Ian Stendal was born to middle-class parents on the eve of World War I, in what was then the state of Bohemia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Konrad Stendal, was an executive at the Chemicke Zavody Sokolov chemical company, and his mother was Sara Marculis, whose family owned several successful dime stores in Prague and Pilsen. Stendal took an early interest in photography while working in his uncle’s camera shop in Prague. In the early 1930s, Stendal was a student at the University of Frankfurt in Germany, where he took classes with Paul Tillich and Theodor Adorno. Although he had planned to study art, Stendal left Frankfurt when the Nazis came to power. In 1934 took a sales position with the Swiss camera company Paillard Bolex. In 1939, Stendal was sent to the United States as a Paillard-Bolex representative at the New York World’s Fair.