Life’s Lens Genius : He Put the ‘Photo’ Into Journalism

At the age of 88, he still comes to work every morning, to an office crowded with dozens of bright yellow boxes full of enduring images of six decades.

Arthritis has slowed his stride, but his brown eyes are still sharp, his reflexes are quick and he has the upper body muscle tone of a man in his 40s. When he walks down the corridors of the Time and Life Building in Manhattan, long-time friends greet him as “Eisie.”

Before we talk about serious issues--his considerable role in chronicling history, the changing nature of photojournalism, the pressures of television on a new generation of still photographers--let Alfred Eisenstaedt reminisce about some of the million photographs he has taken. It is a visual journey down the highways and back roads of our time.

“Look at these boxes,” he proclaims proudly. “On this table here, there are at least 3,000 or 4,000 pounds of pictures. They are so full you can hardly lift them.” As a box is withdrawn he warns: “Be careful this doesn’t fall down.”

Historic Photo Files

When the cover of the box is removed, the expressive face of Winston Churchill with a big cigar appears on Eisenstaedt’s gray metal desk. “That was taken in 1951 . . . . His hobby was watching the mating of guppies. He had four aquariums of fish and I wanted that in the background. He was tipsy, he’d had a nip too many. We had to wait two hours after he came down from dinner or lunch, he was so dizzy.”

Former President Harry S. Truman out for a walk, looking jaunty with a cane. “This is Truman in 1956, the day his daughter married Clifton Daniel of the New York Times. It was 5:30 or 6 in the morning.”

Hiroshima in 1945. “It was unbelievable. I flew over in a Piper Cub and I was there a few hours. I photographed also children sitting around a fire. It was very horrible. You think in terms of your house burns down, and you sit there and there is nothing left.”

Adrift on Dirigible

An outside view of the dirigible Graf Zeppelin as crew members scamper to repair its skin over the Atlantic. “I did a story inside the hull and the motor suddenly stopped. I asked what was going on. They told me they were repairing it. I wondered if they would let me outside for a moment. They let me (outside) for less than half a minute. There was no wind and we were drifting, literally like a balloon.”

George Bernard Shaw playing the piano. “I was told it was impossible to have an appointment. The Associated Press told me he was a vegetarian. I ordered a bunch of 20 bananas and sent a portfolio of my pictures. Two days later, I got word I could come up . . . I wanted to pose him. He said, ‘I’m a photographer myself. I know how to pose.’ ”

The photos go on and on: Shirley Temple in a swing, Eleanor Roosevelt with Mickey Rooney and Charlie Chaplin, Edward R. Murrow, Robert Kennedy looking very stern, Robert Frost, Joan Sutherland, a view of the 38th Parallel during the Korean War, Arturo Toscanini, Salvador Dali, Marlene Dietrich, Richard M. Nixon, Frank Lloyd Wright, Sophia Loren in a skimpy gown. When Life printed that one, Eisenstaedt says, the magazine got “2,500 letters and 800 cancellations. It was the time of the Vietnam war, and mothers of soldiers said, ‘I can’t send that magazine to my soldier boy in Vietnam. It would spoil his morals.’ How far removed they were!”

The photographer--one of the original four Life hired when it began publishing in November, 1936--paused before a picture of Ernest Hemingway looking mean, with a giant sea shell in the background. “He shot at me. He almost broke my spine.”

The full story of Eisenstaedt and Hemingway will have to wait. It is complicated and cannot be told in a paragraph.

Neither can Eisenstaedt’s impact on photojournalism.

‘Candid Camera’ Era

“Eisie is the last of the generation of European people who first discovered the joy of the small, 35-millimeter candid camera,” said John Loengard, Life magazine picture editor. “Eisie was in his 20s when the candid camera was marketed and developed and came on the scene.

“Like Henri Cartier-Bresson, like a number of Life photographers, he was around at the time of the big bang, when this was a whole new wave of photography. There is nothing like him. When others grew up, candid photography was all around. Eisie was of the generation that was used to taking pictures one at a time. The ability of the small camera to take pictures quickly and rapidly mingled with his taking pictures one at a time. He still knows every picture he takes.”

Cornell Capa, director of the International Center of Photography, which recently held a major Eisenstaedt exhibition, as a youngster once worked in a darkroom where Eisenstaedt’s film was developed. “I know what a good contact sheet looks like. Looking at Eisie’s contact sheet was a revelation,” he recalled.

“He knows what he is after. In three or four exposures, he makes perfectly framed pictures. When you deal with Eisie, you are able to look at his contact sheet as well as his enlargements. It is easy to call him a master photographer. He is the one photographer, I suppose, who never failed to bring back pictures.

No Photo Worries

“What always intrigued me as a colleague of his, is that Eisie worries intensely and absolutely when doing a story about everything--every detail of it except the picture,” Loengard added.

“He worries who will get his lunch, what to wear, what should he say, how long should he stay, should he wear red suspenders or green, but he never worries about how he should take a picture. Most other photographers worry about how they are going to get the subject to do something or what equipment to take. Eisie seems to have supreme confidence the picture will fall into his camera, but he will worry he will be wearing the wrong shoes.”

