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Dwight Eisenhower, left, with Swiss president Max Petitpierre at the 1955 Geneva summit. “In the 1930s, as Hitler rose to power, I left Austria for Israel. I started earning a living on the beaches of Netanya, near Tel Aviv, taking pictures of young mothers sitting on the beach with their children. I also worked as a kindergarten photographer and a taxi driver. I didn’t have any ambition – it was nice simply taking pictures of families. But the second world war changed my life. I spent most of it in the Western Desert, moving heavy machinery in a depot near Haifa, and selling cameras to the soldiers from the Middlesex Battalion. My family, who stayed in Vienna, all died in the gas chambers. When I returned to Vienna at the end of 1946, it was a shambles. Now I wanted to show what life was like in the aftermath of the war. In 1955, there was talk about a four-power conference where the big players – the Soviet Union, the US, Britain and France – would discuss how to make a long-lasting peace. The mood was uplifting, full of hope. For the first time in the history of diplomacy, the Big Four were sitting together and talking – and the future of the civilised world depended on it. About 30 photographers were at the airport in Geneva, where the conference was held, all waiting for the American President Dwight Eisenhower to arrive and be greeted by Max Petitpierre, the Swiss president. Most of the photographers had flashes and some had newfangled devices where the film was wound on by a motor. I had my Leica and that was all. 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”. And that is exactly what happened. A beam of light caught Eisenhower, leaving Petitpierre in the shadow. It seems as if I was the only photographer that day who got the picture just right: in other people’s shots, the light was on Eisenhower’s stomach, or his hat was obscuring his face. After the conference came the Austrian state treaty, granting the country independence. Then in 1956, the Hungarian revolution happened – but it was put down by the Soviets, and the west did nothing. I realised that, although reportage pictures have the power to move the world, they do not have the power to change it”. (Photo by Erich Lessing/Courtesy Magnum Photos)
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