Candid Camera

A hotly debated aspect of modern journalism is its impudent "invasion of privacy."

Not to U. S. publishers, but to the London Graphic (illustrated weekly) goes the well-merited palm for ultimate journalistic impertinence. It has equipped one Dr. Erich Salomon, under the pseudonym of "Cyclops," with a camera which will take pictures of people where they have never been successfully snapped before--in ordinary electric lamp light. This enables him, for example, to attend a great banquet and photograph a queen with a spoonful of soup at her lips. For the past ten months the Graphic has published such stealth-got snapshots. Last week Graphic readers smirked and tittered at the "Unsuspected Moments" page. Not only had "Cyclops" got a picture of the Belgian Ambassador to Holland sitting on a shrub-hidden staircase with the Countess of Limburg-Thirmm at a Hague reception, but he had succeeded in taking a picture of himself in the mirror behind them.

Alert and sensational, the 60-year-old Graphic is edited by Alan John Bott. British pressmen can find a striking similarity between Editor Bott's journalistic policies and his Wartime activities. After having served in the Artillery and Royal Flying Corps in France and Mesopotamia, he entered the British espionage system. Captured by the Turks in 1918, he dramatically escaped across the Black Sea into Russia, whence he made his way through Bulgaria to Salonika. For his Turk-spying he was given the Military Cross with bar. Gleaning two bits of information where but one guarded bit grew before is for him a predilection and a hobby.

Now, with his unique camera hidden beneath a napkin, Editor Bott's "Cyclops" can and does snap the Very Rev. William Ralph Inge, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, in the act of sleeping through a speech at an Anglo-Finnish Society dinner. At the English-Speaking Union dinner, the Archbishop of Canterbury was snapshot six times, peering, grimacing, pinching his chin. Timothy A. Smiddy, High Commissioner of the Irish Free State, was seen smacking his lips over what was clearly not his first glass.

Slinking week by week through London banquet halls, "Cyclops" has winked a camera shutter at Winston Churchill fiddling with the silver at the Canada Club dinner, at Funnyman Leon Errol, caught looking uncomfortable in stiff evening clothes, dining with the American Society. That great shipowner and financier, Lord Inchcape, was snapped five times during one course, once sucking his forefinger.

Best shots of the season were taken in Albert Hall, dusty arena of pianists and pugilists. Among the shadowy audience of the Carnera-Stribling fight, Edward of Wales was photographed sucking on a cigar, asking puzzled questions of his attendants.

Upon the inception of its "Candid Camera" page, the Graphic smugly commented: "Week by week important functions of the Season will be pictorially chronicled by the Graphic in a new and original manner. Our photographer's victims will not know they are being taken. The naturalness of these unique photographs can be judged from this week's 'Unsuspected Moments.' . . ."

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