He was a contemporary of Alfred Eisenstaedt and Erich Salomon, and he was just as good and daring, but today he is by far not as famous as those legendary colleagues. The American James Abbe published great photo reportages from Stalin’s Moscow, on the last years of the Weimar Republic and from the sites of the Spanish Civil War. Obsessed and carefree, he approached Europe’s dictators: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco. In 1932 he was the only American allowed to photograph Stalin. Many of his pictures, portraits of Rudolph Valentino, Mae West, Josephine Baker and Charlie Chaplin among others, became icons of the modern image world.