Erich Salomon
[Ramsay MacDonald, Albert Einstein, and Hermann Schmitz at the German Chancellery in Berlin, 1931]
From "Statesmen of Europe," FORTUNE, November 1931

Walker Evans
Communist Speaking to Longshoreman, NY Waterfront, 1934
From "The Communist Party" [unpublished], FORTUNE, September 1934

Alfred Eisenstaedt
Family in car, 1937
From "Biggest Cotton Plantation," FORTUNE, March 1937

In May 1931, Fortune published Dr. Erich Salomon’s surprisingly informal pictures of publisher William Randolph Hearst at his palatial mountaintop home in California. Salomon had achieved renown in Europe for his candid shots of politicians and celebrities taken with a small hand-held Ermanox with a fast lens. These informal and unposed pictures contrast sharply with the monumental industrial photography of Bourke-White, Rittase, and Aikins. In 1932, Ingersoll arranged for Salomon to come to New York under Fortune’s patronage. Salomon photographed people, not machines; his pictures are a series of casual portraits of the protagonists of history. The spontaneity and topicality of Salomon’s pictures make him the father of the whole range of today’s paparazzi and celebrity photographers.

By the mid-thirties, the increasing use of unobtrusive, hand-held cameras such as the Ermanox and the 35mm Leica brought about a new, naturalistic type of photography. Documentary assignments carried out by photographers for the Works Progress Administration and the Film and Photo League caused a sea change in the uses and perception of photography between the wars. Fortune, too, began to shift its emphasis toward a more humanistic photography and increased its foreign coverage. The work of photographers such as Fenno Jacobs, Otto Hagel, Hansel Mieth, Horace Bristol, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and later, Aaron Siskind, Sol Libsohn, and Morris Engel, was more informal, spontaneous, and socially engaged. This surprising political openness may have been facilitated by Luce’s own attitude toward intellectual debate. Many writers have noted that because Luce relished a good discussion, he hired leftist writers and poets such as Archibald MacLeish and Dwight Macdonald, whose political leanings were at odds with his own. Luce himself said, "It is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers."