Lucien Aigner, Leniel Hooker, Max Manning, Jim Brown, and manager Raleigh “Biz” Mackey, Newark Eagles, 1939.
NEW HAVEN, CONN.- The Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy, Andover, the Yale University Art Gallery, and Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library have acquired the Lucien Aigner Collection, an extraordinary archive of photographs, negatives, recordings, film, books, magazine clippings, letters, and journalistic writings.
A pioneer of 1930s photojournalism, Lucien Aigner (1901–1999) belonged to the generation of photographers that included Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Erich Salomon. Embracing the introduction of 35mm film and fast, small, lightweight cameras, these artists changed the face of photography, making candid images that captured contemporary life with powerful immediacy.
Born in Hungary in 1901, Aigner began his career as a reporter, then became a photojournalist for Az Est, a Budapest daily newspaper. At the age of 25, he moved to Paris to work for James Abbe, an American freelance photojournalist. Though this job was short-lived, Aigner remained in Paris and established himself as an enterprising photojournalist—and early practitioner of the Leica camera—whose pictures of world leaders and events, as well as the city and its people, appeared in prominent photojournals such as Vu, Picture Post, and LIFE. In 1939, before the invasion of France, he immigrated to the United States, where his work appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Look, Coronet, and Pageant. He became an announcer and eventually a producer and director at the Voice of America in the late 1940s. During the McCarthy era in the early 1950s, he was forced to leave his job. For the next 20 years or so he operated a portrait studio in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1970, Aigner rediscovered a suitcase that—having survived WWII occupation—contained approximately 50,000 of his 1930s negatives. He had not opened it since 1950 when his brother, leather goods designer Etienne Aigner, emigrated from Paris and returned it to him. Several years later, the photographer closed his portrait studio to focus on the cataloguing and indexing of his collection of over 100,000 negatives. Following his death in 1999, Aigner’s family continued to catalogue, research, and care for this vast collection.
Consisting of tens of thousands of negatives and thousands of prints and contact sheets, this rare and comprehensive collection is made all the more unique by Aigner’s extensive writings that accompany virtually every image or series of images and explain the circumstances under which they were shot, and often the current events that surrounded the photo shoot. Considering himself as much a journalist as a photographer, Aigner paired text and pictures to vividly describe a range of themes, from European cafés to American prisons; from Bastille Day celebrations in Paris to amusement rides in Coney Island; from rehearsals at the Paris Opera Ballet to street life in Harlem. Documenting major European and American political and cultural events, Aigner’s archive includes portraits of world leaders and celebrities including Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Sara Delano Roosevelt, and Haile Selassie, among numerous others. A master at timing, Aigner’s candid portraits reflect his desire to reveal the essential vulnerability of prominent figures.
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