Then he goes to his tiny, windowless office, cluttered with yellow boxes of photos from at least 2,500 assignments he shot for Life, including 86 cover photos, and some early ones for The Associated Press, such as the 1934 Hitler-Mussolini encounter. On sunny days, he spends a half-hour getting tanned on a terrace amid the skyscrapers. He's stopped taking assignments, but every morning at 9:15 a.m., 'Eisie' arrives at the Time-Life building on Sixth Avenue, walking four blocks from his Manhattan apartment. He started and ended every sentence with a four-letter word.'ĭespite the difficulties, Eisenstaedt produced a spread that ran in Life.Įisenstaedt still has his office there and says, 'I will never stop working.' He was drinking from morning till evening, and he was blue-red (in the face).

Photographing the novelist, he says, was his most difficult assignment. The knife bounced off the hard biceps, Eisenstaedt says, and Hemingway yelled out to his wife, 'Martha! Martha! It's little Papa!' He asked for a knife, rolled up his sleeve, flexed his arm muscle and dropped the blade point on it. The diminutive Eisenstaedt - 'I'm 5 feet 3, like Napoleon' - decided to stage his own macho act. 'Papa' was too proud of his aging muscles to cover up. 'I asked him if he had a shirt to wear, and he blew up.' That was a year after the two had first met, when Hemingway opened the door of his house near Havana 'and in front of me stood a man only clad in very dilapidated shorts, with a hairy chest, tanned,' he says. 'I really thought I would die, my spine almost broke,' Eisenstaedt recalls. When Eisenstaedt indicated he didn't believe him, Hemingway grabbed him and slammed him across a dock railing over the water. The avid angler warned him not to get too close, or he would shoot his rifle.Īt a cocktail party later that day, Hemingway told Eisenstaedt that he had fired shots toward the photographer's boat. Hemingway went out on a deep-sea fishing expedition, with the photographer following in a speedboat. He laughingly recalls an assignment to photograph Ernest Hemingway fishing in Cuba in 1953 after 'The Old Man and the Sea' was published. When he saw a great picture, Eisenstaedt risked everything to get it on film. Only too bad I can't move around so fast anymore. 'Your brain and your finger react at the same time - click,' says Eisenstaedt, one of the original staff photographers at Life magazine. Through his camera lens, the pioneer photojournalist has seen the great faces of the 20th century. These images are among the thousands of photos Alfred Eisenstaedt, 93, has taken since 1929. Mussolini is shaking hands with a youthful Hitler in prewar Europe, before the horror. Click.Ī sultry Marlene Dietrich is posing in a tuxedo. NEW YORK - A euphoric sailor is kissing a nurse in the middle of Times Square.

Bertrand russell alfred eisenstaedt