Bernard Hoffman was an Americanphotographer and documentary photographer. The bulk of his photographic journalism was done during the first 18 years of the revamped Life magazine, starting in 1936. During this time he produced many photo essays, including a shoot with Carl Sandburg in 1938. He is, perhaps, most known as the first American photographer on the ground at Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945, providing some harrowing glimpses into the destructive power of the bomb. After leaving Life in 1951, Hoffman went on to establish Bernard Hoffman Laboratories, a company dedicated to improving the technology for professional photography. The lab was well-known enough that in 1963 he was brought on to process film from the Kennedy assassination, leading to support for belief in the infamous "shooter on the grassy knoll." Following the sale of the lab in 1973, he spent his retirement years running photography workshops with his wife, Inez. Hoffman died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1979.
Early life
Bernard Hoffman was born in New York City in 1913, and little is publicly known about his youth, besides the fact that he received a camera as a birthday present in 1931, when he was 18 years of age. Hoffman used the camera to snap photos of friends skinny dipping, but was told by the local shopkeeper that they would not develop the film into prints. He decided to take matters into his own hands and purchased a kit to develop the pictures himself. This incident would chart the course of his entire adult life. In 1935, he accepted a job as staff photographer for Life, the first of the original four members of that department, as Henry Luce revamped the publication into an all-photographic American news magazine.
Life Magazine
Hoffman was brought on board approximately one year before the relaunch of Life would turn the magazine from its original format into a photojournal of modern American life. In his role as staff photographer, Hoffman worked on dummy layouts and design elements prior to the reworked magazine's debut on November 23, 1936, as well as contributing photography for the first issue. After the magazine's launch, Bernard Hoffman covered a dizzying number of assignments worldwide, ranging from the glamorous to the deadly. According to the International Center of Photography in a brochure for a Bernard Hoffman exhibit, "...politics, heavy industry, science, medicine, beauty, sports, animals, theatre, agriculture, art, photo-micrography, motion pictures. Name it, he did it." Notable events during his 18 years with Life include: Of Hoffman's photography in covering the war in the China-Burma-India Theatre, General "Vinegar" Joe Stilwell said, "It is the best collection of pictures of this type that I have ever seen." Hoffman left Life in 1951 to pursue freelance photojournalism.
Bernard Hoffman Laboratories and the JFK Assassination
Without the resources of Lifes labs behind him, Hoffman very quickly found dissatisfaction with the development labs available to freelance and professional photographers. To remedy this, he founded Bernard Hoffman Laboratories, with the goal of providing the highest possible quality prints from negatives of all sorts. BHL set an aggressive pace towards improving the technology of photography, and was earmarked as "one of the two most interesting and progressive labs going" by Minor White. The lab made several noteworthy additions to the field, including chemical formulas that made it possible to shoot full detail motion photos in low illumination, a montage process for combining many photographs without the need of airbrushing, a new lens design with the ability to focus from four inches to infinity, and process of bringing detail to badly under-exposed negatives. During his tenure with the company, Hoffman gained such acclaim that his labs were used to process much of the footage from the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. The resulting detailed prints led to the belief that a person aiming a rifle at the President stood atop a car behind a wall near the path of the motorcade. Additionally, the United States Atomic Energy Commission regularly consulted BHL as an expert in important film and print analyses. Hoffman sold the custom lab business and retired in 1973 after suffering a mild cardiac arrest.
Late life
After officially retiring from business life, Bernard Hoffman published a book, The Man From Kankakee in 1973, chronicling the life of Romy Hammes, a self-made millionaire whom he had first met in 1938 when he photographed Hammes for Life. Following this, he started a small home-based photography training course to teach new students the art in 1974, in partnership with his wife, Inez. One of his early students, John DeSanto, went on to become a well-known American photojournalist and is currently Director of Photography of the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, New York. The training business closed in late 1978, due to Hoffman's deteriorating health. Hoffman died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in November 1979.
