On The Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1938

This striking photograph is the work of Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969), the German-born American photographer who fled to the U.S. in 1941 from Occupied France (where he had been placed in detention by German officials immediately after The Fall Of France).

Blumenfeld was one of countless Jewish émigrés lucky to have escaped from a Europe seized with madness—his foreign nationality is what saved him, Blumenfeld having taken Dutch citizenship several years before Hitler’s troops went on the march—and he chose the United States as his final destination.

In the U.S., Blumenfeld became a renowned fashion photographer, equally famous for his mastery of black-and-white and color mediums. For more than two decades, his photographs were staples of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

An American citizen from 1946, Blumenfeld died on Independence Day.