Roi des Indiscrets

President Hoover might never have allowed Dr. Erich ("Candid Camera") 'Salomon in the White House if Premier Pierre Laval of France had not politely insisted. Like Benito Mussolini, Ramsay MacDonald and Chancellor Heinrich Briming, Premier Laval has become convinced that Dr. Salomon's unposed, spontaneous snapshots are historic human documents to be preserved for posterity and schoolbooks. FORTUNE brought Dr. Salomon to the U. S., sent him to Washington to take pictures of the Hoover-Laval Conference.

Until 1928 Dr. Salomon, a bland, heavy-set German with an ingratiating smile, was not even an amateur photographer. Born in Berlin 63 years ago, he took degrees in law in both Berlin and Munich. He started life as a lawyer, became a banker, then found himself press agent for a German publishing house. While working at this job he heard of a new German camera small enough to carry easily in the hand, sensitive enough to take pictures without special illumination.

Dr. Salomon bought himself one of these cameras, gave up his job and set out to make his new kind of historic document --photographs of the great as they really are, working, talking, eating, yawning. He climbed up a fire ladder disguised as a painter to take pictures of "Uncle Arthur" Henderson on his hotel balcony at The Hague. He disguised himself as a waiter. He camouflaged himself behind potted palms. Temperamental conductors let him sit with the first violins.

Later, because Dr. Salomon's manners were infinitely better than those of most newspaper photographers, because he interrupted nobody, bothered nobody, he was invited to public functions, allowed to snap his shutter openly. He has attended League of Nations meetings. He snapped the signing of the Kellogg Pact. When the late great Gustav Stresemann made his last speech at Geneva, Dr. Salomon was calmly seated below the rostrum. He accompanied Chancellor Bruening and German Foreign Minister Curtius and snapped them sipping coffee with // Duce. Brer Briand, Europe's "Master Parliamentarian," has given him a nickname that has stuck: Le Roi des Indiscrets, King of the Indiscreet.

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