Alfred Eisenstaedt, the great photographer of modern journalism, regarded around the world as the father of the art, died early yesterday morning at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital after suffering heart failure at the Menemsha Inn, where he had summered since 1937. He was 96 years old.
Late Wednesday night, the Tri-Town Ambulance was called to the small cottage where Mr. Eisenstaedt lived with his sister-in-law, Lucille (Lulu) Kaye. He was taken to the hospital in respiratory and cardiac arrest. He was pronounced dead at 12:45 a.m.
Before Mr. Eisenstaedt, photojournalism was a stuffy business of posed pictures and rotogravures. In part this was because cameras of the early 20th century were so bulky and slow, making it difficult to catch a truthful or spontaneous moment. But also politicians and leading artists refused to be caught off-guard, fearful of what the snap of a shutter might catch.
Mr. Eisenstaedt and his small Leica changed all that.
“I’m not in awe of them,” he said of the renowned. “A famous picture editor said to me in 1938 when I went to Hollywood, ‘Alfred, don’t be in awe of these queens. You are the king of your profession.’ I have never forgotten. You shouldn’t be in awe of people because people don’t like you to be in awe of them.
“To get along with people, naturally, you have to have good manners,” he added. “You have to blend in, you have to know what to talk. You shouldn’t be a dope.”
T.S. Eliot called him “the acrobatic photographer,” for Mr. Eisenstaedt — who described himself as a worrier, obsessively punctual, a pessimist and a “health bug” — thought little of putting his camera three feet from the tongue of a cobra, or 20 feet from a pride of grazing lions. He mucked his way through the rain forests of Surinam, picked his way over the rocky shores of the Galapagos Islands and scaled the parapets of a moccasin factory in Minneapolis.
He had other nicknames, besides the best known — Eisie — given to him by the colleagues who pioneered the craft of photojournalism at Life; one was “the one-man task force,” because in a realm in which assistants and interns run rife, Mr. Eisenstaedt worked alone. “When you want a good picture you have to be alone,” he told Mark Alan Lovewell of the Vineyard Gazette in 1992. “People don’t understand that. People think I’m crazy waiting four hours for the right light. I see beauty in many things. My strength is composition.”
But the key to all his achievements in photography — and the thing that set him apart from everyone who had gone before — was revealed in one sentence in an otherwise unremarkable interview some years ago:
“They can send me into an empty room,” he said, “and I can do a story.”
To Mr. Eisenstaedt, good pictures told the full story by themselves. Words were unnecessary. His most famous photograph, taken 50 years ago this month, was made in Times Square on V-J Day. “‘Remember the sailor kissing the nurse,'” Mr. Eisenstaedt answered an interviewer once, laughing. “That’s what my gravestone will say.” But to look at the picture is to imagine, at the same instant, the moments that must have come immediately before and after — and to understand that the story behind this embrace could have been caught neither a second earlier nor later.
Arthur Goldsmith, editorial writer of Photography magazine, wrote in 1973 that Mr. Eisenstaedt’s pictures went “right to the heart and guts and point of things. So simple. So obvious. And here lies the power, the purity, the charm of Eisenstaedt’s best work.”
“He is like the camera — silent, sharp and ready for the moment,” said Aaron Altman, a vice president at Leica Camera Inc., in a tribute to Mr. Eisenstaedt given at the Harbor View Hotel in 1991.
This genius was not always present, by the photographer’s own admission. His first assignment, at the age of 31 for the illustrated weekly Der Welt Spiegel, was to cover the wedding of King Boris of Bulgaria to the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel I of Italy. So fascinated was he by the parade of eminent guests that he forgot to shoot the bride or bridegroom. “They wanted to fire me,” he said. “They were sorry to find out I was a free-lancer. I wasn’t working for them.”
His love of Martha’s Vineyard was, quite literally, visible to all. He was introduced to the Island by Henry R. Luce, founder of Life magazine, the year after the publication got under way. Mr. Eisenstaedt most often came in August, but his shots of the Vineyard span the seasons. A gust through a tangle of scrub oak and grass in the western hills evokes autumn; the angry race of waves into Squibnocket tells of winter; the luminous green around the broken hull of a rowboat elicits spring.
