Erich Salomon

Legal Training and the Ability to Enter Closed Spaces

Salomon studied law, entered publishing and advertising after the economic difficulties that followed World War I, and moved into photographic reporting in the late 1920s. The International Center of Photography places his doctorate in law and his rapid entry into photojournalism within the same biography.^*1

That background also mattered to his choice of subjects. He repeatedly photographed international conferences, courtrooms, diplomats, and cabinet ministers—people inside institutions that a photographer could not reach simply by moving physically closer. The Berlinische Galerie archive emphasizes that from 1928 onward he became a “star reporter” by photographing scenes rarely visible inside closed political and social settings.^*2

Illustrated Weeklies Turned “Behind the Scenes” Into a Commodity

In 1920s Germany, illustrated magazines expanded dramatically, publishing large numbers of photographs and making individual photojournalists recognizable to readers by name and style. Salomon’s pictures were not first conceived as autonomous art objects. They were tied to a magazine culture that used articles, headlines, and page sequences to make politicians appear more immediate and familiar.^*3

The Smithsonian’s photographic history collection preserves Salomon and the Ermanox as a pairing that helps explain changes in modern picture reporting. Smaller cameras and more light-sensitive working conditions expanded the spaces of news photography from outdoor ceremonies into dark conference rooms. Smithsonian records show that Salomon initially used a conventional Contessa Nettel, then adopted the Ermanox for its advantage in low light and began using a Leica around 1932. It is therefore more accurate to see him as a working reporter who updated his equipment to suit changing locations than to claim that one compact-camera invention single-handedly created a new form of news photography.^*4

The German biographical dictionary likewise distinguishes Salomon from conventional representative portraiture made with large cameras, emphasizing his entry into social situations and his tendency to photograph people in the middle of action.^*5

MoMA’s chronology notes that Salomon first published a photograph in a newspaper in 1926, used the Ermanox from 1927 to 1933, secretly photographed major trials in 1928–29, and was excluded from the German press in 1933 because he was Jewish.^*21 The Mother of the Defendant, 1928, is an early example of his ability to show the courtroom not only as an official legal proceeding but also as a human event that included spectators and the anxiety of family members.^*22

The Expansion of the Picture Press Was as Important as the Photographer’s Innovation

During Salomon’s working years, German illustrated magazines were rapidly expanding the mass audience for photography. According to MoMA, Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung had surpassed one million copies by 1920 and exceeded two million in the 1930s, becoming a major medium for reporting politics, entertainment, sports, and society through photographs.^*26 The Metropolitan Museum of Art likewise explains that competition among illustrated magazines encouraged new approaches to page design and photographic reporting.^*25

In this environment, a politician’s public image was shaped by sequences of photographs, headlines, captions, and page order as much as by any single innovative image. Salomon’s “behind the scenes” pictures belonged to a media culture in which readers increasingly encountered politics through faces, habits, fatigue, and social mannerisms. His place in photographic history sits at the intersection of this personalization of politics and the mass expansion of photographic magazines.

Candid Photography and the Construction of the “Real Politician”

Salomon’s photographs are often understood too simply as being closer to “truth” because they look more natural than official portraits. Bernadette Kester’s research, however, shows that politicians were already being personalized and popularized before Salomon’s success and that magazine readers were increasingly prepared to consume the private expressions of public figures.^*28

Cara Finnegan’s research on the history of political photography further argues that candid photography after the late 1920s imposed new expectations of “access, intimacy, and vitality” on politicians. Herbert Hoover adapted poorly to this new visibility, while Franklin Roosevelt actively managed how his disability appeared in photographs. As apparently unguarded photography became more widespread, politicians themselves learned to manage “looking natural” as a new kind of performance.^*29

This is where the historical importance and the limits of Salomon’s method meet. By reducing the camera’s presence, he made it possible to photograph outside official ritual. Yet the success of that method also helped establish a new photojournalistic value: the belief that an expression produced without apparent awareness of the camera reveals a person’s essential character. That belief itself soon became something political publicity could manage.^*29

