Andreas Feininger, the son of painter Lyonel Feininger, trained to be an architect and became a particularly thoughtful photographer. To flatten the perspective in cityscapes, he constructed special camera bodies and tripods for use with very long lenses. With them, he accurately rendered the relative scale of the objects he photographed.
Andreas Feininger: “In 1952 I took a picture of the ocean liner United States in front of Manhattan because I felt putting these two achievements together gives you a fantastic look at the achievements of man. Man has built this enormous city and this enormous ship. I don’t know whether you noticed that there are tiny people lining the bridge of the ship. They are clear, but very small. To think that people, no bigger than these, have constructed and built that enormous ship. That is almost unbelievable.”
[Interview dated January 13, 1992 was printed in full in the Bullfinch Press book, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw, in 1998. Photograph by Andreas Feininger © 1952 Time Inc. is courtesy of The LIFE Gallery of Photography.]
John Loengard
