BERLIN-Erich Salomon is much better known on this side of the Atlantic than in the United States. He was a photographer who used his educated background to find his way, and his camera, into intimate environs of many of the leading figures of the 1920s and 1930s, in both Europe and the United States. He revealed the private sides of politicians and entertainers-often in a manner that suggested the looming cloud of fanaticism that was hovering over Europe and that would eventually lead to his demise.

I learned about Salomon first in 2004 when I took a quick visit to Strasbourg, France. (I was living in Austria at the time.) The city is generally considered the European capital because it is both the seat of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. My final day in Strasbourg was a Sunday afternoon and, more or less looking for something to do, I popped into the Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) without much of a specific idea as to what I would view.

The impression that Salomon’s works made on me is best illustrated by realizing that I go to museums frequently-more when I am in Europe than in the United States. However the exhibitions that I see rarely stick in my head. I tend to remember a work or two sporadically, but sometimes forget the name of the artist who produced it.

My reaction to Salomon in Strasbourg was the exact opposite: I was hooked the instant that I read his biography on the museum wall.

He was born in 1886 in Berlin, the fourth child of a wealthy Jewish family, was trained as a lawyer, earning a Ph.D. in law. In his forties, he became interested in photography and started taking pictures for Ullstein publishers. It is not entirely clear why he took up photography. An anecdote listed in a German book of his works mentions that Salomon’s photographic inclinations came out as more of an accident. In 1927, while working in the advertising department of the Ullstein publishing house, he happened to be at the scene of a deadly accident that had been caused by a bolt of lightning. Salomon, recognizing the importance of the story, wrote a report on the event and added his own photographs.

However Salomon’s real impulse, at least according to this account, for looking to photography as a profession was the money involved. As he saw from the accounting breakdown of his aforementioned first “scoop,” 90 marks (the German currency at the time) were allocated for the photographer, the reporter was to have received only 10 marks. It is thought that a day after learning of this scheme, Salomon bought himself a camera.

Most of his work was in Europe, but he also traveled to the United States not only to photograph potential immigrants on Ellis Island, but also to take pictures of committee meetings in the Senate, Hollywood stars lounging at parties, or as, in the case of Marlene Dietrich, a picture of her lying across her bed happily chatting with her daughter in Berlin (in 1930).

Salomon’s works are striking for two interconnected reasons: The first is that the viewer is inevitably absorbed in how close Salomon seems to be physically to the subjects of his pictures.

We see his subjects, wearing elegant evening clothes, huddled together discussing what appear to be serious matters of state. Indeed this is a factor of Salomon’s work that the photographer himself emphasized. The title of the exhibit that I saw in Strasbourg, and of the book that I recently bought in Berlin that accompanied the exhibit, is called, in English, Erich Salomon: With a Waistcoat and Lense through Politics and Society. The title is the same as that of a presentation of his own works that Salomon gave in Berlin on the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday in 1931. A collection of Salomon’s works was later published in the United States under the title Unguarded Moments: Images of People, Politics and Society in Europe and USA 1928-1938.

On a superficial level there are some of Salomon’s works that essentially reconfirm notions about the 1920s and 1930s that one probably already would have: The privileged lived well while maintaining the traditional roles and barriers of the day.

The era being what it was, it is evident through his pictures that in those days it was the men who made the important decisions, often enveloped by cigar smoke, while their wives gaily (in the original sense of the word) interacted over drinks and tea, with occasionally cigarettes accompanying them.

This gender juxtapositioning, though by no means the main focus of any study of Salomon’s work, is striking in the sense that one often sees photographs of leading political figures of the time, such as Britain’s Anthony Eden or Ramsay MacDonald, France’s Aristide Briand, Germany’s Gustav Stresemann or Reichskanzler Paul von Hindenburg, often mixing together with their wives not in the picture.

However, what makes his work so remarkable is the proximity that Salomon had to his subjects and that allowed him to show them at moments where they betray their public veneers. Indeed Salomon would often sneak his camera into functions either hidden in his waistcoat or inside his bowler hat.

The intimacy that Salomon could capture through his photographs is amplified by one of his most famous works. In this one, Salomon is in Paris with leading French politicians in August of 1931. One imagines from the picture that he is standing with his lens about thirty feet away from a group of five male politicians standing in a circle in a corridor. Salomon prepares to snap one picture and then, or so it appears, Aristide Briand (1862-1932, a ten-time Prime Minister of France of the Socialist Party from 1909-1929) realizes that Salomon is there. He whips his body around and points directly at Salomon with the exclamation, “Voila le roi des indiscrets” (”There he is, the king of the indiscreet”).

The spontaneity and diversity with which Salomon was able to capture his subjects are without question artistic elements within his work. He was able not only to capture the leading figures of the time in intimate moments but also in their public appearances, while giving speeches to parliaments or other assemblies. Yet he could still shoot them in ways that appear unorthodox, angular, disquieting, and, in certain cases, rather unbecoming of the subject. For example, senators appearing to be either asleep or completely disengaged at a committee meeting or a Romanian delegate to the League of Nations laughing as if she is in a drunken hysteria.

Some of his pictures from Geneva, including a picture from the balcony looking down at the interwar German politician Gustav Stresemann (reichskanzler-chancellor, 1923-and foreign minister from 1923-1929) as he gives his speech to the body in 1929 or of the Ethiopian Emperor from the back in a garden seem jarring in a manner that reminds one of a Hitchcock film.

Perhaps it is this sense of impending doom that is evident in a number of Salomon’s works (especially his later ones-late 1930s) that makes them, and him as a person, so fascinating to me. The viewer can see that despite the efforts of a number of people, such as Einstein, Stresemann, Briand, and countless others to bring Europe together following the First World War, things were not working out. Whether Salomon could sense that things were falling apart when he was taking pictures in the late 1920s and early 1930s is not known.

Salomon, having taken numerous pictures within the German Reichstag (parliament) in the late 1920s and 1930s, had multiple opportunities to portray the growing “brownshirt” or National Socialist movement. There are two in the book depicting his exhibition. One shows the Nazi men sitting in the Reichstag wearing their brown militaresque uniforms. They are laughing in a manner that reflects the utter contempt that they had for any opinion or position that was not rigidly their own.

This picture is, however, predictable and frankly teaches us nothing we do not know already. In the second picture though, Salomon captures these aggressively nationalistic young men in a lounge area outside of the main parliament hall. It is probably just a consequence of poor light or, by today’s standards, inferior technology that the men’s movements look blurry. I find this photograph striking as it reflects to a viewer today the confusion and lack of clarity that existed in politics and society in Germany in the early 1930s-it was through this loss of orientation among the German populace that the Nazis were indeed voted into power.

With the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933 in Salomon’s native Germany, he was forced to flee to the Netherlands. The Hague became his base from then on, although he did spend some time in the mid-1930s in London. The saddest irony in Salomon’s life is that the coalescing storm that existed behind the scenes of privilege that Salomon photographed through much of his professional life would capture him as well. His oldest son Otto remained in England, changed his name to a British name (Peter Hunter), and wound up fighting for the British in the Second World War.

Erich Salomon was arrested along with his wife and youngest son by the German secret police, the Gestapo, in the Netherlands 1943. He was murdered on July 7, 1944, in Auschwitz. His wife and son were likely murdered earlier.