Edwin (a.k.a. Edward, commonly 'Ed' or 'Eddie') Feingersh was born in Brooklyn on April 21, 1925, the second of three sons of Harry Feingersh, a women's fashion designer and Rae Feingersh (née Press). His Jewish grandfather Abraham, a tailor, migrated to America from
Moldavia in 1913 to escape the
pogroms. Ed Feingersh majored in art at Manhattan's
Haaren High School. He took up photography while serving in Germany in the Army, where he bought an inexpensive
35-mm camera. After the war, with the assistance of the
G.I. Bill, he first attended New York University, where he joined the camera club, and later enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch's photography course at the New School for Social Research. He worked during this period as assistant to
Gjon Mili. This experience, and photographs he took for the course secured work as a 22-year-old
stringer with
Pix Publishing photo agency in 1948. For them he produced stories for major magazines including a day in the life of a woman doctor for
McCall's, moody and revealing scenes from a Tokyo night club for
Argosy men's magazine, a report on German war orphans for
Redbook, a study of a disturbed boy's psychological rehabilitation and the story "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Controversy', both for
Look, in addition to making a portrait series of
Albert Schweitzer in New York and covering a night
fighter squadron's mission over
Greenland. His coverage of the
Korean War, particularly the
Battle of Pork Chop Hill (1953), involved Feingersh carrying in addition to his cameras, the gun, pack, and other standard G.I. equipment, nevertheless, he produced imagery with his
wide-angle lens that conveyed a charged,
first-person perspective. The work was published in
Pageant and
Argosy. He developed a reputation for putting himself at risk to get the eye-catching shot the magazine editors craved; parachuting with
paratroopers, lying right in the path of stunt cars and having himself tied to the periscope to photograph a submarine diving. At
PIX he worked alongside the agency photographers
Alfred Eisenstaedt, George Karger,
Jerry Cooke,
Eileen Darby (Lester),
Robert and
Cornell Capa,
George Zimbel, Bob Schwalberg,
Lawrence Fried, Bob Henriquez, and
Garry Winogrand whom Feingersh introduced to the photo agency. ==Marilyn Monroe==