Photo Pioneer Alfred Eisenstaedt Dies : Journalism: ‘Eisie’ recorded some of the 20th Century’s most enduring images, many for Life magazine. He was 96.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, a pioneer of modern photojournalism whose camera recorded many of the historic photographs of World War II, including that of a sailor kissing a nurse in New York’s Times Square to celebrate V-J Day, has died. He was 96.

Eisenstaedt, who lived in New York City, died late Wednesday of cardiac arrest while vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, his friend William Marks announced Thursday.

One of Life magazine’s first four photographers, Eisenstaedt was working for the magazine when he took the exuberant Times Square photo. It became a Life cover, a symbol of the end of the war, and a defining moment in photojournalism.

“When people don’t know me anymore, they will remember that picture,” the photographer said years later.

Eisenstaedt pioneered the use of natural light and informal poses in the late 1920s and early ‘30s, and continued as a working photographer almost to his death.

There were tens of thousands of “Eisie” pictures published worldwide over the course of a career that spanned more than six decades. He may have been the most widely published photographer in history. He may also have been the best.

“He’s probably the greatest genius in photojournalism we’ll ever see,” former Life photographer and editor John Bryson said a few years ago. “A lot of people think they can strap on a couple Nikons and call themselves photojournalists, but Eisie is head and shoulders above them all.”

His best work lives on, of course, indelible images of the breadth of human experience--the ugliness and beauty of the 20th Century, all captured with a basic purity of technique and a simpleness of spirit that left no room for photographic trickery.

The images remain, although the old weekly Life magazine is gone and the era of still photography has been overtaken by the television age:

The photo of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini shaking hands, meeting for the first time before the outbreak of World War II . . . the shot of Winston Churchill flashing his V for victory sign during the German bombing of London . . . the picture of the sultry Marlene Dietrich posing in a tuxedo . . . the many photos of the Kennedy clan enjoying life in Hyannis Port.

Then there were the portraits--Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe.

The man who was to take these pictures was born Dec. 6, 1898, in Dirschau, Germany, now a part of Poland, and raised in Berlin, the son of a prosperous department store owner. On his 14th birthday, he was given a camera by an uncle, and, as he said in a 1987 interview with The Times, showed early promise but not an abundant amount of interest in his new toy.

Eisenstaedt graduated from high school and in 1916 was drafted and sent to Flanders to serve in a German artillery unit. His war service ended a year later when a British shell struck his battery. He was the lone survivor and was sent home to recover from shrapnel wounds.

Eisenstaedt attended college in Berlin, but his family lost its fortune in Germany’s devastating postwar inflation and he was forced to find work--selling belts and buttons wholesale.

About 1920, Eisenstaedt took up photography and, he said, became a “real fanatic” when a friend showed him how to make enlargements.

“I was thrilled when I discovered what you could do with an enlarger,” Eisenstaedt said in 1978. “Nobody knew about enlarging then. I could take the arms, or the legs, or the tree branches. I could crop things out. That’s when the bug hit me.”

He set up a crude darkroom in the family bathroom, and like thousands of other hobbyists, snapped away at whatever interested him. But there was something special about Eisenstaedt. He had spent several years in the museums of Berlin, studying the light and shadow in the works of Rembrandt and others, and the experience began to show in his photographs.

He made his first sale in 1927, a shot of a woman playing tennis that he had taken while on vacation in Czechoslovakia. The editor of a German periodical gave him three marks (about $12 at the time) for it and asked for more pictures.

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“The photo bug bit me and this started my whole career,” he said. “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.”

Eisenstaedt quickly became a successful professional, quitting his button-selling job and working full time as a free-lancer for a Berlin picture agency that later developed into a subsidiary of Associated Press. He also became one of the standard-bearers of the rapidly developing art of photojournalism.

He was among a group of German editors and photographers working to replace stiffly posed flash photography with news pictures that captured a feeling of realism and immediacy by using existing light.

Eisenstaedt and the others used new cameras--the cumbersome, single shot Ermanox and, in 1930, the Leica, the first 35-millimeter camera. The Leica was small and capable of taking dozens of pictures without reloading. The camera and photographers such as Eisenstaedt revolutionized news photography.