Photojournalism has changed dramatically since Eisenstaedt picked up his first Leica, and some of its critics are beginning to wonder whether the changes are all to the good. They are calling for reaffirmation of the values Eisenstaedt has espoused over more than 60 years.

“There are many more photojournalists than they were in the days of Life magazine,” said Howard Chapnick, president of Black Star, one of the nation’s oldest photographic agencies. “Newspapers have become much more sophisticated in their use of photojournalism . . . . They have gotten the graduates of universities who are better educated, better informed and committed . . . . The traditions of Life magazine in the old days are being plied on a more democratic and useful level than ever before.”

A ‘Manipulated’ Imagery

Chapnick also noted some problems: “In photojournalism, we are seeing more manipulated, preconceived imagery, where the impact of the annual-report, commercial kind of photography is being transmitted to journalistic photography . . . . As a result, the pictures have very strong graphic quality and great imagery, but the substance and content are secondary. It is making images for the sake of making beautiful, slick images. Many picture editors are asking photographers also to light their color pictures. Once we introduce artificial lighting, the spontaneity of the real moment is lost.”

“The great era of candid photography is being threatened by this manipulated, art-directed, jazzily lit, preconceived, posed imagery. It is rare you get a picture of anybody who moves in magazine photography today.”

Bill Kuykendall, director of the photojournalism department at the University of Missouri’s school of journalism, finds he has to remind students in a time when color is pervasive of the heritage of black-and-white photographers such as Eisenstaedt, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa, “who defined the craft.”

“The highest calling is to use the camera as a reporting tool, not to have prearranged ideas beforehand, but to use the camera as a divining rod to sniff out the story,” Kuykendall said. “Eisenstaedt was one of the people who taught us how to do that.”

Camera Was a Gift

In 1912, Eisenstaedt’s uncle gave him an Eastman Kodak Folding Camera No. 3 for his 14th birthday. Even then his pictures showed a professional quality of composition. It was the beginning of a life lived through the lens.

His career began in 1926, quite by accident. While on vacation with his parents in Czechoslovakia, Eisenstaedt, who had been selling belts and buttons for a Berlin wholesaler, spotted a woman tennis player. She was serving, and the young photographer was intrigued by her shadow on the court. He developed the picture in his bathroom and a friend showed him how to crop and enlarge it. The process opened tremendous possibilities.

In his 28th-floor office, Eisenstaedt, short, balding and in a nubby sweater, reached into a pile of photographs and pulled out a small print of that tennis player. “The photo bug bit me and this started my whole career . . . . For me, still photography still is magic things. It captures the moment, the excitement, and it comes out in the developer and it creates beautiful images. It’s excited me very much.”

Eisenstaedt sold the photo of the tennis player to the editor of a weekly magazine for three marks--about $12 at the time. Three weeks later, he sold his second picture, one of an old lady in a railroad station in Berlin.

Started as Free-Lancer

Soon it was bye-bye to belts and buttons. In 1928, he joined the Associated Press on a free-lance basis. In 1936, a year after he came to the United States, Life magazine was founded and Eisenstaedt became one of its original quartet of photographers.

His career has been anchored in some basic philosophy. “You know, as photojournalist or photo reporter, you have to read very much. You don’t have to be afraid. You shouldn’t be in awe of anybody,” Eisenstaedt said.

In 1938, Life picture editor Wilson Hicks sent his young staffer to Hollywood. “He said, ‘Albert, the most important thing is, don’t be in awe of all these queens. You are a king in your profession.’ This means, I don’t feel like a king, but you shouldn’t be in awe of anybody. People don’t want to be looked upon in awe.’ ”

One of Eisenstaedt’s trademarks is his ability to put people at ease. Unlike the many other photographers who carried heavy bags crammed with lenses, cameras and lights, he often traveled with very little equipment.

When he was first married, his wife, Alma, glanced at his little 35-millimeter cameras. “Where are your real cameras?” she asked.

‘I Don’t Boss’

“Very often I finish before people even realize I’m finished,” Eisenstaedt said. “I talk to them. I can talk about music, astronomy, anything . . . . But the most important thing is I don’t boss people around. I treat them very gently, like I want to be treated.”

The gentle, unobtrusive manner, however, does not mean a lack of direction. “He is a little bit like an orchestra conductor,” said Loengard. “He is a very well-mannered man, but there also is a little bit of the maestro when he is photographing.”

The gentility also doesn’t hide the steel--the triumph-under-pressure of selective vision. “With a camera in my hand, I can photograph even horrible things I don’t like to see with my own eyes . . . . A long time ago--it was five or six years after Life came out--I had to photograph a breast operation,” Eisenstaedt said. “I could only see it photographing. If I would have done this I probably would have fainted.”

Eisenstaedt once was asked to photograph his close colleague at Life, Margaret Bourke-White, while she underwent brain surgery. It was an attempt to stem her Parkinson’s disease--the disease that eventually killed her in 1971. Bourke-White was far bossier than Eisenstaedt with the people she photographed, but the two shared the same inner drive.

