Alfred Eisenstaedt American, 1898-1995

Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898–1995) was the pre-eminent photojournalist of his generation and the photographer who helped define the visual language of the American picture magazine. He worked with a small Leica and available light, close to his subjects and without arranging them. He attributed his success to one thing: he did not push people around. He had learned early that the reaction to an event often made a better picture than the event itself.

Born in Dirschau, West Prussia, in 1898, Eisenstaedt served in the German army during the First World War and was wounded. He taught himself photography while working as a belt and button salesman in Berlin, turned professional in 1929, and by 1931 was working for Pacific and Atlantic Photos, later part of the Associated Press. During his Berlin years, he photographed the first meeting of Hitler and Mussolini and made his famous portrait of Joseph Goebbels in Geneva in 1933, in which the propaganda minister glares at the camera after realising that the photographer is Jewish. “Here are the eyes of hate,” Eisenstaedt wrote later.

Eisenstaedt left Germany for the United States in 1935, and the following year became one of the four original staff photographers hired for the launch of Life. He remained with the magazine for the rest of its weekly run, producing more than 2,500 picture stories and more than ninety covers. Over the course of his career, he photographed almost everyone of consequence in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

On 14 August 1945, in Times Square, he saw a sailor moving through the crowd, grabbing women as he went, and followed him with his camera. The photograph appeared a week later in Life, in a twelve-page section devoted to the victory celebrations. V-J Day in Times Square became the most widely reproduced photograph the magazine ever published, and Time later named it among the ten greatest images in the history of photojournalism. Eisenstaedt gave two slightly different accounts of how he made the photograph, in two different books.

Eisenstaedt continued working into his nineties and spent his summers on Martha’s Vineyard, which he photographed for decades. He never used a light meter. He died in Oak Bluffs in 1995, aged ninety-six.