ON A PERSONAL NOTE
I have a LIFE coffee table book that I purchased at a tag sale years ago. The book still has the photographic protective sheets in between the pages. The photographs on the pages of this book make me feel like there is hope in the world; makes me dream; makes me believe in people; inspire me and make me think of my Mom. She and I often sat outside on the weekends when I was little and look at LIFE magazines. She loved to savor the fashion, the faces, the details of clothing…she always talked about stitching…she taught me how to assess well made clothing by the stitching. When I opened this coffee table book this morning to find an artist to share today, I opened to a photograph of Marlon Brando and Kim Hunter (1947) taken of them in the original staged production of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. I thought you'd enjoy relishing the detail and brilliance of this photo and the all the emotions conjured in the position of their bodies. I have felt what is communicated in this photo. I suppose the interpretation of that sentence will be many. How does it make YOU feel? Have you felt what you described it to be for you, in your own life?
ABOUT ELIOT ELISOFON
Eliot Elisofon (1911–1973) was born on the Lower East Side of New York City. In 1935, after attending Fordham University, Elisofon opened a commercial photography studio and made photographs for advertising and fashion. He joined the Photo League in 1936, eventually becoming its president. His New York street work was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art and the Julien Levy Gallery. In 1939 his series Playgrounds of Manhattan was exhibited at the New School; for Elisofon the series was a way to bring attention to playground conditions for children in poor neighborhoods. Elisofon befriended and photographed many artists of the period, including Chaim Gross, Isamu Noguchi and David Smith, and his studio across from Museum of Modern Art served as a gathering place for artists.
Elisofon’s first assignments for Life magazine appeared in 1937, Tin Type Photographer and Jewish New Year, and in 1941 his image of General Patton was the first color cover of Life. In 1942 Elisofon photographed a French Moroccan concentration camp, Sidi El Agachei but the images were never published. His other photographs of the North African Campaign during WWII became an exhibition titled The Tunisian Triumph, which opened in June of 1943 at MoMA and traveled to 20 cities in the United States.
Over the years, Elisofon travelled to six continents, covering an estimated 2,000,000 miles. His work appeared in Life for almost 30 years and 19 books of his work were published during his lifetime. He made 11 trips to Africa, photographing, making films and collecting art and donated his extensive collection of African art and his photographic archive of over 80,000 images to what became the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. In 2013 the museum celebrated the 40th Anniversary of the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives and art collection with the exhibition Africa Re-Viewed: The Photographic Legacy of Eliot Elisofon.
QUOTE BY ELIOT ELISOFON
Most people try to include too much in the picture. If you are photographing a child playing on the lawn, photograph the child, not the trees, the house, and everything else in sight. Photography is really a simple statement and the clearer it is the better. -Eliot Elisofon
WHAT I WISH FOR YOU TODAY
SIMPLICTY!