Eliot Elisofon on assignment during WWII. (Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
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Eliot Elisofon (1911-1973) took up photography while working his way through Fordham, where he was pre-med but majored in philosophy. After graduating, he forged a successful business in commercial photography, which he gave up to join LIFE. Noting that the camera “says too much,” Elisofon sought “to try to take pictures that are impossible to take.” He carried his camera into danger zones during World War II. Once, leaving North Africa, his plane crashed and burned the trousers right off him. According to war correspondent Ernie Pyle, “Elisofon was afraid like the rest of us. Yet he made himself go right into the teeth of danger. I never knew a more intense worker.” Elisofon’s postwar subjects were quite varied, including everything from culinary still lifes to studies in the mountains of Africa. His friend Gypsy Rose Lee gave him a small piece of African art; he went on to bequeath 80,000 photos of Africa to the Smithsonian.
—Adapted from The Great LIFE Photographers
LIFE magazine published July 2, 1945, featuring an American flag over US ships at sea. (Photo by Eliot Elisofon/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
Artist Marcel Duchamp walking down a flight of stairs in a multiple exposure image reminiscent of his famous painting “Nude Descending a Staircase.” (Photo by Eliot Elisofon/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
Eliot Elisofon, his eyes closed and his face illuminated by candle. (Photo by Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation)
