REDISCOVERING ERICH SALOMON
By Todd Buell
BERLIN—Erich
Salomon is much better known on this side of the Atlantic than in the United
States. He was a photographer who used his educated background to find his
way, and his camera, into intimate environs of many of the leading figures
of the 1920s and 1930s, in both Europe and the United States. He revealed
the private sides of politicians and entertainers—often in a manner that
suggested the looming cloud of fanaticism that was hovering over Europe and
that would eventually lead to his demise.
I learned about
Salomon first in 2004 when I took a quick visit to Strasbourg, France. (I
was living in Austria at the time.) The city is generally considered the
European capital because it is both the seat of the Council of Europe and
the European Parliament. My final day in Strasbourg was a Sunday afternoon
and, more or less looking for something to do, I popped into the Musée d’Art
moderne et contemporain (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) without much
of a specific idea as to what I would view.
The impression
that Salomon’s works made on me is best illustrated by realizing that I go
to museums frequently—more when I am in Europe than in the United States.
However the exhibitions that I see rarely stick in my head. I tend to
remember a work or two sporadically, but sometimes forget the name of the
artist who produced it.
My reaction to
Salomon in Strasbourg was the exact opposite: I was hooked the instant that
I read his biography on the museum wall.
He was born in
1886 in Berlin, the fourth child of a wealthy Jewish family, was trained as
a lawyer, earning a Ph.D. in law. In his forties, he became interested in
photography and started taking pictures for Ullstein publishers. It is not
entirely clear why he took up photography. An anecdote listed in a German
book of his works mentions that Salomon’s photographic inclinations came out
as more of an accident. In 1927, while working in the advertising department
of the Ullstein publishing house, he happened to be at the scene of a deadly
accident that had been caused by a bolt of lightning. Salomon, recognizing
the importance of the story, wrote a report on the event and added his own
photographs.
However Salomon’s
real impulse, at least according to this account, for looking to photography
as a profession was the money involved. As he saw from the accounting
breakdown of his aforementioned first “scoop,” 90 marks (the German currency
at the time) were allocated for the photographer, the reporter was to have
received only 10 marks. It is thought that a day after learning of this
scheme, Salomon bought himself a camera.
Most of his work
was in Europe, but he also traveled to the United States not only to
photograph potential immigrants on Ellis Island, but also to take pictures
of committee meetings in the Senate, Hollywood stars lounging at parties, or
as, in the case of Marlene Dietrich, a picture of her lying across her bed
happily chatting with her daughter in Berlin (in 1930).
Salomon’s works
are striking for two interconnected reasons: The first is that the viewer is
inevitably absorbed in how close Salomon seems to be physically to the
subjects of his pictures.
We see his
subjects, wearing elegant evening clothes, huddled together discussing what
appear to be serious matters of state. Indeed this is a factor of Salomon’s
work that the photographer himself emphasized. The title of the exhibit that
I saw in Strasbourg, and of the book that I recently bought in Berlin that
accompanied the exhibit, is called, in English, Erich Salomon: With a
Waistcoat and Lense through Politics and Society. The title is the same
as that of a presentation of his own works that Salomon gave in Berlin on
the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday in 1931. A collection of Salomon’s
works was later published in the United States under the title Unguarded
Moments: Images of People, Politics and Society in Europe and USA 1928–1938.
On a superficial
level there are some of Salomon’s works that essentially reconfirm notions
about the 1920s and 1930s that one probably already would have: The
privileged lived well while maintaining the traditional roles and barriers
of the day.
The era being what
it was, it is evident through his pictures that in those days it was the men
who made the important decisions, often enveloped by cigar smoke, while
their wives gaily (in the original sense of the word) interacted over drinks
and tea, with occasionally
cigarettes accompanying them.
This gender
juxtapositioning, though by no means the main focus of any study of
Salomon’s work, is striking in the sense that one often sees photographs of
leading political figures of the time, such as Britain’s Anthony Eden or
Ramsay MacDonald, France’s Aristide Briand, Germany’s Gustav Stresemann or
Reichskanzler Paul von Hindenburg, often mixing together with their wives
not in the picture.
