Ed Feingersh

Ed Feingersh
Ed Feingersh photographed by ©Julia Scully in NYC, 1952
Born	Edwin Feingersh April 21, 1925 Brooklyn, New York, United States of America
Died	June 21, aged 36 New York City, United States of America
Other names	Edward, Eddie
Education	New School of Social Research
Occupation	Photojournalist
Agent	PIX Publishing
Spouse(s)	Miriam Sakol (b.1933), m.1957, annulled 1957

Ed Feingersh (1925–1961) studied photography under Alexey Brodovitch at the New School of Social Research. He later worked as a photojournalist for the Pix Publishing agency. His talent for available light photography under seemingly impossible conditions was well recognised. His pictures of Marilyn Monroe are his best known, but he was a prolific photojournalist throughout the 1950s. Two of his moody photographs of jazz performers were selected by Edward Steichen for MoMA’s world-touring The Family of Man exhibition.

Edwin (a.k.a. Edward, commonly 'Ed' or 'Eddie') Feingersh was born in Brooklyn on 21 April 1925, the second of three sons of Harry Feingersh, a women's fashion designer and Rae Feingersh (née Press). His Jewish grandfather Abraham, a tailor, migrated to America from Moldavia in 1913 to escape the pogroms. Ed Feingersh majored in art at Manhattan's Haaren High School.

He took up photography during while serving in Germany in the Army, where he bought an inexpensive 35-mm camera. After the war, with the assistance of the G.I. Bill, he first attended New York University, where he joined the camera club, and later enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch's photography course at the New School for Social Research. He worked during this period as assistant to Gjon Mili. This experience, and photographs he took for the course secured work as a 22-year-old stringer with Pix Publishing photo agency in 1948. For them he produced stories for major magazines including a day in the life of a woman doctor for McCall's, moody and revealing scenes from a Tokyo night club for Argosy men's magazine, a report on German war orphans for Redbook, a study of a disturbed boy's psychological rehabilitation and the story "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Controversy', both for Look, in addition to making a portrait series of Albert Schweitzer in New York and covering a night fighter squadron's mission over Greenland.