Photography as a Jewish Space[1]
By: Camilla Balbi
A few years ago, I was working on a Photobook from 1930, “Das Frauengesicht der Gegenwart”. The book contained 70 photos, which the editor Lothar Brieger took from the illustrated press.
I am starting my article by talking about this book, primarily because Brieger meticulously noted the photo studios that took the pictures, providing us with an invaluable source of names, dates and locations. Put simply, if we open a random photo book published in Germany in 1930, who took the photos? The answer reveals a surprising preponderance of traditionally marginalized subjects. Of the nine studios that produced the plates, four are run by Jewish women (six were founded by women, with two taken over by their sons) and six by Jews in general.
The consistent Jewish presence in the photographic field is hard to ignore. As Annette Vowinckel noted, although Jewish citizens made up less than 1% of the German population in 1925 (560,000 out of 63 million people), around 20/30% of the photojournalists of the 1920s were Jewish. If we move to the forgotten names of those who worked in the labs, sold the equipment, worked as retouchers and developers, the statistics probably change again. Paradoxically, the only data that tells us anything about this minor, and vanished world comes from those responsible for its disappearance. Of the 14,000 Jews who died at Mathausen between 1938 and 1945, Berkowitz estimates at least 400 were workers in the field of photography.
There are a variety of socio-historical reasons for this conjuncture. Firstly, photography struggled for decades to be understood not only as an art, but even as a respectable vocation. The photographer’s work was long associated with the idea of working for hours in the dark, with dangerous chemicals. This atmosphere is well captured in the 1919 Yiddish short story “in der Finster” by Israel Joshua Singer, in which the Nobel Prize recalls his own experiences as a retoucher for the Polish-Jewish photographer Alter Kacyzne. A lack of appeal that made it less of a problem that it was a prerogative of marginalized social groups.
In addition, photography was a new medium and there was no long tradition of social barriers. Although there was a guild system in Germany, it contained no racial or gender-specific restrictions. The studios were passed down in the family, avoiding the practices of exclusion that a Jew would face in a public career. Photography was also linked to other career networks in which Jews established themselves, such as journalism, advertising, and fashion. In a way, the camera became a symbol of acculturation, of assimilation, of longing for modernity. A conscious practice of a secular and modern Judaism that was still experienced with naïve scandal by some more traditional members of the community. An amusing example of this is an account by Friedrich Tielberger, the young Kafka’s Hebrew teacher and son of the local rabbi. In his memoirs, the young Kafka learns that his teacher was a practicing photographer:
Er staunte darüber. ‘Sie photographieren?’ fragte er, ‘das ist doch eigentlich etwas Unheimliches’, und nach einer kurzen Pause—‘das vergrößern Sie noch!’
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The processes that led women to turn to photography at the beginning of the century were similar to those that moved Jewish photographers. We can see them as part of the transition of some social groups from “outsiders” to “insiders” that Gay recognized as characteristic of the new republic and that led to a broader group of “marginalized identities” finding a form of personal and professional fulfillment in photography. As for many Jews, this process was facilitated by the presence of infrastructures that were lacking in other fields.
In 1890 the Lette Verein opened a Photographische Lehranstalt, a similar institute opened in Breslau the following year and in Munich in 1900 and 1905, while women were not admitted to art academies until 1917 in Munich and 1919 in Berlin. In addition, the craft was passed down from generation to generation in private workshops, including to daughters. Lotte Jacobi, for example, took one of her first photos in 1909 – she was thirteen years old and was photographing her younger brother – in front of her father’s studio, who was watching her from the window.
Of the 430 photographic studios listed in Berlin in 1929, more than 30% were run by women. A world of which only fragments remain. We know, for example, that Sigismund Jacobi gradually left the management of the studio almost entirely to women: his daughters Ruth and Lotte worked as photographers, their mother was responsible for the financial administration and Elisabeth Rottgers for marketing and archiving. Also the captions convey a picture of the general recognition of female professionals in the industry. Joachim Gerstenberg’s studio, for example, preferred to sign itself ‘Gerstenberg fruher Dührkoop’ to remind customers of the former owner Minya Diez-Dührkoop. Similarly, Ernst Froster kept the name ‘Adele’ alongside his own, even many years after the death of his grandmother, who founded the studio. In many cases, Sasha and Cami Stone’s atelier is also listed simply as “Atelier Cami Stone”.
These material and social circumstances cannot be separated from aesthetic and ideological effects, which I can only briefly trace. These emancipated and entrepreneurial women not only embodied the image of the Neue Frau of Weimar, but also contributed to its creation, with their photographs for the illustrated press. The Jewish-coded dimension of the visual culture produced in these years is palpable, as Buerkle demonstrated, in comparison to the Aryanized version produced in the following decade.