Removing Flash Changed How Subjects Behaved

The Ermanox had a fast lens that allowed comparatively short exposures in dim interiors. Because Salomon could avoid powerful magnesium flash, he did not have to interrupt meetings or redirect everyone’s attention toward the camera each time he photographed. The Ermanox used plate film and was not the same type of camera as the later 35mm Leica. For Salomon, its advantage was not size alone. Its fast lens allowed him to work under existing room light without remaking the atmosphere of a meeting for the sake of photography.^*6

What matters in Salomon’s photographs is less the speed of “stealing a moment” than the photographer’s willingness to remain in a room for a long time. By waiting through the period before a meeting, breaks, and late-night fatigue, he allowed stretches of time excluded from official photography to enter the frame. A Berlinische Galerie retrospective also shows that his close relationships with figures such as Gustav Stresemann and Aristide Briand helped make such pictures possible. “Candid” did not mean the absence of a relationship with the subject. Salomon could photograph the moments before and after everyone turned toward the camera because he was a familiar presence at conferences and had been permitted to remain among politicians. Access and unobtrusiveness were both necessary.^*7

The News Value and Ethics of the Hidden Camera

In his 1928 courtroom work, Salomon concealed his camera in places where photography was prohibited. ICP treats these courtroom images as an early body of work that was central to the making of his reputation.^*8

The Smithsonian photograph of the Johann Hein trial differs from a courtroom picture in which participants pose for the camera. The very fact that photography was forbidden became part of the value of “showing the inside.” It is also an example of how the miniaturization of photographic equipment helped modern news photography renegotiate the boundary between public information and privacy. The 1928 photographs were published in Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, and the concealed method itself became news. The technical feat of entering a prohibited zone was directly tied to the competitive promise of the picture press: giving readers access to institutions otherwise closed to them.^*9

The historical question is how photojournalism came to associate a subject’s lack of awareness of the camera with photographic truthfulness, while present-day ethical concerns remain part of that assessment.^*10

Social Access as a Photographic Technique

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s study of interwar photography describes Salomon as a legally trained member of Berlin high society and argues that both his social comportment and unobtrusive equipment made entry into political conferences possible.^*27 Candid photography was therefore not a method available to anyone who happened to own a small camera. The intimacy of the frame depended on social conditions: who could enter a conference room, remain there for hours without arousing suspicion, and speak with politicians.

The Time in Which Politics Happens, More Than the Politician’s “Expression”

At the League of Nations and diplomatic conferences, Salomon repeatedly photographed negotiations around tables, time spent reading documents, and conversation during breaks instead of heroic poses during speeches. MoMA’s holdings include views of the League’s observation galleries and conference participants that look laterally into the institutional setting.^*11

In a Metropolitan Museum photograph of Ramsay MacDonald, Albert Einstein, and Max Planck, famous figures are not ceremonially arranged in a row; they are caught in the middle of social interaction. What becomes news is not fame alone, but how well-known people behave when sharing the same space.^*12

Photographs of Anthony Eden similarly emphasize distance within the room and bodily posture, with flags and official backdrops playing a secondary role. Salomon consistently photographed political power as a situation in which people gather and spend time; official symbols no longer organize the entire image.^*13

Berühmte Zeitgenossen in unbewachten Augenblicken and Ellis Island

The 1931 photobook Berühmte Zeitgenossen in unbewachten Augenblicken assembled famous contemporaries in, as the title states, “unguarded moments,” presenting Salomon’s method in book form. The Berlinische Galerie lists the volume among his major achievements. By removing individual photographs from topical articles and gathering them into a book, Salomon himself presented the “unguarded moment” as a repeatable authorial method. News pictures designed for one-time consumption in magazines became a body of work bearing the photographer’s name.^*14

The Ellis Island reportage preserved by the same museum shows that Salomon’s subjects were not limited to European politicians. Photographing spaces of immigration inspection extended his work from the private moments of powerful figures to the situations of people subjected to institutional authority.^*15

