He took portraits of many icons of his time including President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Albert Einstein, H.G.

[2] While not a photojournalist in the traditional sense, his portraits of the world's political and cultural elite offered a glimpse into the personalities shaping events of the 20th century.

[9] Over the course of his professional life, he developed a technique for using light, positioning, and a contemporaneous interview of his subjects to create not only a striking image of an individual, but one that allowed for personality, emotion, and experience to be visually expressed.

[4] Born in Hungary in 1899, Sternberger came of age in the early days of World War I. Hailing from a family of Hungarian patriots, he joined the Austro-Hungarian Army upon graduating high school and served as an intelligence officer.

[9][10] After a stint studying history in Prague, Sternberger attended the Sorbonne in Paris as a law student, ultimately earning a PhD.

[2][3][4] With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Sternberger found himself stranded in North America, unable to return to England due to his Hungarian citizenship.

[9] He continued to photograph intellectual, political, and cultural leaders of the time among them Albert Einstein, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India, and the Shah of Iran.

It was an opportunity to formally present the psychological methods he had honed over years along with the lighting and positioning techniques he employed in his practice to infuse a photographic portrait with the personality of the sitter.