Alfred Eisenstaedt retrospective opens at CAMERA in Turin

CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in Turin is hosting a major retrospective of Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898–1995), the German-born American photojournalist and one of the fathers of modern photojournalism. The exhibition runs through September 21, 2025, marking 80 years since his iconic V-J Day in Times Square photograph, 30 years after his death, and 25 years since his last show in Italy. The display features over 2,000 reportages and more than 90 Life magazine covers, organized geographically rather than chronologically to emphasize the influence of his travels. Highlights include portraits of political figures like Joseph Goebbels (1933) and the first meeting between Mussolini and Hitler in Venice (1934), as well as celebrities such as Sophia Loren, Marilyn Monroe, and Ernest Hemingway. Two portraits of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1947 and 1963) show the physicist aging under the weight of his atomic legacy. The exhibition devotes special attention to the backstory of the V-J Day kiss photograph, taken on August 14, 1945, in Times Square. The subject, Greta Zimmer Friedman, revealed in a 2016 Library of Congress interview that the kiss was non-consensual: 'That man was very strong. I wasn't kissing him. He kissed me.'