You Must Remember This

By Richard Lacayo

The grim reign of Adolf Hitler in Europe had one ironic benefit for the U.S. Among the emigres, mostly Jewish, who fled to these shores to escape him were designers, filmmakers and composers who would sound a new note in the American arts, one that kept ringing long after the war ended -- names like Mies van der Rohe, Billy Wilder and Arnold Schoenberg. Alfred Eisenstaedt was among them. When he set down in New York City in 1935, Eisenstaedt, "Eisie" to his friends, brought with him a loose-limbed working method that would eventually set the tone for all of American photojournalism. In the process, he would make pictures that are prize keepsakes of the nation's collective memory.

Remarkably, Eisenstaedt is only now receiving his first retrospective, "Eisie at 88," an engrossing exhibit of 125 photographs at Manhattan's International Center of Photography. The show brings back the prewar pictures that provided the world with its first evidence of his acute and mostly cheerful eye: an imperturbable waiter on ice skates, Marlene Dietrich in a top hat, but also the vulpine stare of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. It proceeds into the years when Eisenstaedt became a legend on the staff of LIFE, where he served from the first issue, contributing thousands of pictures and 92 covers.

Eisenstaedt's technique was adopted from the pioneering candid camera work of Erich Salomon. In the late 1920s, Salomon electrified photojournalism with his available-light pictures of European diplomats in unposed situations -- stuffed shirts in unbuttoned moments. Eisenstaedt applied Salomon's methods to less official surroundings, in ballrooms, at the opera, or among strollers at St. Moritz. His strengths were the chief strengths of photography generally: not the ceremonial but the serendipitous, not oratory but anecdote. He was the kind of photographer who could become so entranced by the sideline * doings at a royal wedding that he would forget to get a picture of the bride and groom.

Not long after Eisenstaedt arrived in the U.S., he came to the attention of TIME Co-Founder Henry Luce, who was about to embark on the publication of LIFE. Luce wanted his new magazine to make readers feel they were in the midst of settings they had formerly glimpsed from a distance. Eisenstaedt's companionable vision and his knack for the intimate view were just what was needed. In his LIFE assignments, Eisenstaedt flourished as a witness to our time, as the title of one of his books would have it: the guest at a sharecropper's home as well as at the White House, the recording angel of Hollywood and the fond chronicler of suburbia, the portraitist of everyone from Shaw to Kennedy.

Eisenstaedt's pictures blur the line between the public and the personal, getting the intimate angle on great occasions and personalities but lending consequence to more modest events. Take possession of the times, they say, in the forms of intimate remembrance. Look at his most famous photograph, of a sailor planting a resolute kiss during the 1945 V-J day celebration in Times Square. A confident grip on the future at the hub of the American universe, a heartfelt smooch at the world's most celebrated intersection of the public and the private -- what other postwar picture at once acknowledged the historical moment, summed up the elation of the victors and even hinted at the baby boom?

Oddly for a photographer who is known for keeping an autograph book, Eisenstaedt is sometimes held to lack an autograph of his own, an unmistakable style in the manner of Andre Kertesz or W. Eugene Smith. But the signature his work bears is more a matter of spirit than style, an embrace of life's episodes that is as benign and enveloping as eyesight itself. His 1963 picture of children watching a puppet show in Paris is both the consummate example of his close-in approach and the best metaphor for his own excitement in seeing.

In retrospect, Eisenstaedt's exile to America starts to look like a stroke of luck. Amid the prevailing cheer of the postwar nation, his upbeat view of things probably found a more ready audience than it would have in the more somber precincts of Europe. His chief mood is celebration. His chief attitude is assent. Is that the stuff of sweetness and light? Sometimes it is. But who can say no to such engaging sweetness, such abiding light?