Ed Feingersh

Ed Feingersh (1925–1961) studied photography under Alexey Brodovitch at the New School of Social Research. He later worked as a photojournalist for the Pix Publishing agency. His talent for available light photography under seemingly impossible conditions was well recognised. His pictures of Marilyn Monroe are his best known, but he was a prolific photojournalist in throughout the 1950s. His moody photograph of a jazz pianist playing at a dance hall was selected by Edward Steichen for MoMA’s world-touring The Family of Man exhibition.

Career

Feingersh majored in art at Manhattan's Haaren High School. He took up photography during while serving in Germany in the Army, where he bought an inexpensive 35-mm camera. After the war, with the assistance of the G.I. Bill, he first attended New York University, where he joined the camera club, and later enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch's photography course at the New School for Social Research.

The photographs he took for the course secured work as a 22-year-old stringer with Pix Publishing in 1948, for whom he produced stories for major magazines including a day in the life of a woman doctor for McCall's, moody and revealing scenes from a Tokyo night club for Argosy mens magazine, a report on German war orphans for Redbook, and a study of a disturbed boy's psychological rehabilitation, for LOOK, in addition to making a portrait series of Albert Schweitzer in New York and covering a night fighter squadron's mission over Greenland.

His coverage of the Korean War, particularly the Battle of Pork Chop Hill (1953), involved Feingersh carrying in addition to his cameras, the gun, pack, and other standard G.I. equipment, nevertheless, he produced imagery with his wide-angle lens that conveyed a charged, first-person perspective. The work was published in Pageant and Argosy. He developed a reputation for putting himself at risk to get the eye-catching shot the magazine editors craved; parachuting with paratroopers, lying right in the path of stunt cars and having himself tied to the periscope to photograph a submarine diving.

At PIX he worked alongside the agency photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, George Karger, Jerry Cooke, Eileen Darby (Lester), Robert and Cornell Capa, George Zimbel, Bob Schwalberg, Larry Fried, Bob Henriquez, and Garry Winogrand whom Feingersh introduced to the photo agency.

Marilyn Monroe

Ed Feingersh photographed Marilyn Monroe for Redbook magazine in May 1955. For a story which would follow Monroe through her daily routine shooting candidly and without flash in available light, the actress and her new production-company partner Milton Greene recommended him to the magazine as their choice. The photographs he made of her during the week March 24–30, 1955 as she prepares for two appearances; opening night of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the Morosco Theatre, and being fitted with a burlesque corset for her ride on a pink elephant at a charity event at Madison Square Garden, were the only candid images of the actress made specifically for publication. A wide angle shot of the corseted Monroe reflected in a mirror contains an out of focus self-portrait of the photographer holding a Nikon S2 fitted with 28mm lens, the rangefinder camera he customarily used and which was starting then to be adopted by picture magazines in America previously wary of Japanese equipment.

Redbook asked him to repeat the exercise in 1957, and he accepted their assignment to photograph Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrier in Paris, again candidly, capturing their actions in dance rehearsals under difficult low-light conditions requiring shutter speeds of 1/15 sec. and lower.

Late career and legacy

Robert Stein, then editor of Redbook magazine and at one time chairman of ACMP, and who was a close friend of the photographer reports that Feingersh suffered depression between his bouts of frenetic activity, and in the years immediately after the Monroe shoot, and after a brief, failed marriage, gave up photography.

Stein invited him to join him at Redbook as picture editor, but Feingersh soon succumbed to his poor mental and physical health, neglected work and died 'in his sleep'. Full of praise for his friend's photography, Stein says that though many want to see 'Eddie's' work in public collections of 'museums to give him the recognition he deserves[...]Almost all his prints and negatives, so closely held, scattered and disappeared, magnificent pictures lost forever.'

In 1987, 26 years after Ed Feingersh died, several rolls of film were discovered by photography collector Michael Ochs which revealed the unpublished images from the Monroe series. This collection is held by Getty Images and they are the best known of Feingersh's photojournalistic output.

Books

Feingersh, Ed; LaBrasca, Bob; Michael Ochs Archives (1990), Marilyn : March 1955, Delta, ISBN 978-0-385-30119-0

Selected articles illustrated by Ed Feingersh

Argosy magazine[4]:

• Argosy’s Tips from Photographers, (cl) Argosy Jul 1952
• Argosy’s Tips from Photographers:
• ___ Mistakes That Make Pictures, (cl) Argosy Jul 1953
• Dave Chambers’ $2,000,000 Worth of Horses, (pi) Argosy Mar 1955
• The Hot-Seat Drag, (pi) Argosy Jul 1954
• How Red China Gets Dope to Our GIs, (pi) Argosy Feb 1954
• Irish Horan’s Hell Drivers, (pi) Argosy Jun 1953
• The Last Patrol, (pi) Argosy Dec 1953
• Mistakes That Make Pictures, (cl) Argosy Jul 1953
• Nice Work If You Can Get It, (pi) Argosy May 1954
• Pictures Tell the Story:
• ___ The Hot-Seat Drag, (pi) Argosy Jul 1954
• ___ The Last Patrol, (pi) Argosy Dec 1953
• The Private Takes a Wife, (pi) Redbook Dec 1955
• Vice Squad, (pi) Adventure Dec 1954
• You Can’t Miss! (with Robert Bridgeport), (ar) Argosy Mar 1959

Books about

• Russel, J. (1989). Marilyn Monroe and the camera. Bulfinch P. Books.
• Greer, H. (2001). Immortalizing the ephemeral. The World & I, 16(6), 84.