Lotte Jacobi
Lotte Jacobi ( born August 17, 1896 in Thorn, West Prussia; † 6 May 1990 in Concord, New Hampshire) was a German photographer in the fields of portraiture, theater and art.
Life and work
Jacobi was born into the fourth generation of a Jewish family of photographers and lived from the age of two in Poznan; 1921 the family moved to Berlin. After training - first with her father - Lotte Jacobi studied from 1925 to 1927 in Munich film and photography. Then she took over his father's studio in Berlin. Already at that time she was known as a photographer, the artist and the art. Your images appeared in major magazines of the time, such as in the Berlin newspaper or magazine in the Munich Illustrated Press. End of the 1920s made Lotte Jacobi acquaintance with the Italian photographer Tina Modotti. In September 1930 Modotti put her photographs in Jacobi's gallery.
As fascism from 1933, the Jewish Lotte Jacobi, work in almost impossible at first she worked under various pseudonyms, also favored by the Agency Schostal. Jacobi saw, however, ultimately forced to emigrate. Her studio in Berlin's Kurfürstendamm 35 was taken from the photographer Hein Gorny Hanoverian. She went in 1935 with her son in the meantime divorced to New York. Here she married in 1940 the Berlin publisher Erich Reiss († 1951), who had emigrated in 1939 via Sweden to New York. Until 1955, she lived in the city and photographed during this period American and European celebrities emigrated.
After Lotte Jacobi had left New York, they settled in rural Deering in New Hampshire, where she again opened a studio and also works by young artists exhibited. Her estate includes 47,000 negatives.
Among other things, it has the following personalities portrayed: Berenice Abbott, WH Auden, Martin Buber, Marc Chagall, WEB Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Henry George, Valeska Gert, Emil Jannings, Egon Erwin Kisch, Käthe Kollwitz, Pauline Koner, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Thomas Mann, Max Schreck, Max Planck, Paul Robeson, Eleanor Roosevelt, May Sarton, JD Salinger, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Grete Sultan, Kurt Weill, Chaim Weizmann.
Her descriptive work but are also originally created in the 1940s and 1950s, created without a camera, experimental photo - graphs, and later by Leo Katz as " Photogenics " designated works.
While still alive, Lotte Jacobi was awarded the 1983 Dr. Erich Salomon Prize of the German Society for Photography for her life's work.