Erich Lessing, Photographer Who Chronicled Postwar Europe, Dies at 95

Erich Lessing, a self-taught photojournalist who fled the Nazi annexation of Austria as a teenager in 1939 but returned after World War II to document Europe’s political and cultural rebirth, died on Aug. 29 in Vienna. He was 95.

His death was announced by Magnum Photos, the agency that recruited him in 1951 after he returned from Israel, where he had eked out a living driving a cab, selling cameras, breeding carp on a kibbutz, and taking pictures of kindergarten classes and of mothers with their children on the beach near Tel Aviv.

That Lessing returned to Europe at all, much less moved back to Vienna permanently, might seem inconceivable given the boyhood memories that his hometown would invoke. His father died of cancer when he was 10. His mother remained behind when Erich emigrated to what was then Palestine and, like his grandmother, was murdered in a German concentration camp.

“I wanted to show what life was like in the aftermath of the war,” he told The Guardian in 2016. “I wanted to tell the truth about the pain, death and destruction Europe was dealing with, as it tried to find a way out of the disaster.”

First for The Associated Press, then for Magnum and in dozens of magazines, newspapers and scores of books, Lessing rapidly emerged as a pre-eminent chronicler of the 20th century’s second half.

He photographed President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955 in Geneva tipping his hat as a beam of light crossed his face; jubilant Viennese outside the Belvedere Palace when the Allied occupation of Austria ended that year; Gen. Charles de Gaulle saluting a fading shadow of French troops in Algeria in 1958; and Nikita S. Khrushchev melodramatically wielding an ax 70 miles outside Paris after walking out on a summit conference with Eisenhower in 1960.

Lessing worked briefly as a war photographer in 1956, covering the Hungarian revolution against Soviet domination. But he soon focused more on social and cultural subjects, including Eastern-bloc beauty contests and postwar bar mitzvahs in Poland, movie sets and art, including the masterpieces for the book “The Louvre: All the Paintings” (2011).

Lessing said he considered himself a craftsman, not an artist.

“I never thought of myself as doing anything other than telling stories,” he said. “The camera became the medium through which I did that, but I don’t carry a camera everywhere I go. To me, it is simply the means to a very specific end. I observe the world through my eyes and not through the viewfinder of a camera.

“I don’t interpret, nor do I adjust anything in the darkroom,” he continued. “I am a realistic photographer.”

While he captured the highs and lows of humankind’s political manifestations, he was realistic about the effects of his work.

“I realized,” he once said, “that although reportage pictures have the power to move the world, they do not have the power to change it.”

Lessing was born on July 13, 1923, in Vienna to Jewish parents. His father was a dentist, his mother a concert pianist. As a boy he took up photography as a hobby. “I’m self-taught,” he said.

When he photographed Eisenhower, he recalled, many of his colleagues relied on their newfangled gadgetry while he patiently waited for an unanticipated opportunity.

“I had my Leica and that was all,” he recalled. “I looked at them all and thought, ‘There is usually some hitch — when their film is being moved along, that will be when there’s an interesting picture to be taken.'”

Before he could finish high school, and with all of Europe girding for war, he escaped by boat to the port city of Haifa in Palestine, where he studied radio engineering at the technical college and served in Britain’s 6th Airborne Division as a photographer and pilot.

He returned to Austria in 1947. David Seymour, a founder of Magnum, hired him as a freelancer in 1951. He joined the agency full time in 1955 and became a part-time contributor in 1979. In 2013, he donated some 60,000 images to the Austrian National Library.

He is survived by three children from his marriage, to Traudl Wiglitzky, a journalist for Time magazine, who died in 2016; four grandchildren; one great-grandson; and his second wife, Renée Kronfuss-Lessing. His daughter Hannah Lessing is secretary-general of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism.