The group of 15 photographs offered here demonstrates Dr. Erich Salomon’s ability to capture uniquely candid and compelling news photographs. While competing photojournalists worked with large-format cameras and flash equipment, Salomon made effective use of smaller cameras and worked only with available light, allowing him to photograph unobtrusively and thus capture moments previously hidden from public view. His ability to penetrate the public personas of the great and powerful put Salomon’s images in high demand and they were widely published in the European, British, and American picture press. His fluid and immersive style established a wholly new direction in photojournalism, and he is widely regarded as the father of modern photojournalism.
Titles include:
The author Upton Sinclair on the terrace of his house in Hollywood, 1930
The banker Otto H. Kahn and his wife in their New York mansion, 1932
Committee at the Reichstag, circa 1930
William Randolph Hearst with guests at a luncheon on his ranch, La Cuesta Encantada, San Simeon, California, 1930
Winston Churchill at the Austrian Legation in London in 1937 on the occasion of the coronation of King George VI, 1937
French premier, Pierre Laval, then French premier, in the home of Senator William Borah, ’s Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, 1931
League of Nations, Geneva – two listeners in the press box during a boring speech given by Wodermas, the president of Lithuania, 1928
In Washington, 1932, Dr. Benvenuto Hauptmann, the son of the poet Gerhart Hauptmann, in conversation with Miss Mary White, 1932
The Hein murder trial, 1928
Ladies of the American Society. A breakfast at the home of Mrs. Vincent Astor in New York, from the left, Mrs. Fell, Mrs. Vincent Astor, Mrs. Louis Morris, Mrs. H.G. Gray, 1932
Soirée, circa 1930
Benjamino Giglio in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, 1932
Harvard University, Common Room, circa 1930
The main deck of the Bremen at night during embarkment in Cherbourg, circa 1930
The honorary loge of the Berlin Opera House, circa 1930