Isaac Kitrosser
Isaac Kitrosser (1899–1984) was a Moldovan-born, French fine art photographer, photojournalist, chemical engineer, and inventor of photographic processes. Family. Isaac Khunovich Kitrosser was born August 27, 1899, in Soroca in Moldova (then Russia), the eldest of three sons of Khuna Isaakovich Kitrosser (1874-1941), who was a landowner and daguerrotype photographer, and Blyuma Moiseevna Kitrosser. His two brothers were Louis and Samuel, who would also become a photographic innovator in the United States with Polaroid Corporation, Itek Corporation, and Cordell Engineering, Inc. Both his parents were murdered in the Shoah. His father, together with his cousins Osip  Moiseevich Kitroser and Grigory Moiseevich Kitroser, was shot to death in the aftermath of the German and Romanian occupation of Soroca in July 1941. His mother was murdered after deportation. Another of his father's cousins, Berthe Moiseevna Kitroser, was the partner and wife of sculptor Jacques Lipchitz. Modigliani painted the two of them in "Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz" (1916). Isaac Kitrosser would marry Eugenia Brodskaya and have a daughter Ariane Kitrosser Scarpa. Career. Pre-war. Kitrosser graduated from the Soroca gymnasium in 1916 and the Electrotechnical Institute of the university of Prague, having studied mechanical and electrical engineering. He  moved to Paris in 1922 and opened a photographic equipment store, pursuing photography as both scientist and artist. As early as 1930 Kitrosser used a Leica camera, one of the earliest photojournalists in France to do so. Kitrosser, nicknamed "Kitro," was a regular in 1930s European magazine newsrooms. Like his fellow photographer Erich Salomon in London, he became well known for discreetly getting behind the scenes photographs, a journalistic vogue of European pre-war weeklies. Section::::"Life" magazine. Kitrosser become a correspondent for "Life" magazine in 1938. The April 25, 1938 issue published his photographs of Spanish Loyalist refugees in the  Pyrenees. The same issue ran a photographic self-portrait, "indulging in his hobby, photographing insects by infrared light," with a brief biography. Photography, to Kitrosser, had always been an opportunity to "immobilize life". "Life" reported that Kitrosser "is enormously fat and proud of it. Trained as an engineer, he has been a photographer for ten years, but still considers himself an amateur." Other work in this period included portraits of Luigi Pirandello, 1934 Nobel Prizewinner for literature; local leaders from French colonial Africa (Chad, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Africa, Gabon, and Senegal) attending Bastille Day celebrations in France in 1938 ; and minister Paul Reynaud after a French cabinet meeting. He covered events such as Édouard Belin, inventor of the Bélinographe wirephoto, speaking at a celebration honoring Louis Daguerre, on stage with movie star Mona Goya; a garden party at Château Saint-Firmin; a strike at Citroën in 1938; and the mobilization of French reservists on September 1, 1938. At a ball at the US Embassy in Paris on February 1, 1939, he photographed US Ambassador William C. Bullitt; French politicians Joseph Paul-Boncour and Paul Reynaud; American sculptor Jo Davidson; Russian dancer Serge Lifar; and the Duchess of Windsor speaking  with Marthe Lahovary, Princess Bibesco. Second World War. Kitrosser engaged in the French Resistance during the Second World War. He was arrested by the Gestapo and interned at Septfonds (Tarn-et-Garonne) where he managed to continue as a photographer. His photographs of Septfonds, including "Cérémonie juive dans le camp de Septfonds," were among the first published concentration camp photos after liberation in 1944. Post-war. After the war Kitrosser worked on the staff of "Paris-Match" (1948-1955). His photography illustrated the , a series of books for young people published by from 1959, the covers of whose volumes were  illustrated by people in real life circumstances. As a chemical engineer, he was a member of the Union of Russian Certified Engineers in France (1968-1978). He died in Paris August 10, 1984.