was bitten by the camera bug, he devoted his life to photography. By force
of will, tempered by an acute understanding of the social graces, he secured
entrance to the halls of government, homes of the powerful, and hideaways
of the well-to-do. He devised intricate ways to capture the rich and famous
unawares on film, and he published these photographs with impunity. He
busted the formal traditions that the high-and-mighty found acceptable
and brought mythic figures down to size. Today these images, collected in
books, are vivid documents of his times.
When Salomon began shooting in the late 1920 s, Kurt Szafranski
was appointed editor-in-chief of BIZand its sister publication, the
monthly Die Dame. Both magazines were part of the House of Ullstein,
Germany’s largest periodical publisher. Salomon was already working in
Ullstein’s promotion department when photography became his obsession.
He showed Szafranski his now-famous candid pictures of exhausted
delegates to the League of Nations and was immediately awarded a
contract to work for BIZ. Szafranski also employed other pioneers of
photojournalism—Martin Munkacsi, the action photographer, and André
Kertész, then a travel photographer.
Szafranski and his colleague, Kurt Korff (both of whom eventually
moved to Lifemagazine in New York), were early experimenters with the
essay approach—a form that required a variety of pictures and concise
captions linked together to build impact and drama. According to the
principle of the “Third Effect,” when two pictures are brought together and
positioned side by side, each picture’s individual effect is enhanced by the
reader’s interpretative powers. This juxtaposition was sometimes possible
with disparate images but usually required thematic pictures reproduced in
radically different scales. Sometimes, it would be accomplished with serious
conceptual photographs; at other times, novelty pictures—such as a stark
close-up of a horse’s head next to, say, a close crop of a similarly featured
human’s head—made a comic statement. Yet for all their innovation,BIZ’s
photographic essays were usually strained juxtapositions of pictures, not
stories in the truest sense. The key to success—the integration of image,
idea, and words—was frequently lost amid poor and ineffectual layouts.
Münchener Illustrierte Presse, a popular Bavarian picture magazine,
however, took the photograph and ran with it. Its editor and art director
was a young Hungarian émigré named Stefan Lorant, who, before leaving
his native Budapest in his early twenties, was already an accomplished
photographer and film director. He decided to settle in Munich rather than
America or England because he was fluent in German. Fortuitously, he fell
into the job as assistant to the editor of MIPand, owing to his remarkable
energy and ambition, was very soon afterward named its photo editor.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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