph become that many Americans actually believed they were one of the participants in that Times Square kiss "heard 'round the world." Over the years, more than a dozen men and several women have written LIFE with convincing explanations as to why he or she had to be the sailor or the nurse in Eisenstaedt’s famous frame (112).
But his VJ Day kiss photograph, Eisenstaedt said, was not his personal favorite. That honor goes to a photo of a young woman in a box seat at La Scala Opera, Milan from 1934. Eisenstaedt was looking for the telling detail to place in the foreground of his image. "Suddenly," he said, "I saw a lovely young society girl sitting next to an empty box. From that box I took another picture, with the girl in the foreground. For years and years this has been one of my prize photographs. Without the girl I would not have had a memorable picture" (Eisenstaedt 14). Editors at Die Dame, who had assigned Eisenstaedt to the opera, did not feel similarly. They hated the photograph and never printed a single copy of it.
In 1949, Eisenstaedt married Kathy Kaye, a South African woman whom he met in New York. The 1950s took him to Korea with the American troops and to Italy to show the plight of the poor there. His work also took him to England, where he would have the opportunity to photograph Winston Churchill. Portrait assignments such as this one often made Eisenstaedt privy to little-known secrets about his subjects. When he asked Lord Beaverbrook how many cigars Churchill smoked each day, he said, "It's all a fake. He smokes only two cigars a day, but when photographed he always has one handy. That's his trademark" (Eisenstaedt 128).
Eisenstaedt's 1951 photo of a drum major is a famous example of his ability to capture a spur-of-the-moment photograph. "Another picture I hope to be remembered by," recalled the photographer "is this one of the drum major rehearsing at the University of Michigan. It was early in the morning, and I saw a little boy running after him, and all the faculty children on the playing field ran after the boy, and I ran after them. This is a completely spontaneous, unstaged picture" (Eisenstaedt 158).
Eisenstaedt said that his most difficult subject was by far Ernest Hemingway. Once he told Eisenstaedt after a fishing tournament, "I think you came up too close to me, so I had to shoot at you." "I said, 'Papa, I don't believe it.' Hemingway dropped his gin glass, grabbed me and started to throw me, cameras and all, into the water. I threw my arm around his neck to keep from falling and he pushed me with his fist—but very softly because he had quickly got control of himself. 'Never say again that you don't believe Papa,' he said" (226).
For LIFE's Fourth of July issue in 1952 Charles Laughton chose his favorite American writings to be read aloud. Eisenstaedt illustrated these verses by traveling across the country—to Minnehaha Falls for Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, to the Hudson Valley for Irving's Rip Van Winkle, and on a Riverboat for Twain's Life on the Mississippi. Eisenstaedt, skilled professional that he was, "always behaved like an amateur with little equipment" (12). As a result, the world has some of the most spontaneous moments to enjoy as a permanent visual delight. He documented the lighter side of life with no less earnest an approach. "You learn something from every picture you take," Eisenstaedt said after shooting a story on women's underwear for LIFE (13).
In 1979, at age eighty-one, Eisenstaedt returned to Germany for the first time. He had an exhibition of ninety-three photographs of German life from the 1930s through 1979. This presentation showed the years of his work when he traveled through Europe and the U.S. Remarkably though, Eisenstaedt's first major retrospective show did not come until age eighty-eight when the International Center of Photography presented one hundred and twenty-five of his prints (17).
Eisenstaedt had his first one-man exhibition in 1954 at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York (Eisenstaedt 220). He had many subsequent exhibits and was the recipient of 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 magazine heralded Eisenstaedt's V-J Day, Times Square, 1945 as one of the ten greatest images in the history of photojournalism (112). In addition, New York City named an Alfred Eisenstaedt Day in his honor. The artist has also authored many books, including: Eisenstaedt's Album, People; The Eye of Eisenstaedt; Witness To Our Time; Eisenstaedt's Guide to Photography; Eisenstaedt's Martha's Vineyard; Eisenstaedt: Remembrances.
Eisenstaedt's final working days would start at nine in the morning when his sister-in-law, LuLu Kaye, escorted him the five blocks from his apartment to the Time and Life Building. He often worked in suspenders and a bow tie, showing his ability to blend in with the crowd. He answered letters and phone calls long before other workers had arrived. Eisenstaedt's days were filled supervising the printing of his photographs for the next exhibit or book project. His five-foot-four stature maneuvered nimbly in an office crammed with books and papers and tidy yellow cardboard boxes of prints. His filing system was perhaps inefficiently simple: the boxes marked only "Germany," "Great Americans," "Great Englishmen," "Musicians," and "Miscellaneous." He had no trouble locating pictures, however. Eisenstaedt had a photographic memory (Eisenstaedt 8).
Alfred Eisenstaedt died in 1995 at the age of ninety-six. Until the last years of his life, he was still shooting and adding to an inventory that included hundreds of thousands of negatives. The key to Eisenstaedt's genius lay in his humility and humanity. One of his fellow photographers, and later LIFE's director of photography, John Loengard, explained Eisenstaedt's enduring success: "He never tries to please editors. He only makes pictures that please him. For some sixty years, LIFE readers were the beneficiaries of those pictures, a life's work that was also his pleasure."
In Witness to Our World, Eisenstaedt wrote:
My style hasn't changed much in all these sixty years," Eisenstaedt explained. "I still use, most of the time, existing light and try not to push people around. I have to be as much a diplomat as a photographer. People often don't take me seriously because I carry so little equipment and make so little fuss. When I married in 1949, my wife asked me. 'But where are your real cameras?' I never carried a lot of equipment. My motto has always been, 'Keep it simple' (Eisenstaedt 9).
Prominent museums and galleries world-wide have exhibited Eisenstaedt's photographs including: the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the International Center of Photography (a retrospective), and the Philadelphia College of Art, among others. Eisenstaedt's photographs are in the enduring collections of the Royal Photographic Society, London; the International Center of Photography, New York; the George Eastman House, Rochester; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (Eisenstaedt 341).
Works Cited
Eisenstaedt, Alfred. Eisenstaedt's Album, People. Westford, Massachusetts: Penguin Books, 1969.
Eisenstaedt, Alfred. Witness to Our World. New York City: Viking Press, 1966.
