ALFRED EISENSTAEDT PROFESSIONAL

In New York he was soon hired with three other photographers-Margaret Bourke-White, Thomas McAvoy and Peter Stackpole-by Time founder Henry Luce, for a secret start-up known only as “Project X.” After six months of testing the mystery venture, it premiered as LIFE magazine on November 23, 1936. Without the girl I would not have had a memorableĪfter photographing dictators-in-the-making Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Eisenstaedt saw the bleak future on the Continent, and emigrated to the United States. For years and years this has been one of my prize photographs. From that box I took another picture, with the girl in the foreground. “Suddenly,” he said, “I saw a lovely young society girl sitting next to an empty box. Eisenstaedt was looking for the telling detail to place in the foreground of his image. I had a Miroflex camera and focused on the chair.”Īnother very famous Eisenstaedt photograph reveals the opera house La Scala, Milan from 1934. To be sure the picture was sharp, I put a chair on the ice and asked the waiter to skate by it. “I did one smashing picture,” Eisenstaedt has written, “of the skating headwaiter. One famous photograph from 1932 depicts a waiter at the ice rink of the Grand Hotel. Using cumbersome equipment with tripods and glass plate negatives, Eisenstaedt produced many photos on assignment of musicians, writers, and royalty.

ALFRED EISENSTAEDT PROFESSIONAL

His first professional assignment was photographing Thomas Mann accepting his Nobel prize in 1929, in Stockholm. It was an adventure, and I was always amazed when anything came out.” It was taken over by Associated Press in 1931. “Photojournalism had just started,” Eisenstaedt has remarked “and I knew very little about photography. Photojournalism was at its very infancy.Įisenstaedt began his free-lance career for Pacific and Atlantic Photos’ Berlin office in 1928. In 1927 Eisenstaedt sold his first photograph and at the time had no idea that professional photography even existed. He may well have followed in his father’s footsteps, were it not for an uncle who gave the boy an Eastman Kodak No.

The family moved to Berlin when Alfred was eight, and remained there until Hitler came to power.

He was born on December 6, 1898, in Dirschau, West Prussia (now part of Poland), one of three sons of Regina and Joseph Eisenstaedt, a merchant. LIFE AND WORK OF ALFRED EISENSTAEDTĪlfred Eisenstaedt was titled “The father of photojournalism”.

Alfred eisenstaedt