Especially celebrated--then and for years to come--was Eisenstaedt’s series on the street life of the poor people of Les Halles, the Paris market, and his photos of the ballet training school of the Grand Opera de Paris. At the Grand Hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland, he took a striking shot of a formally dressed waiter on skates, balancing a tray of bottles and glasses. At Milan’s La Scala opera house, Eisenstaedt caught a moment of beauty when he snapped a shot of a handsome woman standing in front of the glittering opera boxes.

In the 1930s, Eisenstaedt captured many of the moments leading up to World War II. He made a classic picture of the venomous Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, at a 1933 League of Nations meeting in Geneva . . . the shot of Hitler and Mussolini meeting for the first time (Eisenstaedt, a Jew, remembered being “very scared,” for one of the few times in his life) . . . a photo essay--years before anyone had heard the term--showing the barefooted Ethiopian army marching, preparing for the Italian invasion.

The photographer moved to the United States in 1935 and was hired by Henry Luce’s inchoate Life in April, 1936, joining Margaret Bourke-White, Peter Stackpole and Tom McAvoy on the magazine’s original photo staff.

His first cover picture appeared on Life’s second issue, the first of what would be more than 90 over the years. It depicted a stiff-backed cadet at dinner.

He photographed a wide spectrum of subjects for Life. There were the Galapagos Islands, where sharks bumped against his small boat . . . a tropical rain forest where he was hoisted 40 feet above the ground to shoot the verdant undergrowth . . . an encounter with a huge gorilla with only his Leica between the photographer and the beast.

He was perhaps best known for his candid photographs of the famous. Eisenstaedt seemed to have the talent to bring out the essence of the people he shot. To be asked by Life to allow Eisenstaedt to photograph you was, in the 1940s and 1950s particularly, the crowning confirmation of one’s value as a celebrity.

Partially, that was because Life was the magazine of photography in pre-television times. But, also, when other Life photographers specialized in big dams, big steel plants, big agricultural fields and big battleships, “the little man [at 5-foot-5] with the little camera” specialized in big people, and had rapidly become a big person himself by doing so.

“You know,” Eisenstaedt said a few years ago in the German accent that never left him, “it is strange. I have photographed literally hundreds of kings, queens, presidents and personalities since the 1920s but I am not afraid of them no matter who I was shooting. When I have a camera in my hand, I do not know fear.”

In 1978, Eisenstaedt, on the payroll of the new but quite different Life, reminisced with The Times about the good old days of egotistical, fun-loving Life photographers--quick with a Nikon and even quicker with an expense account form, like the fellow on assignment at sea who submitted an $800 bill for taxi fare and, when questioned, blithely remarked, “Well, it was a big ship.”

Eisenstaedt, like all Life photographers, had the best and most modern equipment at his disposal, but he did most of his work with his old Leica and spurned contraptions like the motor drive.

“Some people are under the misapprehension that having the most expensive camera and dozens of gadgets is a sure path to photography,” he once wrote. “It’s the eye behind the camera that counts the most.”

Eisenstaedt’s eye was good, even extraordinary, but, over the years, he made all the usual mistakes. He admitted to taking pictures with the lens cap on, with no film in the camera, with the wrong film in the camera. He even, once or twice, opened a camera to see if there was film there--and, yes, there was. In the early years when Life switched from black and white to color film, Eisenstaedt would sometimes get the film and the cameras containing them confused.

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Although many critics thought his best work was done in black and white, Eisenstaedt, a lifelong watcher of light and shadow, professed to like color.

He lived for most of his years in a simple Jackson Heights apartment, with his wife, the former Alma Kathy Kaye, whom he married in 1949. Widowed in 1972, Eisenstaedt, when he wasn’t traveling, continued to live in Queens, taking the subway to Life’s Manhattan offices to see his developed prints or talk over his latest assignment with editors.

His pictures and his memories of the people he photographed were collected in 13 well-received books, including “Eisenstaedt: Remembrances,” published in 1990. His work was also admired in art galleries.

One critic, Jacob Deschin, may have put it best when he wrote:

“Eisenstaedt is a master of the little detail, the homely trifle, that tells a bigger story. His pictures are never sensational, only direct and easily understood observations about ordinary human behavior. He is fascinated by people and delighted with everything about them.”