Alfred Eisenstaedt, Famed Life Magazine Photographer, Dies -- Life Magazine Featured His Work

OAK BLUFFS, Mass. - Alfred Eisenstaedt, the Life magazine photographer who took the famous VJ Day picture of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square, has died at 96, a friend said today.

The New York City resident died late yesterday at a Martha's Vineyard inn where he was vacationing, said the friend, William Marks.

The famous picture taken Aug. 14, 1945, the day Japan surrendered to end World War II, showed a sailor holding a nurse in a half-dip with one of her feet lifted slightly off the ground.

The photo became a Life cover, and the picture remains a defining moment in photojournalism. "When people don't know me anymore they will remember that picture," Mr. Eisenstaedt said.

Millions of Life readers came to know the great personalities of the century through Mr. Eisenstaedt's eyes. He photographed Hitler, Einstein, Churchill, the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Rockwell, Ernest Hemingway and hundreds more. He photographed President Clinton and his family in 1993.

"Eisenstaedt was not the great stylist or artist, but he was one of the classic photojournalists. His were very direct, simple, powerful images. He just celebrated life," said Bill Kuykendall, of the photojournalism department at the University of Missouri.

Mr. Eisenstaedt was born in 1898 in the city of Dirschau, Germany, which is now in Poland. He began shooting pictures at age 12 when his uncle gave him a camera.

After serving in World War I, in which he suffered shrapnel injuries, Mr. Eisenstaedt went to work as a salesman in Berlin.

But his true interest lay in art, and he studied paintings in the Berlin museums. When he learned how to make enlargements in the late 1920s, he took up photography seriously.

He worked as a free-lance photographer for several years, establishing his reputation both as a photographer and as a journalist with his work for German picture magazines and for The Associated Press.

When Time magazine founder Henry Luce decided to start a picture magazine, he asked Mr. Eisenstaedt to come to the United States in 1935. While working on the prototype of what would become Life, Luce said, his faith the magazine would succeed was confirmed when he saw Mr. Eisenstaedt's photographs of a sharecropper family in the South.

"His influence was very great on young photographers. There weren't many home-grown American photojournalists when Life began, and everyone turned to Eisenstaedt and a handful of others who came here from German picture magazines," said Howard Chapnick, former president of the Black Star picture group and author of "Truth Needs No Ally," a history of photojournalism.

"He was a master of timing and composition," his friend and former assistant Cornell Capra told National Public Radio.

Mr. Eisenstaedt was one of the four original staff photographers at Life and eventually photographed more than 85 Life covers and, by his estimate, 1 million pictures in all.

He used all types of cameras but was best-known for his work with a Leica, one of the easily handled 35mm cameras that helped ignite the explosion of modern photojournalism in the 1930s.

He oversaw production of 13 books on his work, including "Eisenstaedt: Remembrances."

Although he had stopped taking assignments in recent years, he continued working, going four blocks from his Manhattan apartment to his tiny office in the Time-Life building.

He was married to Alma Kathy Kaye, who died in 1972.