However, what
makes his work so remarkable is the proximity that Salomon had to his
subjects and that allowed him to show them at moments where they betray
their public veneers. Indeed Salomon would often sneak his camera into
functions either hidden in his waistcoat or inside his bowler hat.
The intimacy that
Salomon could capture through his photographs is amplified by one of his
most famous works. In this one, Salomon is in Paris with leading French
politicians in August of 1931. One imagines from the picture that he is
standing with his lens about thirty feet away from a group of five male
politicians standing in a circle in a corridor. Salomon prepares to snap one
picture and then, or so it appears, Aristide Briand (1862–1932, a ten-time
Prime Minister of France of the Socialist Party from 1909–1929) realizes
that Salomon is there. He whips his body around and points directly at
Salomon with the exclamation, “Voila le roi des indiscrets” (“There
he is, the king of the indiscreet”).
The spontaneity
and diversity with which Salomon was able to capture his subjects are
without question artistic elements within his work. He was able not only to
capture the leading figures of the time in intimate moments but also in
their public appearances, while giving speeches to parliaments or other
assemblies. Yet he could still shoot them in ways that appear unorthodox,
angular, disquieting, and, in certain cases, rather unbecoming of the
subject. For example, senators appearing to be either asleep or completely
disengaged at a committee meeting or a Romanian delegate to the League of
Nations laughing as if she is in a drunken hysteria.
Some of his
pictures from Geneva, including a picture from the balcony looking down at
the interwar German politician Gustav Stresemann (reichskanzler—chancellor,
1923—and foreign minister from 1923–1929) as he gives his speech to the body
in 1929 or of the Ethiopian Emperor from the back in a garden seem jarring
in a manner that reminds one of a Hitchcock film.
Perhaps it is this sense of impending doom that is evident in a number of
Salomon’s works (especially his later ones—late 1930s) that makes them, and
him as a person, so fascinating to me. The viewer can see that despite the
efforts of a number of people, such as Einstein, Stresemann, Briand, and
countless others to bring Europe together following the First World War,
things were not working out. Whether Salomon could sense that things were
falling apart when he was taking pictures in the late 1920s and early 1930s
is not known.
Salomon, having
taken numerous pictures within the German Reichstag (parliament) in
the late 1920s and 1930s, had multiple opportunities to portray the growing
“brownshirt” or National Socialist movement. There are two in the book
depicting his exhibition. One shows the Nazi men sitting in the Reichstag
wearing their brown militaresque uniforms. They are laughing in a manner
that reflects the utter contempt that they had for any opinion or position
that was not rigidly their own.
This picture is,
however, predictable and frankly teaches us nothing we do not know already.
In the second picture though, Salomon captures these aggressively
nationalistic young men in a lounge area outside of the main parliament
hall. It is probably just a consequence of poor light or, by today’s
standards, inferior technology that the men’s movements look blurry. I find
this photograph striking as it reflects to a viewer today the confusion and
lack of clarity that existed in politics and society in Germany in the early
1930s—it was through this loss of orientation among the German populace that
the Nazis were indeed voted into power.
With the rise to
power of the Nazis in 1933 in Salomon’s native Germany, he was forced to
flee to the Netherlands. The Hague became his base from then on, although he
did spend some time in the mid-1930s in London. The saddest irony in
Salomon’s life is that the coalescing storm that existed behind the scenes
of privilege that Salomon photographed through much of his professional life
would capture him as well. His oldest son Otto remained in England, changed
his name to a British name (Peter Hunter), and wound up fighting for the
British in the Second World War.
Erich Salomon was
arrested along with his wife and youngest son by the German secret police,
the Gestapo, in the Netherlands 1943. He was murdered on July 7, 1944, in
Auschwitz. His wife and son were likely murdered earlier.
