Erich Salomon

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(b Berlin, 28 April 1886; d Auschwitz, 7 July 1944). German photographer. He studied zoology and engineering in Berlin from 1906 to 1909, and then law. In World War I Salomon entered military service and was taken as a prisoner of war in France. He began working in the advertising department of the Ullstein publishing house in 1923 and as a result came into contact with photography, which he began practising in 1927. Until 1933 he worked mainly as a freelance photographer for Ullstein, the Berliner illustrierte Zeitung, the M?nchner illustrierte Presse, Fortune, Life and the Daily Telegraph.

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Salomon, Erich (1886-1944?), German photojournalist and ‘father of candid photography’. Salomon was born into a bourgeois Berlin family that suffered heavily in the German hyper-inflation. After various jobs in the 1920s, he became publicity manager for Ullstein Verlag, publishers of the Berliner illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ). Having experimented with an Ermanox camera, capable of taking pictures in low light, he took a chance on working as a photographer for the BIZ. Seeing himself as a kind of contemporary historian, and exploiting his social contacts, he captured unposed images of political and cultural celebrities. Typical was Reception in Berlin (1931), showing Albert Einstein engaged in animated conversation with Ramsay MacDonald, surrounded by a group of luminaries including the Nobel Prize-winner Max Planck, smoking cigars and sipping cognac.

Salomon would put his subjects at ease by his urbanity and ability to converse on almost any topic (and in any of seven languages). It was the London Graphic that coined the ‘candid’ epithet, following Aristide Briand's 1930 quip that unless a ministerial meeting were documented by Salomon no one would believe it had happened. In the mid-1930s he took his family to Holland, where he worked for Dutch newspapers and magazines. Following the Occupation, they were deported to Theresienstadt, then Auschwitz, where Salomon perished with his wife (Maggy Schuler) and younger son (Dirk), probably in 1944.

— Amanda Hopkinson

Bibliography

• Vries, H. de, Erich Salomon: Portrait of an Age (Eng. edn. 1966).
• Erich Salomon, introd. Peter Hunter (1978)

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