Alfred Eisenstaedt
13 June – 21 September 2025
CAMERA’s 2025 exhibition program continues with a major new exhibition, from June 13 to September 21, celebrating photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt in Italy.
Author of the famous image V-J Day in Times Square, Eisenstaedt was one of the principal photographers of “Life” magazine, for which he chronicled the world and its contemporaneity through an amused and inquiring gaze.
Thirty years after his death and eighty years after he took the famous shot, the exhibition curated by Monica Poggi presents a selection of 150 images, many of which have never been exhibited, starting with his first shots in 1930s Germany, where he took the disturbing photographs of Nazi hierarchs, including the famous one of Joseph Goebbels.
The exhibition – the first in Italy since 1984 – traces the entire span of his career, from the giddy life of the economic boom United States, to post-nuclear Japan, to the last works produced in the 1980s.
Eisenstaedt’s style fits into the great American documentary tradition, but is enriched at times with poetic visions, recalling nineteenth-century painting, or with witty irony, constructed through alienating scenarios that recall the devices of European surrealist art.
Alfred Eisenstaedt
Born in 1898 in Dirschau, West Prussia (now Poland), his first approach to photography came during his teenage years, when an uncle gave him an Eastman Kodak No. 3, which accompanied him throughout his years of study. In the late 1920s, he began working for the Associated Press, which was followed in 1929 by the publication of his first images in the German magazine “Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung.” In 1935, to escape racial laws, he emigrated to the United States, where the following year he began working with the famous American magazine “Life,” with which he would sign some of his best-known features. Eisenstaedt died in 1995, at the age of ninety-seven, at his vacation home on his beloved island of Martha’s Vineyard.