Photography: The Witness

Captain Frans Banning Cocq’s watchmen? Rembrandt’s Nightwatch is all we know of them. Napoleon’s coronation? Jacques Louis David’s massive painting is the permanent report. French firing squads at work in Spain in 1808? Goya’s painting, both witness and indictment, has fixed the image for all time. The court of Philip of Spain? On courtesans, and dwarf retainers, Velasquez has the final word. And so it has always been the artist’s task to report on the figures and events of his day, whether it be the hanging of a Savonarola in Florence or the thrust of the Civil War cavalryman’s saber as seen by Winslow Homer.

By the 19th century, the invention of the camera had begun sharpening the artist’s eye to the importance of the fleeting instant; it also introduced, in the person of the photographer, the artist’s rival for reality. Both crafts have profited: a Degas learned to crop his paintings from the photographer; a Steichen learned atmosphere from the impressionists. Out of this enriching dialogue has come a generation of photographic imagemakers, who have fixed for all time, as surely as the great artists of the past, the fleeting moment that reflects the whole and stands as the witness for an era. Of these, none is greater than Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Brooding Evil, Deep Wisdom. To celebrate his permanent feast of images, ranging over a span of 40 years, a display of 337 of his photographs-opened last week in the Exhibition Center of the Time and Life Building in Manhattan. Derived in large part from his 1,728 assignments for LIFE in the past 30 years, the record astonishes both by its variety—How could any man have been in so many crucial places?—and its perception. The marvel is finally not the Leica that Eisenstaedt used, but the personal eye behind the shutter.

Who but Eisenstaedt could have seen Marlene Dietrich in 1928, two years before The Blue Angel, and won from her a smile that says it all? Or could have photographed Sophia Loren in Marriage—Italian Style, a picture that revealed her as the love goddess of her age, while remembering her as “the nicest and hardest-working movie actress I have ever met”? That the same eye should also have seen the brooding evil in Goebbels in 1933 and wisdom deep in the eyes of Edward Teller in 1963 testifies to Eisenstaedt’s undimmed perception, which makes him at 67 a photographer without peer.

Anthills & Bullrings. Eisenstaedt learned to train his vision long before he turned to the camera as a career. A German artilleryman whose legs were nearly ripped off by shrapnel in World War I, he existed afterward by odd jobs —until 1928, when he sold his first picture to the Berliner Tageblatt. He had been using a camera since the age of twelve (his first subject: the family bathroom), studied light in the works of Rembrandt and Rubens. But it was his ability to be at the right place at the right time, plus millisecond timing, that by 1931 made him the Associated Press’s star Berlin photographer, the man who caught the mature genius in 14-year-old Yehudi Menuhin and recorded the cautious size-up of Hitler’s first meeting with Mussolini in 1934.

What his camera recorded, Eisenstaedt believed. In 1935 he left Nazi Germany, became one of LIFE’S first masthead photographers in 1936, a position he still holds. T. S. Eliot called him “the acrobatic photographer,” and it is true that Eisenstaedt has stood on anthills to get his pictures. Anthony Eden called him “the gentle executioner,” which speaks volumes about Eden. For though Eisenstaedt has been known to shout, “Hey, Tojo, look at me!” and thus capture an unforgettable image of the defeated wartime Japanese Premier trudging to judgment, he maintains: “The important thing is not clicking the shutter but clicking with the subject.”

Clicking was rarely hard. In part this came from his genuine relish in meeting people, in part because his absorption when he worked made him almost in visible. Photographing the G.I.s’ favorite reporter, Ernie Pyle, as he posed for Sculptor Jo Davidson, he caught a look of melancholy that almost seemed to foreshadow Pyle’s death at le Shima a year later. Showing up on the front stoop of Foster Dulles’ Manhattan town house at a moment when Eisenhower was elected but had yet to take office, he found him with Douglas MacArthur; rarely have two great generals been recorded in such a benign mood. He could as easily capture Jacqueline Kennedy reading to Caroline in 1960 at Hyannis Port without intruding on the intimacy of the scene.

Rejoice & Celebrate. Within, Eisenstaedt obviously opens himself wider than he can publicly admit. His pictures of World War II G.I.s saying farewell in Pennsylvania Station weep with the departing and the departed, just as his photograph of a sailor sweeping up a girl in a kiss on V-J day captures the essence of that wild day’s joy. Finally, it is in rejoicing that Eisenstaedt finds his truest subject, the celebration of life. Muttering, “Marvelous! Incredible!”, he continues to work. And, says he: “Even when I’m 90 I can work with a tripod, waiting for the birds to come by.”

*To be published this month by Viking Press in Witness to Our Time ($16.50).