EISENSTAEDT, ALFRED

EISENSTAEDT, ALFRED (1898–1995), photographer. Born in Dirschau, West Prussia (now Tczew, Poland), Eisenstaedt was the pre-eminent photojournalist of his time, whose pioneering images for Life magazine helped define American photojournalism. Over a career that lasted more than 50 years, Eisenstaedt became famous as the quintessential Life photographer, producing more than 2,500 picture stories and 90 covers for the magazine. His most famous photograph, of an exuberant American sailor kissing a nurse in a dance-like dip in Times Square on V-J Day, August 14, 1945, summed up the euphoria many Americans felt as the war came to a close. It is the most widely reproduced of the magazine's millions of photographs. Another of his best-known images shows Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, in 1933, glaring at the camera. "Here are the eyes of hate," the photographer later wrote. When Alfred was eight, his father, a merchant, moved the family to Berlin, and they remained there until Hitler came to power. At 17, Alfred was drafted into the German army and served on the Flanders front, where he was wounded in both legs. Sent home, he recuperated for a year before he could walk unaided. He used the time to visit museums and study light and composition. Although he became a belt and button salesman, he saved his money and bought photographic equipment. In 1927, while vacationing with his parents in Czechoslovakia, he took a photograph of a woman playing tennis. He was on a hillside 50 yards away, and the photo captured the long shadow the woman cast on the court. He sold it to Der Welt Spiegel for about $12. By the age of 31, he became a full-time photographer, working for Pacific and Atlantic Photos, which became the Associated Press. At the time he began working with the innovative Leica 35 mm. camera, which had been invented four years earlier. His assignments included portraits of statesmen and famous artists. By 1933 he was sent to Italy to shoot the first meeting of Hitler and Mussolini. Two years after Hitler took power, Eisenstaedt immigrated to the United States, where he was soon hired with three other photographers, including margaret bourke-white , to be the original photographers for the new Life magazine. The first issue carried five pages of Eisenstaedt's pictures. He became known for his ability to bring back visually striking pictures from almost any assignment. Among the many celebrities he photographed were Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, George Bernard Shaw, and a smoldering Marlene Dietrich in top hat and tails. His mastery of the Leica allowed him to capture his subjects in unguarded moments, creating a sense of intimacy. In a 1947 picture, for example, the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer puffs on a cigarette as he stands in front of a blackboard covered with mathematical formulas. Eisenstaedt became an American citizen in 1942 and traveled overseas to document the effects of the war. He received many awards and honors, including the Presidential Medal of Arts and the Master of Photography Award, given by the International Center of Photography. He continued to work until shortly before his death. In 1993 he photographed President Clinton, his wife, and their daughter on Martha's Vineyard, Mass. He was the subject of many exhibitions and was the author of many books, including Witness to Our Time (1966), The Eye of Eisenstaedt (1969), Eisenstaedt's Guide to Photography (1978), and Eisenstaedt: Germany (1981). At age 81 he returned to Germany for the first time for an exhibition of pictures he had taken there in the 1920s and 1930s. Things in Germany seemed different, he said, from when he left. "You couldn't call it prettier, but maybe more relaxed." (Stewart Kampel (2nd ed.)