A Foreign Eye: Interwar European photographers abroad

Jordan Troeller, Universität Graz
Hyewon Yoon, University of New Hampshire

This session will examine the imagery produced by interwar European photographers as they travelled to Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia, producing travel reportages for European illustrated magazines, seeking work in foreign countries, and responding to decolonisation, exile and emigration, and the rise of the Third World movements. The aim of the session is not only to extend geographically the parameters of interwar European photography, but also to illuminate its role in shaping discourses of gender, race, ethnicity and cultural difference in the mid-20th century.

Speakers

Seeing through Whiteness: The photography of Ilse Steinhoff and Anneliese Scherz in Namibia in the late 1930s
Lorena Rizzo (Centre for African Studies, University of Basel)

From Berlin to Cape Town: New Realism and the South African photography of Annemarie Eva Fischer
Jessica R. Williams (Harvard University)

Ré Soupault in Tunis
Hyewon Yoon (University of New Hampshire)

Lucia Moholy in Turkey
Jordan Troeller (Universität Graz)

Collaboration and Joy under the Mexican Sun: Kati Horna's Story of a Vampire
Michel Otayek (Independent Scholar)

European Women Photographers in Brazil
Erika Zerwes (Museum of Contemporary Arts of the University of São Paulo)

Click here to download this session's abstracts or view below

Seeing through Whiteness: The photography of Ilse Steinhoff and Anneliese Scherz in Namibia in the late 1930s

Lorena Rizzo (Centre for African Studies, University of Basel)

This paper looks at the work of two women photographers of German descent in Namibia in the late 1930s in order to explore the problem of fascism’s visuality in the colony. Ilse Steinhoff’s photographs, produced in the context of national-socialist propaganda and colonial revisionism, and Anneliese Scherz’s photography as an example of the local settler community’s preoccupation with the configuration of whiteness, are placed alongside each other in an attempt to explore the entanglement of fascist, ethnic-nationalist and imperialist alignments in Southern Africa at the time. The essay shows why it is problematic to understand these women’s photographic oeuvres in programmatic terms alone, and how instead their photographs moved in and out of propaganda and criss-crossed neat distinctions between the private and the public, the political and the personal. The case study helps unearth some of fascism’s idiosyncratic iterations in the colony, while highlighting the aesthetic variability and flexibility of fascist visualities more generally. The Namibian material in fact evidences how photography drew from visual tropes of various origins, and how the photographs were embedded in the space-time of the colony as much as the metropolitan and imperial ones.

From Berlin to Cape Town: New Realism and the South African photography of Annemarie Eva Fischer

Jessica R. Williams (Harvard University)

Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, Cape Town became a hotbed of artistic and political activity as exiles from Europe joined South Africa’s left in the fight against the Union’s burgeoning fascism. Among those who sought refuge from Hitler’s Third Reich in South Africa was Annemarie Eva Fischer (1914–86), a 23-year-old German-Jewish photographer who would become one of the nation’s most sought-after portraitists. Despite her later success, Fischer was destitute when she arrived in Cape Town save for her camera and her ‘distinctive’ photographic style – Weimar Germany’s aesthetically and politically ambiguous Neue Sachlichkeit. Looking to her unheralded documentary work, this presentation examines how she and her South African contemporary, Constance Stuart Larrabee, mobilised German modernist photographic aesthetics to both critique and uphold public fictions of race in pre-apartheid South Africa. Although both women brought their modernist lenses to bear on similar subjects during this period, their divergent politics drastically affected the ideological content of their images. Considering their work in relation to one another allows us to probe the thematic and structural tendencies of fascist aesthetics and the ways (and extent to which) they were manifested in South Africa in the years leading up to, and immediately following, the outbreak of the Second World War. It also, perhaps more importantly, sheds light on how issues of race, class and gender inflected Fischer’s experiences of exile and, in turn, how she mobilised her lens in her new colonial context as a young pariah among parvenus.

Ré Soupault in Tunis

Hyewon Yoon (University of New Hampshire)

The paper examines a series of female portraits that interwar photographer, Ré Soupault (1901–96), produced in the Quartier Réservé (Reserved Quarter) in Tunis. Despite her multiple identities as a Bauhaus student, filmmaker, fashion designer, journalist and photographer working at the heart of the international avant-garde, Ré Soupault has been unjustly excluded from histories of the European avant-garde. Mobilised by her anti-fascist sentiments and with a camera in hand, Soupault began her photographic career in the early 1930s by travelling across Europe and documenting portraits and scenes of everyday life during the political tumult in France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Italy and Finland. Her photography exists at the intersection of the surrealist documentary style and the New Vision’s aesthetic. In 1936, Soupault relocated from Paris to Tunis with her husband, Philippe Soupault, the surrealist poet who ran the anti-fascist Radio Tunis from 1937 until 1940. Granted access to photograph in the Quartier Réservé, an isolated district of female social pariahs, Soupault produced a series of individual portraits of those female subjects. This paper focuses on Ré Soupault’s employment of modernist aesthetics – especially the surrealist techniques of double exposure, chance encounters and shadow effects – in documenting female subjects of colonial domination. The paper emphasises how Soupault dissociated her subjects from the colonial fantasy that seems reliant on late-Orientalist figurations of eroticised tourist attractions, in favour of the colonial real created by the complex relationship between the colonial gaze, the surrealist encounter with the colonial reality and photographic performativity.

