The Eyes Tell All
Alfred Eisenstaedt at Robert Mann Gallery
There’s not a person alive who wouldn’t want to feel the fire immortalized in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day in Times Square,” taken in 1945. Controversy around the circumstances caught on film bubbled to the surface in the years that followed–the “passionate kiss” was not consensual and the two people involved didn’t know each other– but that hasn’t knocked this work from its position at the top of the list of the most recognizable images of the 20th century.
We all know what thirst feels like. We all recognize who and what Marilyn Monroe signified in Eisenstaedt’s portrait of her. We all see what is there; the point of this style of work is to also see what is not. The thunderstorm of the feminine gaze, the weight of its secrets and hopes, sizing you up and deciding what to do with you next, all of it crashing in an instant.
“In a photograph, a person’s eyes tell much, sometimes they tell all,” Eisenstaedt once wrote, in reference to the thought process behind his work. In Alfred Eisenstaedt: Portraits of the Past, on view at Robert Mann Gallery, we witness just how much they have to say.
Eisenstaedt emigrated to the United States in 1935, and LIFE Magazine hired him as one of its founding photographers. The body of work he produced during this era portrays the pieces of WWII-era life that lent New Yorkers a much-craved distraction from the turmoil of war–the effervescent smiles of starlets like Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis, the thrill of opening night at the theater, and the comfort of knowing that trains will always run on time.
We hope you find as much inspiration and pleasure in these works as we have.
Alfred Eisenstaedt: Portraits of the Past closes at Robert Mann Gallery in New York on April 27.
