Photo Study – Arthur Esse – Albert Einstein

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For years, I saw this iconic image on T-shirts, posters and postcards. I thought it had been faked and photoshopped but I recently discovered that it is wonderfully real. We have all done what Einstein does here – we see a camera pointing at us so we pull funny faces, gurn and stick our tongue out at the camera. We see lots of camera phone images of friends goofing about like this, convinced that they look cool. It’s refreshing therefore to see the great Relativity scientist clowning around like this – he turns a fairly routine paparazzi shot of himself from 1951 into an instant classic – an ageing genius just having fun, not caring one jot about anything. It’s hard to imagine this as the man who discovered E = MC 2 but here he is – fabulous. Arthur Chappell