Eisenstaedt set up his first darkroom in his family's bathroom.Įisenstaedt was on vacation in Czechoslovakia in 1927 when he snapped a picture of a woman playing tennis. This was the turning point in his love for picture taking.
Alfred eisenstaedt vj day photo how to#
In 1925, a friend demonstrated how to enlarge photographs. What soon became commonplace, was then a groundbreaking development in the field of photography. The camera was compact and worked with available light.
What caught his attention was a new camera called the Ermanox invented by fellow German, Erich Salomon. In the 1920s, his interest in photography was revived. They lost all of their money and Eisentaedt was forced to find work. The economic decline of post-war Germany proved the undoing of the Eisenstaedt family business. While Eisenstaedt nearly lost both his legs, the rest of his battalion was killed.Įisenstaedt returned to Germany following the war and went back to the university. In December of 1917 when he was hit with shrapnel during British shelling in the second Allied western offensive. There he served as a field artillery cannoneer. Eisenstaedt was sent to Flanders following his basic training. He was drafted into the German army in 1916, in the midst of World War I. His uncle gave him a camera for his 14th birthday, but Eisenstaedt quickly lost interest in it.Įisenstaedt graduated from the Hohenzollern Gymnasium in Berlin. His father owned a department store and made an above-average living for his family. His friends called him, "Eisie."He was the older son of Joseph and Regina Schoen Eisenstaedt. Self-Taught Hobby Led to CareerĪlfred Eisenstaedt was born on December 6, 1898, in Dirschau, West Prussia, then a territory of Germany, and later known as Tczew, Poland. At that moment, Eisenstaedt snapped the picture. He followed him long enough to see him grab the woman whose outfit in white brought the contrast of the sailor's blue to his keen eye. One of the people he noticed was a sailor who was kissing his way through the crowd. That day in August of 1945, Eisenstaedt was simply walking among the crowd that had gathered on the streets of New York.
He often noted that he had learned it was the reaction to an event that created the best picture, rather than the event itself. He got it as he got many of his pictures-persistence rather than planning. Even those who did not know his name, knew his picture.Įisenstaedt was almost 47-years-old when he took that picture. The picture, that of a sailor in his blue uniform kissing a nurse in her white uniform, with a passion usually reserved for lovers, became synonymous with the mood of celebration the country felt at the war's end. But the photograph that won him the most fame was the won he took in Times Square on V-J (Victory over Japan) Day in 1945, ending World War II. Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995) was an established photographer when he moved to the United States from Germany in 1935.
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