OZZIE & ALBERT

How cool would it be to have time travel available to us? There are so many people from the past I’d want to meet…. Somewhere near the top of my list would be Albert Einstein, the subject of our cover story on the March 2015 issue of Antiques Roadshow Insider. Specifically, I’d love to have been there on the day of the photo shoot that resulted in the striking image we use on p. 1.

Of course, Einstein (1879–1955) died before I was born, but by a stroke of good fortune, the photographer that day, Ozzie Sweet (1918–2013), became a close and treasured friend of mine over the last 20 years of his life. It’s not like Ozz talked about the Einstein session very often, but yes, I’d bring it up from time to time. I suspect I was like a little kid at story time, trying to glean every detail I could. How often do you get to know someone who stood face to face with Albert Einstein?

Cover of Antiques Roadshow Insider, March 2015.

INSIDE EINSTEIN’S OFFICE
Sweet traveled from his Connecticut home to Princeton University in February 1947 on assignment for Newsweek, which sent him to snag a color cover image (as pictured here). While he was at it, Ozz took some black-and-white portraits, including the iconic one on our cover.

If you’ve looked at enough portraits of Einstein, you know it’s rare to see him in such a relaxed, loose moment; he usually comes across as serious and thoughtful in photographs. But when Ozzie was behind the lens, heavy moods turned to light. A Newsweek editor, Thomas Orr, once said that Ozz could “charm the birds out of trees.”

March 10, 1947 cover of Newsweek: Albert Einstein, by Ozzie Sweet. (Note O.C. Sweet autograph in lower-left corner; Ozzie signed this vintage copy in 2013.)

The portrait session may have been one of thousands that Sweet conducted during his lifetime, and he remembered so many of them—what a sense of recall he had, right into his 90s. But the Einstein shoot—that was an especially memorable day for him.

When I would ask Ozz about it, he would tell me about loosening up Einstein with “small talk and corny jokes” even as he surveyed the office space, arranging real-life “props”—books, stacks of papers, small desk objects…. He’d talk of Einstein’s somewhat unkempt aura, from his casual wardrobe to the “just-right” clutter in and around his office. (You know what they say about what a messy desk means.)

Ozzie would talk about sitting Albert into his office chair while he ducked his head under the cloak attached to his large view camera, continuing the small-talk and banter even as he studied Einstein’s features—the lines in his face, that twinkle in his eye, that great hair…. (And keep in mind that for the photographer using a view camera, the image is upside-down.)

One bit of small talk between Sweet and Einstein involved footwear. Ozzie noticed Einstein’s well-worn shoes and the way the back wall of each shoe was flattened. Einstein told him he liked his shoes that way—easier for him to slip on and off. Ozz would always chuckle when he described those customized loafers.

DETAILS, DETAILS…
Nick Scutti of Greenwich, Conn., was Ozzie’s longtime photo assistant, and though he wasn’t with him on the day of the Einstein shoot, he remembers the details Ozzie related to him about that long-ago session. One of them that Scutti recalls was the blanket just behind Einstein’s hair. On the first images from the session (including one published in Liberty magazine later that year), the blanket wasn’t there, and Einstein’s hair was getting “lost” in the red and white stripes of the chair’s pattern.

Scutti, now 88, said that Ozzie, like a magician, came up with a dark textile that he placed behind Einstein’s head. So in the more widely seen Sweet portraits of Einstein (including the one on Newsweek’s March 10, 1947 cover), there’s a folded navy-blue blanket hanging over the back of the chair, adding the perfect contrast to that wild Einstein coif.

Yes, it would have been great to have been a fly on the wall when the master of the visual—a man credited with more than 2,000 magazine cover photos—met the master of science, physics, and math: Ozzie and Albert.

Interior photograph from the October 1948 issue of Liberty magazine. Note the absence of the dark blue blanket behind Einstein’s head. Ozzie added the textile after this early image from his Einstein session, and it provided contrast for the “keeper” shot used on Newsweek’s cover.