Lucia Moholy in Turkey

Jordan Troeller (Universität Graz)

This paper examines the impact of archival photographic practices, developed at the Bauhaus by the Prague-born photographer Lucia Moholy, on the preservation of cultural heritage in the Middle East. Neither a student at the Bauhaus nor a paid staff member, Moholy applied her experience in printing technology, publishing and translation as she systematically documented Bauhaus products and buildings at the request of Walter Gropius, who relied on these photographs to illustrate press articles and the school’s series of books – which Moholy also edited and produced – as well as his own writings.

While this history is slowly being recognised, thanks to the pioneering scholarship of Rolf Sachsse, Robin Schuldenfrei and others, what is less known is that Moholy extended and even theorised this archival practice after she left the Bauhaus in 1928. In 1934, she moved to Britain and shortly thereafter founded one of the earliest microfilm organisations, whose extensive archiving of German publications during the Second World War played a key role in gathering English intelligence. In 1946, Moholy brought this experience to the newly founded United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), under whose auspices she helped to establish institutions of cultural preservation in recently decolonised countries, including Czechoslovakia and Turkey. In this paper, I will focus on the two years that Moholy spent in Turkey as a representative for UNESCO in the mid-1950s, during which time she helped to found the country’s first National Library, set up a microfilm laboratory, and install state-of-the-art German reproductive equipment.

Virtually unknown in art history, this episode reveals the remarkable afterlife of the Bauhaus’ archival imagination – initially cultivated as a defence against nationalist attacks on the school – in the project of nation-building after the Second World War. A better understanding of this period in Moholy’s career and its debt to her earlier work in the 1920s, sheds light on the continuing impact of the Bauhaus on Western European assumptions regarding photography’s capacity to preserve cultural heritage in the face of destruction.

Collaboration and Joy under the Mexican Sun: Kati Horna's Story of a Vampire

Michel Otayek (Independent Scholar)

As she travelled across national boundaries and experienced the upheavals of the interwar period, Kati Horna (née Katalin Deutsch, Budapest, 1912–Mexico City, 2000) held onto her camera as a tool for sustenance, political engagement and creative fulfilment. From the outset of her career and through revolution, war and exile, Horna's photographic practice remained close to the illustrated press. The first part of my discussion tracks the representation of women at different points in Horna's career, from her political work during the Spanish Civil War to a series of deeply personal photo-stories she created in the early 1960s for a literary magazine in Mexico City. I then take a close look at one of these photo-stories: her little-known Story of a Vampire: It Happened in Coyoacán in 1962. My analysis of Horna’s tale of a vampire woman considers how the Hungarian-born photographer capitalised on her embeddedness in dense markets of print culture, and her mobility across networks of cultural production in Mexico City, to create a body of collaborative work that reflected on exile and the feminine experience with remarkable aesthetic versatility. Taking into consideration her Central European background and her long-standing engagement with surrealist tropes of photographic representation, I also examine how Horna’s idiosyncratic take on the vampire theme engages with certain traditions of Mexican popular film. Ultimately, I argue that Horna’s fantastic photo-story reflects her joyful entanglement as a mature artist in exile with the dense fabric of Mexican culture.

European Women Photographers in Brazil

Erika Zerwes (Museum of Contemporary Arts of the University of São Paulo)

Until recently, the historiography of photography in Latin America in general, and Brazil in particular, has failed to acknowledge the importance or even the presence of women photographers in the subcontinent. It is a very common mistake to assume that the first women to practise photography professionally in Brazil were German-born Hildegard Rosenthal and Alice Brill, who emigrated to Brazil during the 1930s. However, recent studies show that women had been working as photographers for the press in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro at least since the beginning of the 20th century.

Although Rosenthal and Brill are certainly not the first women to adopt photography as a profession in Brazil – a country that has a vast and rich history of the medium, including the isolated discovery of a photographic process in 1834 – they still mark a specific moment in Brazilian and Latin American photography, which is the introduction and consolidation of the visual language of modern photography. This presentation intends to analyse the historiography of Brazilian women photographers in order to explore some aspects of these interwar European immigrants’ crucial role in promoting cultural transfers that impacted photography made in Brazil, both on its visuality and on its agency.