“We were very good friends,” he recalled. “For Margaret Bourke-White, nothing was too small to photograph. Others would say the hell with it, it was not important. Margaret would take an assignment to photograph a bread crumb at 3 in the morning. She would be there too, like me.”

Looked Through Lens Only

As the surgeon drilled into his friend’s skull, Eisenstaedt confined his vision--and his emotions--to his camera’s viewfinder. The pictures were a success.

Nerve of another kind was called for when Eisenstaedt photographed Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini shaking hands on June 13, 1934, in Vienna. It was the first time the two dictators had met.

Without a pause, Eisenstaedt, who is Jewish, recalls what went through his mind then: “I remember I was very scared,” he said. “I knew what these people were. By that time, Mussolini was a big shot and Hitler was an upstart . . . . Two months later he became fuhrer of the Reich.”

Soon afterward, Eisenstaedt photographed Hitler alone, strutting into the memorial service for Germany’s president, Paul von Hindenburg. “It was not easy to photograph at that time, you know, not being Aryan. And all the other photographers were Aryan around me. They looked at me, but I photographed.”

Perhaps Eisenstaedt’s most famous photo--of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square during the celebration of V J Day--was a triumph of reflexes, of instantly putting his camera to his eye and snapping.

‘No Time to Think’

“There was so much ecstasy, it was unbelievable what was going on,” he said. “I photographed sailors and everybody kissing each other . . . . The next day I heard I had a remarkable picture. I didn’t even know. For me, everything was a fleeting moment. Very often, everything happens so fast there is no time to think.”

Standing in his office, he snapped an imaginary shutter release with his finger. “I have very fast reflexes. I had such fast reflexes that someone wrote to me if Marlene Dietrich drops a handkerchief, I catch it falling. I wish I could do it now.”

He flexed his arm muscles for a visitor. “Look at this, my muscles are still very strong. You can touch them, like iron.”

Eisenstaedt’s office is a tribute to his remarkable career. A row of well-traveled camera bags rests on one shelf. On one wall is a portrait he took, autographed by John F. Kennedy. A picture of the photographer in a bathing suit at Jones Beach--again flexing his muscles--decorates another wall, across from his color photograph of the Taj Mahal as seen through the petals of a flower.

He has a remarkable collection of tributes from people he has photographed. Picasso penned a drawing in one of his autograph books. Andrew Wyeth sketched a house. Charlie Chaplin drew the Little Tramp. Robert Frost wrote a poem for him. Poet William Carlos Williams penned a long letter. Thomas Benton drew Eisenstaedt’s portrait. (“I said, ‘Thomas, you made a monk out of me. I have no hair.’ He said, ‘In five years you will have no hair. You will look like this’ ”).

Mementoes of the Famous

T. S. Eliot wrote praises, as did Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Eisenstaedt was so excited about photographing the two great physicists that he at first forgot to put film in his camera). Marilyn Monroe wrote, “You made a palace out of my patio. But next time, let’s take more time.” Kennedy, in the White House just three weeks, observed: “He has caught us all on the edge of the New Frontier. What will the passage of the next four years show on this revealing plate?” Financier Bernard Baruch expressed a universal wish: “Only to be 80 again!” And Henry Luce, a founder of Time Inc., expressed his gratitude: “I am proud to join the parade of people you have made famous and proudest of all that I had a part in starting the parade . . . All thanks and long life to Eisie.”

Eisenstaedt closed the album. “Pretty good,” he said with a smile.

Because of the arthritis, he doesn’t go out on assignments very much, and this bothers him.

Whom would he still like to photograph? “There are many, many people,” Eisenstaedt said, pausing for a moment. “I think I probably would have liked to photograph Nancy Reagan.” He laughed. “I read all the stories about her. If he would be as tough as she is, it would be wonderful.”

Now, as promised, earlier, the story of Eisenstaedt and Hemingway. Photographing the author, who was drinking heavily, was one of Eisenstaedt’s most unpleasant assignments. The photographer recalled that he accompanied a very belligerent Hemingway to a deep-sea fishing tournament.

The Hemingway Incident

The author warned that if the boat containing Eisenstaedt and a Life reporter came within 200 yards of his vessel, he would shoot at them with a rifle. Later, at a cocktail party, Hemingway told Eisenstaedt that he really had shot at him.

“Instead of thinking, I said, ‘Papa, I don’t believe it!’ Foam came. He grabbed me by the lapels and bent me over the railing, almost broke my spine. The cameras fell. To lift myself up, I grabbed him around his big head and lifted myself up until I came close to his big, huge head. ‘Never say you don’t believe Papa!’ Hemingway shouted.”

An hour later, the storm had passed. “You wouldn’t believe it,” Eisenstaedt recalled, still angry, after all these years, at being manhandled. “He didn’t remember anything.”

A few minutes later, Hemingway’s wife walked over. She had seen her husband and the photographer face to face from a distance. Eisenstaedt started to laugh as he remembered her words:

“ ‘I didn’t know that you liked men that much,’ she said. She thought I wanted to kiss him.”