Alfred Eisenstaedt 1983 interview

Nice interview. I interviewed him in 1990 in that same room (his tiny office on the 28th floor of the Time-Life Building in NYC) when he was 92 and the ‘retainer’ of Life Magazine as he was called, and he told me a lot of the same stories as in this 1983 interview. I tried to steer him into other questions that I’d not heard him answer before (such as his thoughts on the Cincinnati Mapplethorpe incident that took place earlier that year) and he was somewhat willing to venture into other areas, but in the end he preferred to tell me about things I’d heard and read about so many times before. Overall it was a decent interview (about an hour long), but if I had to do it over again I’d probably have done it differently (and I would have taken this photo differently too!). Ah well, the things we learn with age and hindsight.


Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1990 by Vince Lupo, on Flickr
 
I think it's a great picture. And yes, as we get well on in age we tend to want to talk about things that we were personally involved with.
 
Well I for one think the image does him justice. A man aging like we all do in an interesting setting. No, you should be proud of that image and it’s memory.
Out of curiosity, what would you now have done differently ??????
 
jmpgino said:
Well I for one think the image does him justice. A man aging like we all do in an interesting setting. No, you should be proud of that image and it’s memory.
Out of curiosity, what would you now have done differently ??????
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I think I would have asked him different questions, maybe ones that weren’t so ‘lofty’ (I was a first year photo undergrad student, so maybe I was being a bit too ‘academic’ for my own good in my questions if that makes sense). What I really wanted was to get at questions that were different from everything I already knew about and questions he likely had answered hundreds of times before.

As far as the photo goes, I wish it didn’t have camera shake, so maybe if I shot with a faster film or pushed it (I was using HP5 in my Leica III with a Summar lens, which impressed him) it would have been sharper. Think I took about 5 shots - maybe I should look at the others!

BTW if you notice the magazine he’s reading, it’s Life Magazine issue #2 (Nov. 30, 1936), which was his first cover. It depicts a West Point cadet drinking water at attention. I purchased this magazine from an antiques dealer friend of mine just before I flew down to New York to interview Eisenstaedt, and had him sign it for me. I still have it.

I still remember a few kernels of wisdom from him, and somewhere I still have the audio cassette of our interview. First, he is not the father of photojournalism - Dr. Erich Salomon is. Second, he did not agree with censorship regarding Mapplethorpe’s photos, so he was in favor of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center’s decision to show the work. Third, he has no style: “You look at a Cartier-Bresson and you can say, that’s a Cartier-Bresson. But Eisenstaedt has no style - I have no style!” Fourth, the best way to take a portrait of someone is to get them to like you (like Sophia Loren!). Finally, if your camera is sitting on a table, never let the camera strap hang down over the side of it (he berated me for doing that!).
 
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