The Best Job in the World

When Marlene Dietrich arrived at London’s Heathrow Airport one day a few years ago, she was in no mood to meet the group of photographers waiting for her. “Go away!” she shouted. “You are all morons. Why don’t you get a proper job?” And they laughed and made her picture and loved her, as they have through the years, for she always gladdened their hearts — and their eyes. They didn’t mind what she said, because they knew they had a proper job.

In fact, they knew they had the best job in the world. No matter what, there is nothing a photojournalist would rather do than look at the world around him and take pictures of it — pictures of living history, which means, especially, pictures of human behavior. If he doesn’t get a thrill out of that job, if he doesn’t wake every morning with excitement and go out with his cameras hanging on him like a gold prospector with his rock hammer in hand, % he’s no good. Over the years some photojournalists have said to me, “if they didn’t pay me for doing this, I’d do it for them for nothing.” I too have felt that way since, more than a half-century ago, as a reporter a few years out of college, I put my typewriter aside for a camera.

Photojournalism, which has brought about the second revolution in communications, after the invention of movable type in the 15th century, is so new that some photographers who pioneered its development — Peter Stackpole, Dmitri Kessel, George Tames, Alfred Eisenhstaedt, Howard Sochurek and I — are still taking pictures for publication. The speed and sweep of photojournalism’s technical achievements can be appreciated by considering the life of one of its greatest pioneers, Fritz Goro. He began his career in the 1930s using flash powder to light his subjects, and just before he died in 1986, he was using a laser beam for light.

It is sometimes felt that because photographs are the product of a mechanical tool, a camera, that some of the great pictures made by photojournalists are simply lucky shots, accidents. One day when Edward Steichen, the late dean of American photography, was taking a group of visitors through an exhibition of pictures by photojournalists, he was asked, “If you were to take all the lucky pictures, the accidents, out of this exhibition, how many pictures would you have left?” Steichen pondered that, and then he said, “Not many, perhaps. But have you ever thought how many great accidents have been made by great photographers?”

Luck is forever at play in a photographer’s life. It is part of his intellectual training to know where luck is most likely to lie and to take advantage of it. In January 1945 I was the only press photographer aboard General Douglas MacArthur’s command ship as he prepared to invade Luzon, in the Philippines. I was invited to go ashore with him. As our landing craft neared the beach, I saw that the Seabees had got there before us and had laid a pontoon walkway out from the beach. As we headed for it, I climbed the boat’s ramp and jumped onto the pontoons so that I could photograph MacArthur as he stepped ashore. But I suddenly heard the boat’s engines reversing and saw the boat rapidly backing away. I raced to the beach, ran some hundred yards along it and stood waiting for the boat to come to me. When it did, it dropped its ramp in knee-deep water, and I photographed MacArthur wading ashore. No one I have ever known in public life had a better understanding of the drama and power of a picture.

A photojournalist must persist against all odds. When I arrived in Rome in May 1940, I was repeatedly prevented from taking pictures by Blackshirts who blocked my cameras. On May 9, Mussolini appeared at the Victor Emmanuel II monument to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the founding of the Italian Empire. A circle of security men barred me from the ceremony. But as Mussolini was departing, he strutted right past me. The security men were compelled to applaud as he went by, and I was able to make one quick frame between their shoulders. The picture appeared lacross a page of LIFE several weeks later with the caption, “The Elderly Butcher Boy of Fascism, Benito Mussolini, Steps Out . . .” The TIME and LIFE staffs were immediately expelled from Italy.

There are times when photographs of important moments make vital contributions to history. In May 1960, as Moscow buzzed with rumors of a downed American spy plane, the Soviet government suddenly convened journalists and diplomats at the Chess Pavilion in Gorky Park. The big room was filled with aircraft debris. I decided instantly that what was being offered to me for photographs was of enormous historic importance. So I began working very fast to record as much as I could. After some time, two Soviet officers hustled me out the door. I learned later that I had been “taking pictures too systematically.” Inexplicably, they did not take my film. Three years later, I was reading a story in TIME about Clarence (“Kelly”) Johnson, the designer of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane. “Powers,” Johnson said, “Didn’t really know what hit him. I told him what had happened ((a surface-to-air missile strike)), based mostly on my analysis of Carl Mydans’ photographs of the wreckage that LIFE sent us.”

In describing the highlights of their careers, photojournalists reveal a lot about what happens behind the camera — and about themselves. Bill Eppridge, a giant in the field, photographed Robert Kennedy on that June evening in 1968 as he lay dying on the floor of the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. “That scene and that picture have been with me continually ever since,” Eppridge told me. “I remember every second of it. It was 21 minutes long, and I shot 2 1/2 rolls. And in all those 21 minutes, I knew what I was doing and why I was there. This is what I’ve been trained to do, I remember telling myself. This is what my whole life is about.”

Dirck Halstead, another of today’s great photojournalists, knows the importance of timing. He photographed the shooting of President Reagan at the Washington Hilton in 1981 for TIME. “Good photojournalistic coverage is easy,” he says. “All you’ve got to do is be there — in the right place. That is one of the major differences between photojournalism and print journalism. The photographer must be where the action is.”

I happened to be in Grenoble in 1944 when a young French collaborator was tied to a stake before a firing squad. His head hung down, and he did not look at the jeering crowd or the waiting firing squad. As I moved in quickly with my camera, he straightened and, raising his head high, looked proudly into my lens as though to tell the world he was not ashamed and not afraid to die. I photographed him in this last heroic pose — not out of compassion or a feeling of retribution, but because I was there. The young man’s face has haunted me ever since.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, still active at 90 and still surrounded by his cameras and pictures, knows the importance of instinct. “We live in a world of fleeting moments,” says Eisie. “When one such moment arrives, I am never quite aware of what I am doing. I react intuitively. And in such fast-moving events there is, I think, an electronic impulse between my eye and my finger.” Today, when I look at the work of some of the young people in the field, I find there are many among them who are also instinctive photojournalists. And I feel confident that the tradition we created is in good hands.

As a storyteller in pictures, the photojournalist is looking not only for action but also for substance. He is a historian and a sociologist. He has created humanity’s first international language, a common imagery for all mankind. And in his pictures, people see themselves with a clarity they never knew before.