Young Campaigner

Just 42 days after the fall of Tunis, a photographic record of the U.S. African campaign went up on the walls of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. It was a one-man show by LIFE Staff Photographer Eliot Elisofon (pronounced, by pals, Hellzapoppin). In it were 113 pictures of almost every aspect of the American occupation. Missing: views of U.S. dead, Elisofon prints of which were not released by the War Department.

Visitors to the Museum saw such subjects as: "Elisofon and his two Contaxes"*; a telling snap of three gay and very German prisoners; beautifully crosslit heads and torsos, leaning out of a truck window; a three-picture sequence of helmeted U.S. artillerymen reacting to a close shellburst; a detail study of a Sened building's shell-spattered plaster wall.

Hung with the show were passages from Elisofon letters. Sample: "I went on two bombing missions. The first was a sweep on the lookout for Axis shipping. ... I got into a Mitchell's nose. . . . We fan across some shipping. The tankers were escorted by two Axis destroyers. ... I was so petrified by seeing the flak coming up towards us ... that I made practically no pictures over the target. I have no shots of the destroyers or the flak. It was all I could do to get the single shot of the tanker through the nose of the plane."

"As It Actually Is." At the front he wisely eliminated most of the equipment necessary for time-consuming photographic work. He simply shot fast, wide and sometimes almost blindly, with a battery of miniature hand cameras (Contax and Rolleiflex). Says he: "I have no right to deceive the people back home; they're entitled to look at the thing as it actually is and that's what I photograph."

Said New York Post Photography Editor John Adam Knight: "One of the amazing things to come out of this war has been the uniformly bad photography produced by the Army Signal Corps. . . . Another phenomenon is the superiority of the pictures sent back by young and relatively inexperienced photographers, such as Elisofon, as compared with the work of oldtime press photographers sent over by the picture syndicates."

Eliot Elisofon was born in a New York tenement in 1911, has been a professional photographer since 1935. He got his first photographs out of his sister's camera, his next ones from a $14 machine he bought himself. Then came a three-year period in commercial photography in which he "nearly starved."

Far less pinching was his free-lance career for picture magazines, chiefly LIFE. Gaudiest assignment: color portraits of Hollywood stars. Preferred work: graphic reports in black & white on social subjects such as Pennsylvania miners. He is so photogenic himself that Ginger Rogers once suggested that he be screen-tested.

*German-made miniature cameras, expensive, highly adaptable, producing negatives about the size of two postage stamps.

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