The Observation Gallery in the League of Nations, 1928, is one example in which political reporting encompasses the conference floor together with the surrounding spaces where people watch and wait.^*23 John Kennedy, London, 1939, in the National Gallery of Art, shows that Salomon continued photographing international figures after exile and prevents his method from being reduced to a brief technological fashion of the Weimar period.^*24

The Weimar Picture Press as the Larger Transformation

In contemporary German illustrated magazines, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Felix H. Man, Martin Munkácsi, Willy Ruge, and others were also changing the appearance of news through compact cameras and photographic sequences. The Met situates this generation within the broader transformation of the German picture press from text-led reporting toward increasingly visual journalism after World War I.^*25

Salomon’s distinctive position within that transformation was his concentration on political conferences, diplomacy, corporate leadership, and other settings in which access itself was ordinarily restricted. Pages of Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and a group of roughly fifty-five related items preserved at ICP show that his photographs functioned as picture reporting encountered through magazine spreads and article sequences more than as isolated works.^*30

SFMOMA’s holdings include dinners at San Simeon, a U.S. Senate banking investigation, a Royal Dutch Shell board meeting, the League of Nations, and social occasions. Salomon’s movement across closed social spaces where political, financial, and cultural elites gathered made “access” itself a defining field of his photography.^*31

The Exclusion of a Jewish Photographer and Arrest in the Netherlands

After the Nazi seizure of power, Salomon could no longer continue working in Germany because he was Jewish and moved to the Netherlands. Following the German occupation in 1940, he and his family were arrested, and he was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. He continued photographing after exile, but under occupation the safety of his family and the preservation of his archive became urgent concerns. According to the biography preserved by the Smithsonian, he hid negatives in several locations during the war. The surviving body of work is therefore itself an archive that passed through persecution and dispersal.^*16

The Berlinische Galerie now preserves a Salomon archive of more than 10,000 items, allowing his work to be followed through negatives, prints, and documents before and after publication. The archive reconstructs the production process of magazine reporting that disappears when photographs are viewed only as individual museum objects. Because it includes negatives and related records as well as famous published images, researchers can ask how many exposures were made, what was selected, and how material moved into the magazine. It makes possible a history of photojournalism as a process of waiting, repeated exposure, editing, and publication rather than a mythology of the single “decisive” picture.^*17

The Myth of the “Candid” and the Limits of Equipment

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian both position Salomon as an important figure in the formation of candid photography and modern photojournalism. But owning the same Ermanox would not have enabled another photographer to make the same pictures.^*18

The fact that the German Society for Photography established a press photography award in his name in 1971 shows that later journalism inherited “proximity to the scene” and an individual photographer’s mode of observation as parts of Salomon’s legacy.^*19

Salomon’s place in photographic history reaches beyond the appealing idea that he made politicians look human. Access to closed institutions, techniques for minimizing the visibility of photography, editorial preference for moments when subjects seemed unaware of the camera, and mass magazine circulation converged in his work to give concrete form to a journalistic norm that continues today: the promise of showing what happens “behind the scenes.”^*20

The “Unguarded Moment” as a Convention of Truth

Media-historical research argues that informal images of politicians were already appearing in magazines before Salomon and that his photographs were received in a culture whose readers were increasingly prepared to see politicians as private, human personalities.^*28 It is therefore more accurate to place Salomon among the photographers who made the shift from official political portraiture toward personalized political imagery especially visible than to mythologize him as a lone inventor.

A subject’s apparent unawareness of the camera does not automatically mean that a photograph shows the “real person.” The image a reader recognizes as an unguarded self is produced through choices about who gains entry, how long the photographer waits, which exposures are selected, and how a magazine supplies headlines and page design. Salomon’s innovation did not eliminate these mediations. It placed him near the center of the process through which modern photojournalism established a new convention for making “behind the scenes” appear truthful.