This picture preserves a moment few cameras ever caught — Albert Einstein, Summer 1939 Nassau Point, Long Island, Ny. Made in 1939, it is the kind of image that turns a date in a history book into something you can actually see.
Albert Einstein became, almost against his will, the first scientific celebrity of the photographic age. After British astronomers confirmed his general theory of relativity in 1919, newspapers made his face world-famous, and photographers followed him for the rest of his life — which is why so many candid, humanizing pictures of him exist.
Pictures of ordinary life are some of the most valuable historical documents we have. Grand events were always going to be recorded, but a normal day — how people worked, dressed, shopped, and passed the time — survives only when someone happened to point a camera at it.
