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EISENSTAEDT Alfred

Date of birth : December 6, 1898, Dierschau (Tczew), Poland.

Date of death : August 24, 1995, New York.

 

Portrait : 

Story

He made his first pictures aged 13 with a Kodak offered to him.

During the inflation period following the First World War, he began to earn money as a belt and buttons salesman for a firm from Berlin Germany.

During his free time, he devoted himself to photography and began to make experiments of details enlargement.

The publication in Weltspiegel magazine of his picture of a tennisplayer woman marked the beginning of his activity as a free-lance photographer, notably for the Berliner Tageblatt.

In 1929, he decided to make photography his job and worked then for the "Pacific and Atlantic Picture Agency".

His first order, a photo reporting about the Nobel prizegiving to Thomas Mann in 1929, already gave him a great respect.

In those yearsn he made many portraits which later became famous, as those of Marlene Dietrich (),
George Bernard Shaw, but also Joseph Goebbels, Hitler and Mussolini (), and also a reporitng about the war betawee Italy and Ethiopia.

He worked for the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and other newspapers in Berlin and Paris.

The political situation of Germany and the hope of better work conditons led him to emigrate to the USA in 1935, where he first worked for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Town and Country magazines.

He arrived in New York City and was hired as a permanent contributor at Life magazine, from its start in 1936.

Until the temporary activity suspension of Life in 1972, he worked for more than 2 500 orders and made the pictures of more than 90 covers.

Photoreporter, he wasn't specialized in such a specific domain. His pictures of personalities still came into the photography history. He didn't only take pictures of so many political and artistic personalities, but also of anonymous people in everyday life situations :

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He received many international prizes and belongs among the most published photographers in the world.

Link with Marilyn

"Eisie" as he was called, took Marilyn in pictures in May 1953, for Life magazine, in the patio of her apartment of
Doheny Drive.

Portrait of Marilyn : 

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Full body :

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In her apartment :

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With Alfred Eisenstaedt : 

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Bibliography

"Eisenstaedt's Album". New York : Viking, 1976.

Websites

The digital journalist

Wikipedia

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