Few 20th-century figures had a contacts book to match that of the magazine and newspaper editor, Stefan Lorant. The names of Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Franz Kafka, Marilyn Monroe and John F Kennedy all appeared – partly due to his first-rate social skills, but mainly due to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Lorant’s remarkable life included six years in London, from 1934 to 1940, during which he launched and edited the ground-breaking photojournalistic magazine, Picture Post. The publication is the subject of a new documentary, Picture Stories.
With sales of two million copies a week, Picture Post was Britain’s best-selling magazine during the Second World War. It owed much of its popularity to the firm political line Lorant adopted: according to the second of his three wives, Laurie Robertson-Lorant, he was driven by “contempt both for the effete, vacillating Chamberlain government and the swaggering, brutal Nazi regime.”
Lorant was born in 1901 in Budapest, where his father ran a prominent photography studio. Aged 18, following the rise to power in Hungary of the autocrat, Miklós Horthy, he left for Czechoslovakia. There he befriended the 30-something Franz Kafka, who helped get him a job as a violinist in a silent-movie house.
Soon he felt the urge to make films himself, and from 1920 to 1925 – shifting between Berlin and Vienna – he contributed to more than a dozen. His roles ranged from stills photography and scriptwriting to directing and casting. (It was Lorant who gave Marlene Dietrich her first film test – and politely suggested she pursue another career.)
“He was a natural story-teller,” says the photography historian, Michael Berkowitz, who is currently writing a book about Lorant: The medium didn’t matter.