ALFRED EISENSTAEDT
Making the grandiose pithy and the ordinary grand is no mean task–it takes work. “I have found that the most important element in my equipment is not an expensive camera or a unique lens but patience, patience, patience,” he has said. “If you don’t know how to stand knee-deep in water for hours, or sit broiling in the sunshine while mosquitoes buzz around your head, remaining absolutely motionless yet relaxed and alert, you are finished before you start. It is a question of temperament more than technique.” As in the craft of ballet (which he photographs so well), it’s always the things that look simplest that are, in reality, the most complex and difficult to achieve.
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Even his shots of celebrities’ empty rooms have a sheer emotion. Like a good narrator, Eisenstaedt is not content to merely tell you the story: he knows where the punch line comes in, and centrally locates it with an unfailing eye, loading a few objects with implication.
In Premier at La Scala, Milan, the same imposing repetition of spiral rows (tiers of box seats with colonnades) focuses the attention on one young woman gazing thoughtfully in the foreground. It’s the fragility and beauty of the moment that give this photo its focus. She’s decorated as heavily as the six tiers of balconies: we see her jewelry–a ring, a bracelet, a necklace, a watch–and the lace at her elbow. Yet like the war-horse building itself, which has served up many an inspired performance despite catering to the gilded tastes of the gentry it serves, she may have a genuine artistic bent. After all, her opera glasses, out of their case, are propped on a special shelf in front of her. And she isn’t using them to stare at the society mavens around her.
Other celebrity photos also offer insights into artists’ private worlds. In George Bernard Shaw the writer is immersed in paperwork, suddenly interrupted for the mundane task of a portrait–and he clearly resents the waste of time. In a sardonic close-up, one eye is almost closed, but he’s opened the other wide: old and wizened, Shaw is not only wise but oracular. He’s seen the future and he knows it’s not going to work. Robert Frost offers homespun casualness: he sits on a cloth-covered chair working at a makeshift table propped up with a stick tied to the tabletop with a string. Tousled white hair adds to his look of utter concentration. It’s as if everything around him–bookcases, armchairs, windows, paintings–has disappeared: everything but what’s before him on that board, which he must give himself over to.
