The story of Albert Einstein's sticking-out-tongue photograph: taken on his 72nd birthday in Princeton on 14 March 1951 by UPI wire photographer Arthur Sasse, and how a throwaway gag became one of the most reproduced photos in history.
On 14 March 1951 Albert Einstein turned 72. He had spent the day at a celebration held in his honour at Princeton, New Jersey — smiling, by most accounts, for photographers for hours as his fame kept growing. When the event was winding down and the gaggle of photographers on the pavement asked him for one last smile as he got into his car, the man who had just helped give the world the theory of relativity did something no one expected: he stuck his tongue out at them. It was a tired, playful gesture in a lifetime of deliberately posed portraits — and it produced the image that now defines him to more people than any equation ever has.
The man behind the camera was Arthur Sasse, a staff photographer for United Press International. By his own telling the tongue came and went in an instant — Einstein pulled the face and immediately turned away — so the shot was less a posed portrait than a split-second catch. Sasse had his camera up when nobody else's was, and he got it. It is the classic wire-photo story: a press photographer in the right place at the right moment, one frame that outlives the assignment it was never meant to fulfil.
The photograph might easily have never appeared. UPI initially set it aside — the office is said to have judged it undignified for the world's most famous scientist. But Einstein asked for several copies for his own use, and he liked the image so much that he is reported to have sent it out on his own cards. From that moment the gag photo became an institution: republished, remixed and parodied more times than almost any photograph of any public figure, and it remains the single most recognised image of Einstein today.
For someone learning to date a photograph — which is precisely what guessNow trains — the picture is a small classroom. The double-breasted suit and dark bow tie, the neatly parted white hair, the clean fine-grain look of a press print shot on black-and-white stock: all of it reads 'early 1950s' at a glance. Einstein's unmistakable face does most of the dating, but a player who wants to reason rather than recognise can bracket the era from the plain clothes of a senior man in postwar America, the press-photograph grain, and the Princeton setting behind him. The same close-reading skill carries across to any other image in the archive.
The photograph is one of the rounds in guessNow's archive. It arrives revealed piece by piece, and you slide to the year you think it was taken before your HP runs out. See how quickly the telltales — the clothing, the hair, the print, the setting — let you date it, then read the full record with its photographer and licence on the reveal. For a guide to the exact cues in a 1950s portrait, our how to date a 1950s photograph guide works through them in detail.