The big picture: Alfred Eisenstaedt’s people-watching at the opera

Alfred Eisenstaedt, the prime mover of candid photojournalism, took this picture at the La Scala opera house in 1933. Eisenstaedt was experimenting with a new Leica camera that allowed him to do away with much of the clunky paraphernalia of his craft. That night, at the gala premiere of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, he was looking for a way to find some intimacy among the theatre’s grand architectural curves.

Scanning the boxes in the upper tiers of the opera house he saw a young woman whose attention to the progress of the Russian epic on stage did not seem absolute. Better still, the box next to her was empty. Eisenstaedt was an unobtrusive man, only 5ft, and he inveigled his way into the empty box and got his shot. “Without the girl there would have been no picture,” he said.

A couple of years later, this was one of the images that persuaded a new magazine called Life, in New York, to take on the German-born Eisenstaedt as one of its first four staff photographers. Having photographed Hitler and Goebbels (the latter scowled into Eisenstaedt’s lens on discovering he was a Jew) he had left Berlin for the US in 1935. Among the 2,500 photo stories he published in Life in the next four decades was perhaps the most iconic image of the end of war: a US sailor kissing a young nurse in Times Square on VJ Day.

Eisenstaedt died in 1995, aged 96. His La Scala picture is included in a new exhibition devoted to modernism in photography since the first world war. Eisenstaedt was the least austere of modernists. “People don’t take me too seriously with my little camera,” he once suggested. “I don’t come as a photographer. I come as a friend.”

Breaking Away: Modernism in Photography since World War I, presented by Michael Shapiro Photographs and Richard Nagy Ltd, is at Richard Nagy gallery, London W1, 6 February-27 March