Gerti Deutsch

Gerti German (* 1908 in Vienna, † 1979 in Leamington Spa) was an Austrian photographer. She lived and worked mainly in Austria and England.

Life

Growing up as the only child of a Jewish family, she began to study at the Vienna Academy of Music at age 16. However, your career goal pianist she could not reach due to a neuritis and thereupon turned to photography. Your photographic training she received from 1933 to 1934 of Graphic Arts and Research Institute in Vienna.

After living in Paris and London she believed professionally serious to be taken as in their home there as a woman - came Gerti German returned briefly to Vienna, then moved however, due to increasingly poor climate for Jews and better career prospects permanently to London. In 1936, she had to work her first exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Society in London, a forerunner of the Austrian Cultural Forum, and began in 1938 as a freelance photojournalist and editorial photographer for the Picture Post, the former deputy editor Tom Hopkinson, she married the same year. This marriage produced two daughters, Nicolette (today: Nicolette Roeske ) and Amanda.

In the period between 1937 and the early 1960s, when she retired from photography in 1969 and left London to live in Salzburg, she produced numerous photo essays - first in the Picture Post, after its closure in 1957, inter alia, in Nova, Holiday, Queen, Harper's Bazaar and The Tatler and the Swiss magazine L' Oeil and Atlantis. Their important features include the following: your first day in England (1938 ) on the refugee transports of Jewish children from Nazi Germany to England and its documentation of the occupied postwar Vienna ( 1948). In the 1950s, they cooperated more with the - also emigrated from Austria - photographer Inge Morath. In Deutsch's estate, there are numerous photographs that are signed by both photographers; about the exact extent of cooperation is unfortunately nothing received .. In the estate also find several designs to unrealized book projects, in the form of maquettes. Because of their great love for music she portrayed repeatedly sizes of the music world such as Yehudi Menuhin, Benjamin Britten, Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan or Irmgard Seefried, often in Salzburg or Vienna.

During her lifetime Gerti German had two major exhibitions: the first 1957 in Austria " Austrian Institute ", the second 1962 on Japan in the " Trade Fair" at London's Olympia exhibition hall. After its rediscovery there was an exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London (February to May 2010) and in Berlin (January 2011 ), followed by a more extensive in the gallery Fotohof in Salzburg (June and July 2011) There is currently not a complete list of works by Gerti German.

Monograph

• Kurt Kaindl. " The photographer Gerti German. Works 1935-1965 ". 2011 Fotohof edition, Salzburg. ISBN 978-3-902675-54-5. ( published in German and English Edition)

Further reading

• Iris Meder, Andrea Winklbauer. Shooting girls. Jewish photographers from Vienna. Metroverlag. Vienna, in 2012. ISBN 978-3-99300-089-9.