
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, August 25, 1995                   TAG: 9508250109
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: NEWSDAY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PHOTO POET OF LONG ERA, ALFRED EISENSTAEDT, DIES

He was a Jew who photographed the first meeting between Hitler and Mussolini; an immigrant from a country that no longer exists who took portraits of Truman and Kennedy and Clinton, and helped create postwar America's image of itself; a world-famous pioneering photojournalist who was so short and unthreatening that Sophia Loren allowed him to sit in her lap.

He shot Hemingway and Hepburn and Horowitz, Einstein and T.S. Eliot and Elizabeth II, Marlene Dietrich in a top hat and tails, Marilyn Monroe before she was well-known, Helen Hayes at 100. But the most famous image captured by Alfred Eisenstaedt, who died Thursday at the age of 96, is probably that of a kiss between two strangers in the middle of Times Square.

It was V-J Day - the day World War II ended, 50 years ago this month - when a teen-age sailor embraced a passing nurse in an American tango of joy and celebration.

The picture, which Eisenstaedt often dismissed as ``a snapshot, accidental,'' has become so much a part of the culture that ``people see themselves in it, literally,'' says David Friend, director of photography for Life, where Eisenstaedt worked continuously from its first issue almost 60 years ago until just a month ago, when he went on his annual vacation.

``It's almost unfair to think of just that one photograph,'' says Cornell Capa, Eisenstaedt's assistant in 1937 and the founding director four decades later of the International Center of Photography. ``He has 1 million others. And they're all exuberant.''

Eisenstaedt was himself exuberant. A gregarious, hard-working man, the Prussia-born "Eisie," as he liked to be called, was often hailed as the most prolific photographer of the century.

``He won't be remembered for the presidents and kings he photographed,'' Friend says, ``but for the simple people, the everyday American, whom he photographed with such joy."

by CNB