Alfred Eisenstadt

Could you endure loneliness, do you think, for a few weeks, a few days?

I could, because I'm very much interested in ecology. I would look for mosses, lichens, orchids, lizards. … And so on. Look at grasses, at sand corns. I'm very much interested. I have a microscope at home and look to the microscope. You can keep yourself occupied. Oh yes.

What do you remember about the [German] Revolution?

I was walking near our home in Berlin. when in the afternoon a truck with marines came, about ten or fifteen jumped from the truck and tore my epaulettes off and I got so scared I said, My goodness, if somebody from the army sees me, I will be court-martialled. And then we heard that revolution broke out and I couldn't believe it, and nobody could believe it at the time.

How did you become interested in photography?

Now I had a 9 by 12 centimeter size ideal camera and went on my vacation with my parents to Johannesburg in Bohemia, it's now Czechoslovakia. And one afternoon in August I saw a woman tennis player playing tennis in a sunken tennis court surrounded by benches, but visitors and was photographed with a glass plate. Several weeks later I developed it, made a contact print and a friend of mine saw that and says, my God, you can enlarge that tennis player. I said, what's enlarging? I've never heard of enlarging before. And he says, come to me and I'll show you. He showed me a contraption of a wooden box with a camera on.