Alfred Eisenstaedt
A keen understanding of his cameras and subjects made this photographer an icon. Roger Hicks tells us more
At first sight, some of Eisenstaedt’s work looks formulaic, banal, stagy and contrived. It looks like hack reportage next to his best pictures, which knock your socks off: his portrait of Stravinsky, for example, where the huge abstract shapes of the piano and the background dwarf the musician. Or Goebbels, whose smile changed to a glare when he learned that Eisenstaedt was Jewish. Or the sailor kissing the nurse on VJ Day in Times Square, New York.
But then you look closer at the stuff that’s apparently formulaic, banal, stagy and contrived and you realise the truth of his observation – that it’s more important to click with the subject than to click the camera. Take his pictures of Marilyn Monroe. It might seem hard to take a bad picture of one of the most beautiful women who ever lived, but it’s even harder to take a really great picture which shows you her face as if for the first time. ‘Eisie’ managed it.
Born to a Jewish family in Dirschau in West Prussia (now in Poland) in 1898 and educated in Berlin, he served in the German army in World War I but emigrated to the USA in 1935 for obvious reasons. He had already made enough of a name for himself, both in reportage (cf. the Goebbels picture, 1933) and in show business (cf. Marlene Dietrich in Der Blaue Engel, 1930) that when Henry Luce launched Life magazine in 1936, Eisenstadt was one of only four staff photographers.
As well as serious hard-core reportage and major picture essays, he shot a lot of ‘froth’, such as the 1932 picture reproduced here of René Breguet, head waiter at the Grand Hotel at St Moritz. But even the ‘froth’ well demonstrates his absolute technical mastery as well as a sort of playfulness which invites us into whatever world he was photographing, whether it was the playgrounds of the financially overprivileged or the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935.
He died in 1995, having proven that a great photographer can use anything. This picture was taken with a Miroflex, but although his name is often associated with Leica and to a lesser extent Ermanox, he also used a Rolleiflex TLR extensively from about 1935 on. On the other hand, he also demonstrated that some cameras or styles of camera are best suited to some photographers or styles of photography. In particular, he knew how and when to be unobtrusive, and mostly he used quiet, unobtrusive cameras: not for him the bulky, noisy Speed Graphic or the clattering motor-drive. Likewise, he preferred available light: no dazzling flashbulb or flickering strobe. He seems always to have used the minimum that was necessary to get a picture. From the 1940s onwards, this was usually a Leica – in recognition of which, in 1960, Leitz gave him Leica M3 no. 1000001.
‘It’s more important to click with the subject than to click the camera’