Bernard Hoffman (1913–1979) was an American photographer and documentary photographer. The bulk of his photographic journalism was done during the first 18 years of the revamped Life magazine, starting in 1936. During this time he produced many photo essays, including a shoot with Carl Sandburg in 1938. He is, perhaps, most known as the first American photographer on the ground at Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, providing some harrowing glimpses into the destructive power of the bomb.
After leaving Life in 1951, Hoffman went on to establish Bernard Hoffman Laboratories, a company dedicated to improving the technology for professional photography. The lab was well-known enough that in 1963 he was brought on to process film from the Kennedy assassination, leading to support for belief in the infamous "shooter on the grassy knoll." Following the sale of the lab in 1973, he spent his retirement years running photography workshops with his wife, Inez. Hoffman died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig's disease) in 1979.
Early life
Bernard Hoffman was born in New York City in 1913, and little is publicly known about his youth, besides the fact that he received a camera as a birthday present in 1931, when he was 18 years of age. Hoffman used the camera to snap photos of friends skinny dipping, but was told by the local shopkeeper that they would not develop the film into prints. He decided to take matters into his own hands and purchased a kit to develop the pictures himself. This incident would chart the course of his entire adult life.
In 1935, he accepted a job as staff photographer for Life, the first of the original four members of that department, as Henry Luce revamped the publication into an all-photographic American news magazine.
Life Magazine
Hoffman was brought on board approximately one year before the relaunch of Life would turn the magazine from its original format into a photojournal of modern American life. In his role as staff photographer, Hoffman worked on dummy layouts and design elements prior to the reworked magazine's debut on November 23, 1936, as well as contributing photography for the first issue.
After the magazine's launch, Bernard Hoffman covered a dizzying number of assignments worldwide, ranging from the glamorous to the deadly. According to the International Center of Photography in a brochure for a Bernard Hoffman exhibit, "...politics, heavy industry, science, medicine, beauty, sports, animals, theatre, agriculture, art, photo-micrography, motion pictures. Name it, he did it."
Notable events during his 18 years with Life include:
To illustrate an essay on the "World of Animals," he blindfolded a rattlesnake and stuffed cotton in a shark's nostrils.
He reported the social effects of the dictatorship in Portugal during 1937.
While on one of the first transatlantic commercial flights, aboard a Boeing flying boat, Hoffman had Archduke Otto von Habsburg hold his flashes while photographing the plane's interior. The flight took 19 hours to travel from New York City to the Azores in Portugal.
Hoffman covered actor John Barrymore a number of times. During a performance of Barrymore's last play, My Dear Children, the actor had to run out on stage and kiss his then new wife, Elaine Barry, and run off stage again. With Hoffman in the audience, Barrymore performed the bit as usual, but then without any warning ran back out onto the stage and shouted to Hoffman, "Did you get that picture, Bernie?"
In one day, Hoffman was given assignments with short deadlines in three different states. Editor Wilson Hicks gave him the advice, "If this is too tough, you can always cut your throat." Hoffman chartered a private plane to cover a rifle match, Gold Cup motorboat races, and a thigh operation.
One of Hoffman's most cherished memories were that of poet Carl Sandburg, a man Hoffman referred to as "the only genius I have ever met." He and Sandburg became close friends, and Hoffman's photos of Sandburg singing to his goats in the living room became an instant classic Life photo essay in the February 21, 1938 issue, in which Hoffman also received a cover photo credit.
The sculpture The Kiss, by Auguste Rodin, got Hoffman and Life in some trouble. His layouts on the art exhibition came out so lifelike that the magazine was temporarily banned in Boston and Argentina on morality grounds.