There are scores of Island images, many of them famous: The dark five-sided shape of a Gay Head cottage set against the flatness of gray sky and the sparkle of a silver sea. Fishing boats bound to Memorial Wharf, Edgartown, starboard bows frosted in snow. The brilliant white clapboards, divided sharply by lines of shadow, running the length of the First Congregational Church in West Tisbury.
While much of his work on the mainland required that he point and shoot in a trice, the Vineyard called upon another skill: enormous patience.
He was known to wait two hours for a pair of sailboats to tack close enough to the Gay Head light to please him, and an hour to find the right angle to shoot the ancient oak in North Tisbury whose lowest limbs kneel all the way to the ground
“When you look at an Eisenstaedt photo, he is working with God’s light, Rembrandt’s light,” said David McCullough, the author, at the same 1991 tribute in Edgartown. “He is working quietly and unobtrusively. We see that reflection of our time, in a way that no human being ever saw their own time.”
Alfred Eisenstaedt was born Dec. 6, 1898 in Dirschau, West Prussia (now a part of Poland) to wealthy parents. His father was a merchant who moved the family to Berlin in 1906. Alfred was given his first camera at the age of 13, but he showed no real interest in photography then.
Injured at Verdun in the second western offensive of World War I — shrapnel tore through both legs, forcing him into a year-long convalescence — he returned to civilian life, selling buttons and belts from 1918 to 1927. On holiday with his parents in Czechoslavakia, he took a picture of a woman playing tennis. It was the shadows cast by the afternoon sun, and the challenge of cropping the picture to his satisfaction, that set him on his course.
His reputation in Germany grew, but the rise of Hitler shut down many of the publications he worked for, and Mr. Eisenstaedt came to the United States in 1935. Soon he was hired by Henry Luce to work with three other photographers — Margaret Bourke-White, Thomas McAvoy and Peter Stackpole — on something called “Project X.” Luce said that until Mr. Eisenstaedt came home with pictures from his first assignment — sharecroppers in Mississippi — he was not sure that a picture magazine could work. “Eisie showed that the camera could deal with an entire subject,” he said, “whether the subject was a man, a maker of history or whether it was a social phenomenon. That is what is meant by photojournalism.” Life magazine was born in the fall of 1936.
He photographed the great men and women of his day — George Bernard Shaw, Glenn Gould, Helen Hayes, Thomas Mann, Robert Frost, Marlene Dietrich, John Kennedy, an abusive Ernest Hemingway, a rather cool and unapproachable Spiro Agnew, and Thomas Hart Benton painting The Rape of Persephone.
His favorite subject was Sophia Loren, with whom he struck up an instant and easy friendship. “She told a reporter that I remind her very much of her obstetrician,” he said later.
But he also took pictures of skid row drunks in Los Angeles, of national conventions, and of a mother and child looking at some vegetables they had planted in the ruins of their garden after Hiroshima. In all he shot 86 covers for Life, and went on more than 2,500 assignments.
Awards came to him by the bouquet. Among them were the Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award, given by the National Press Photographers Association in 1971, the Culture Prize in Photography, given by the German Society of Photographers in Cologne, and most recently the National Medal of the Arts, given by President Bush at the White House on Nov. 17, 1989.
Despite this body of work that raised him above all who traveled alongside him — and most who will ever follow — he said: “We were pioneers. But nothing sets us apart. Photographers today are terrific. I admire them. They are fantastic. They are much better than we were.”
He was a small man, only five feet, four inches tall, with an open face and a quick smile. He was watchful about his health, and late in his life he was still often seen early in the mornings vigorously walking the hills of Menemsha. In the 1960s he was known to carry with him at all times a thermometer, barometer, hygrometer and pedometer to measure his gait.
On the morning after his death, Laura Palmer, a journalist and seasonal visitor of the Vineyard who knew Mr. Eisenstaedt, wrote that for an interview she once asked him, as he entered his 10th decade, whether he ever found himself thinking of death.
“Without a moment’s hesitation he said, ‘I’m too busy working.’ Then with that unmistakable twinkle in his eye he said, ‘But I know what I want to be in my next life.'”
What? she asked.
“A photographer,” he replied.
Mr. Eisenstaedt is survived by Miss Kaye, his sister in law. His wife, the former Alma Kaye-Zlotnick, known best as Kathy, died in 1972.
Funeral arrangements were incomplete as the Gazette went to press this morning. Details will be published in the Tuesday edition.