Alfred Eisenstaedt

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Alfred Eisenstaedt (born December 6, 1898 in Dirschau , West Prussia ; died August 24, 1995 in Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard , Massachusetts , USA) was one of the most influential photo reporters of the 20th century.

Life

Alfred Eisenstaedt, son of a Jewish merchant family, started taking photos at the age of fourteen with a given Eastman Kodak No. 3 folding camera . After the First World War he worked as a haberdashery seller. In his free time, Eisenstaedt occupied himself with photographic techniques, discovered the stylistic device of enlarging a section and began to experiment with it. In a report for the magazine Weltspiegel about a tennis tournament, the inclusion of a tennis player was so well received that Eisenstaedt's career path as a freelance photographer was paved.

In 1927, as in 1914, he began to work as a freelancer for the Berliner Tageblatt . In Berlin of the 1920s and his rise began: the motifs that he found he transformed into picture messages, after which the newly founded magazine examined and photo agencies. In 1929 he made photojournalism his permanent profession. His first commission for the Nobel Prize nomination for the writer Thomas Mann in the same year received a lot of attention. In the years that followed, Eisenstaedt made a name for itself through portrait photography . The recordings of Marlene Dietrich , George Bernard Shaw and Richard Strauss , but also of dictators such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, have become famous .

The persecution of German Jews initiated by the Nazi regime , Eisenstaedt was excluded from membership in the Reich Chamber of Culture and emigrated to the United States in 1935 . Soon he became the star reporter for the Associated Press . The bustling and often described as "lively" Eisenstaedt soon found orders from renowned publishers and worked for publications such as Harper's Bazaar , Vogue or the newly founded Life magazine, of which he was to become the most important employee.

Alfred Eisenstaedt's last photo work was a series of portraits of the Clinton family on Martha's Vineyard in August 1993 for People Magazine

In the following years Eisenstaedt delivered numerous, often award-winning war reports for Life (in 1950 he was Photographer of the Year ). B. with his reports on the war between Ethiopia and Italy as well as in 1955 about the twenty-five year crown anniversary of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia.

In the 1960s Eisenstaedt made numerous trips; so he reported on the inauguration of John F. Kennedy and documented the early days of the young president. At the end of the 1960s he wrote several essays with mostly cultural aspects: portraits of actors and artists, e.g. B. by Sophia Loren or the pianist Vladimir Horowitz .

Over time, over 2,500 of his photo reports have been printed, plus 92 cover photos for Life . Well into old age - he was active for over seventy years - he was one of the most influential chroniclers with the camera.

Eisenstaedt is (posthumously) an honorary member of the Association of Freelance Photo Designers (BFF).

plant

Alfred Eisenstaedt never specialized in certain subjects in photography. He delivered both humorous photo reports z. B. about ice-skating waiters in St. Moritz as well as extremely time-critical recordings. He photographed people from contemporary history as well as completely unknown people in everyday situations.

Eisenstaedt's works are characterized by a natural ease in dealing with people and things. He was one of the first to work exclusively with a 35mm camera . Along with Erich Salomon, Alfred Eisenstaedt is one of the pioneers of so-called available light photography. Eisenstaedt preferred to rely on the existing lighting conditions, worked with highly sensitive film material and an open aperture; he did without flashing or staged scenes in order to preserve the authenticity of the situation.

This technique allowed him the discretion and flexibility he needed for the pictures of the beautiful and the rich (e.g. for Vogue or Harper's Bazaar), but also for the “bad guys” of politics. The camera was less of a cloak of invisibility than a mechanical eye. Among the huge number of photos he published in Life are some that have achieved world fame on their own (such as the kiss of joy at the 1945 New York Victory Parade in Times Square ). He was never an edgy social critic - rather charming and optimistic. Nevertheless, some of his recordings get under the viewer's skin, because his gaze never remained superficial, it always went deep. Eisenstaedt was in fact one of the founders of photojournalism as an art form.

One of Eisenstaedt's most impressive and oppressive photo sequences are photographs of Joseph Goebbels that he took in 1933 at a conference of the League of Nations in Geneva . Goebbels was initially friendly, but made a hateful expression on his face when he learned that the photographer who was taking his picture was of Jewish descent. The latter photo went through the world press. Eisenstaedt himself only became aware of the expressiveness of the photo much later in his autobiography "Eisenstaedt über Eisenstaedt".

Eisenstaedt's best-known picture is VJ Day in Times Square from a series of four pictures that he took on the day of the victory over the Japanese, VJ Day on August 15, 1945 . The photo, which is now available in countless poster shops around the world, shows a sailor in Times Square in New York who, in a rapture of joy, spontaneously and hands-on kisses a nurse who is unknown to him. The woman, which symbolism, came from Austria, had fled the Nazi regime because of her Jewish ancestors and found refuge and safety in the USA. Her name was Margarete Zimmer . An original print "VJ Day Kiss in Times Square" was auctioned in 2016 in an Austrian auction house for 48,000 euros.

Alongside Robert Capa , Henri Cartier-Bresson and Lee Miller, Alfred Eisenstaedt is one of the most published picture reporters in the world.

literature

  • Alfred Eisenstaedt: Eisenstaedt about Eisenstaedt . Schirmer / Mosel (1985), ISBN 3-88814-183-4
  • L. Fritz Gruber (Ed.): Great Photographers of our Century. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt (1964), p. 80 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The 75 Best LIFE Photos, Eyes of Hate: Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1933
  2. ↑ The kiss - the story of a world-famous photo . ( lotsearch.de [accessed April 16, 2018]).
personal data
SURNAME Eisenstaedt, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German photo reporter
DATE OF BIRTH December 6, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Dirschau (Polish: Tczewin), Poland
DATE OF DEATH August 24, 1995
Place of death New York City