A POET AND HIS CAMERA

The 20th century image bank consists in good part--some of the best part, you might say--of what was put there by Alfred Eisenstaedt. When he died last week at 96, he left behind one of the great lyric troves of modern photography. An incomparable photojournalist, "Eisie'' helped to make LIFE an indispensable scrapbook of the national memory. And even before that, in the 1920s, when many people still believed cameras could only take dictation, he had figured out their potential for poetry.

Eisenstaedt was born in Dirschau, Prussia, a town now in Poland. A man with a lifelong taste for whatever was close-in, informal and unofficial, he came to photography at the very moment handheld cameras were at last making it possible to take pictures in the same unbuckled mood. Seen through Eisenstaedt's Leica, public events became less ceremonious, while ordinary people took on scale and emotional weight. After he fled Hitler, those were the qualities that recommended him to the editors of LIFE, where in 1936 he became one of its four original photographers. It was part of his gift to recognize that history could be made in the placid American suburbs just as surely as it was made in Berlin.

Another part was his agreeable disposition. "Never boss people around,'' was his working rule. "It's more important to click with people than to click the shutter.'' It was only to be expected that a man of his temperament would close out World War II with an image, his most famous, of a sailor locking lips with a woman. Precisely because he understood the war's tragedy, he chose to see it sealed with a kiss. It was like that generally between Eisie, the world and his camera. Very simply, they clicked.