Maria Eisner

Italian American photographer, photo editor and photo agent (1909–1991)

Maria Eisner (Maria Eisner Lehfeldt; February 8, 1909, in Milan, Italy – March 8, 1991, in New York, New York) was an Italian American photographer, photo editor and photo agent. She was one of the founders of Magnum Photos, and the first head of its Paris office.

Maria Eisner (born Marie Jeanne Eisner) was the daughter of Emma (née Lederer) and Alfred Eisner, a merchant. Her Jewish parents had emigrated to the USA in 1886, were naturalised 1891, lived in Nebraska, then briefly in Milan in 1896 where Maria was born in 1909.

Eisner studied in Germany and worked for the illustrated press from the age of twenty, was trained by Simon Guttmann, head of the very successful Berlin based agency Dephot (Deutsche Photo Dienst), and her imagery attracted clients including Berlin publisher Martin Hürlimann.

From the 1920s, photographers from Germany, but also Hungary, took refuge in Paris, at the same time as the appearance of photographic magazines with a large circulation. The German group Ullstein, in particular, employed photojournalists who, fleeing from Nazism, brought their experience in this field to France. Charles Rado, founder of Rapho (1932), and Eisner of Alliance Photo agency, both came from Ullstein, as did Stefan Lorant, based in England, among others. Eisner fled Nazi Germany in 1932 to France where before the War she contributed photography to such journals as Paris Sex Appeal In 1933 Eisner was Simon Guttmann's representative in Paris, which she continued after the inception, with Fritz Goro, of the agency Anglo Continental Press Photo Service in mid 1934, which lasted only a few months, then decided to put her experience in the illustrated press at the service of photographers.

Alliance Photo started initially at Eisner's apartment in 26 rue de la Pépinière and brought together Eisner's friends from Studio Zuber operated by René Zuber who worked for Étienne Damour's advertising agency from 1929 to 1932, contributing to the magazine Vendre, then had opened his own photographic studio, rue Vernier with Robert Capa, Pierre Boucher, David Seymour, Emeric Feher, René Zuber and Denise Bellon who were all recruited for Eisner's new agency. Suzanne Laroche and Juliette Lasserre soon joined them. 'Chim' Seymour mentions 'a German girl,' who is Eisner, in one of his letters home; 'Socially, I am moving in new circles, away from the Polish gang. I am more among photographers, thinking people, interested in the same problems as myself. However, I feel a stranger and I am missing the "togetherness" ' of our Polish bunch. I met a German girl, who became quite prominent in the French press and she feels as I do. We are trying to organise some kind of association of revolutionary minded photographers "From October 1935, Gerda Taro sold pictures for Alliance Photo then started working for the agency as a photographer, and introduced the fictitious American Capa (Endre Friedmann's pseudonym) to Alliance in the hope of higher royalties, but Eisner recognised his imagery and offered him a lower monthly advance of 1,100 francs in return for covering three assignments a week,

The collective was officially registered in 13 December 1935, and eventually settled at 125 rue du Faubourg St Honoré.

As well as the magazine Vu, Alliance Photo clients included Art et Médecine, Arts et Métiers graphiques, Fiat Revue, Le Monde illustré, Paris Magazine, Pour lire à deux, Visages du monde, and Voilà. her fluency in four languages, and her contacts abroad with agencies such as Black Star in New York or ABC Press in Amsterdam. Consequently the agency's photographers enjoyed a growing reputation both inside and outside France with Verger, Boucher, Feher and Zuber participating in an exposition Affiche Photo Typo, organised by the Maison de la Culture, and Bellon, Boucher, Feher and Verger being invited by Beaumont Newhall to participate in Photography 1837 1938 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Through Eisner's diligence, collaboration with the Musée de l’Homme (1937–1938) and photographers from Alliance Photo, particularly Verger and Zuber, took on a formal dimension through the design of the new rooms at the museum in which modern photographs showed the objects of anthropological interest in context and in use.

Alliance Photo ceased its activities at the end of the autumn of 1939, as Eisner, a Jew, had to flee Paris at the time of the occupation. Considered a German ally, she was interned in June 1940 in the Gurs camp in the Pyrenees. where she spent the end of the Second World War. The agency she founded was re established after the war as A. D. E. P. (Agence de documentation et d’édition photographiques) run by Suzanne and Pierre Boucher, closing in 1959. In May 1947, Robert Capa organised a meeting over lunch at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with Eisner and LIFE magazine's Bill Vandivert and his wife, Rita, to establish Magnum Photos, Inc. Though Henri Cartier Bresson, David ‘‘Chim’’ Seymour, and George Rodger were not told of the meeting, they were nevertheless made Magnum's vice presidents. On a detour to Paris, Seymour received Eisner's telegram: "You are Vice President of Magnum Photos. Detailed letter sent to Paris on May 22nd. I will soon have interesting assignments for you." The seven members became the original shareholders of Magnum which was to have offices in New York and Paris, to be run respectively by their new president, Rita Vandivert for which she was paid $8,000 a year, and Eisner was appointed secretary and treasurer and head of the Paris ‘office’, on $4,000 a year, at 125 rue du Faubourg St Honore, from where she had run Alliance before the war. In New York it operated from the Vandiverts’ small office and darkroom in a brownstone on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. in 1949 and moved to New York in 1949 as the agency's president. Whelan records her unease with Capa's anarchic management style, at odds with her own organisation, and his ready borrowing of money from the agency, particularly that of Cartier Bresson then operating independently in the East. Capa regarded her impending motherhood as a distraction from her work and delegated George Rodger, briefly returned from Africa, to tell her she was to be dismissed and to arrange her severance pay. Capa took over as president in July that year, survived by her husband and son.