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These two spaces, the new photographic female and Jewish space, coincided in the physical space of Berlin, particularly in the neighborhood of Kurfürstendamm. Between 1909 and 1910, the neighborhood’s Jewish population grew exponentially (in 1925, Grunewald was over 10-5% Jewish) and Kurfürstendamm became one of the city’s most important commercial centers, with stores, theaters, artists’ studios. The character of the neighborhood, which stood for a cultivated Jewish modernity, led to the Rosh Hashanah pogrom of 1931. But in the previous decade, there was an unprecedented concentration of photo studios run by Jewish women. It is important to consider these geographical factors and the existence of a network of collaborations and direct influences. Atelier Jacobi’s decision to exhibit a selection of her photographs in the studio’s window on the street, for example, was to have a lasting influence on other young women photographers as Ilse Siebert, who worked in Steffi Brandl’s studio. An invaluable source for the complex intertwining of geographical proximity, intellectual community and instances of race and gender can be found in Marianne Breslauer’s memoirs. Here, the photographer recalls how a visit to an exhibition by photographer Hanna Riess at Galerie Flechtheim (both the gallery and Riess’s studio were located on Kurfürstendamm) was pivotal in her decision to pursue a career as a photographer, detailing the feminine nature of the craft and the vibrancy of the Berlin photography world.
Map of (some) photoaterliers in Kurfürstendamm between 1920 and 1930
The transition from remembering the “kleine jüdische Rotschopf” of Hanna Riess to reflecting on the uncertainty of her fate is emblematic of the brevity and tragedy of this cultural season. Of the authors in the previous map, only Erna Lendvai Dircksen, the only non-Jewish woman, kept her studio, becoming one of the leading photographers of National Socialism. Lotte Jacobi, Steffi Brandl and Elli Marcus emigrated to the United States. Yva was murdered in Sobibor, Charlotte Joel in Auschwitz, Frieda Reiss in Paris.
In the blink of an eye, these authors, or rather the survivors among them, were pushed back to the margins of history, geography and the canon. It is difficult to look at this corpus all at once. On the one hand, a collective effort is needed to bring all the names and biographies of these authors to light, which has been started but is far from complete. On the other hand, difficult methodological questions must be asked: Is it possible to look in the same way at those who managed to reopen a studio, those who worked only sporadically with photography, those who found a network, and those who remained isolated, those who emigrated to America, those who stayed in Europe, and those who moved to the future state of Israel or to non-Western countries? Can tracing the paths of individual exiles produce a grammar? Or would any attempt at a map correspond to the territory at a scale of 1:1, as in Borges’ famous short story? If the definitions of exile usually refer to the idea of a lost homeland, one must also ask whether an autonomous paradigm is needed for subjectivities such as the Jewish and the female, which could never fully relate to an idea of Heimat. However, recognizing that a visual culture emerged during this period that was both Jewish and female is a first step for any further hermeneutic operation. In this sense, exile could be understood as an analytical framework, a set of relations between a constructed ideal of “cultural unity” as opposed to “displacement”.” Observing the gaps and movements between the pre- and post-exile periods of these authors offers, in other words, simultaneously an archaeology of a vanished visual culture and an atlas of the transformations to which this original lexicon was subjected. On the one hand, this means that we must take into account how the state of exile often “explodes” the concepts of high and low culture. Photographers who continue to work with photography often take on temporary jobs, and it becomes necessary to navigate between reportage and children’s portraiture, medical photography and state commissions. Engaging with Weimar post-history forces the interpreter to go beyond the names that characterise the canon, its traditional geographies and its genres. It means looking at the plural legacy of a modernity that was born on the margins and rejected on the margins, but that existed and persisted in unexpected forms and off the radar of scholarly attention. It also means addressing the gaps and the silences. Not only those of the actual victims. But also the voices that were structurally silenced by the patriarchal system, one of the structures that exile does not seem to deconstruct. Etel Mittag Fodor, trained at the Bauhaus, stopped taking photographs after the birth of her second child, Else Hausman, – owner of a studio in Hamburg – taught the craft and left the management of the business entirely to her husband once in Cape Town. Marianne Breslauer, gave up photography to work with her husband. Maria Eisner, who was fired from Magnum (the agency she co-founded) in 1951 because she was pregnant and Robert Capa claimed “that she would not be able to do her job properly once the child was born”. Lucia Moholy, whose theories and images were largely stolen from her, first by a patriarchal society and then by an equally patriarchal scholarship. From this point of view, the new possibilities of criticism and exhibition (such as Lucia Moholy’s Exposures, which opened at the Prague Kunsthalle on May 30, 2024 and was the first occasion of this text) can be seen not only geographically, but above all intellectually, as an act of historical and critical restitution, and a homecoming.
[1] Notes on a talk given at the opening of the Lucia Moholy: Exposures exhibition at the Prague Kunsthalle in May 2024.