Framing females, then and now: ANU exhibition sheds light on photographic torchbearers

Gender inequality, as many of us are regretfully aware, is still a pressing issue deep into the 21st century. How that and other societal inequalities are possible, with all the “progress” we have made in all sorts of walks of life, is something of a mystery.

So, perhaps it is basically a sad matter of the white male continuing to rule the economic, social, and political roost around the world.

The numerical titular banner refers to the score of yesteryear snappers and the same number of their living counterparts on the exhibition roster.

This isn’t any old presentation of cross-temporal prints, with a handful of illuminating video material betwixt and between. The fact that the lineup includes a total of 40 exclusively Jewish female photographers from the last and current centuries knocks the interest value up several notches.

Lucia Moholy is a stark case in point. The Prague-born photographer’s work was expropriated, without so much as a “by your leave,” by her then-husband, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a noted Hungarian painter and photographer who taught at the envelope-pushing Bauhaus school in Germany.

Many years later, it was discovered that pictures that were thought to have been photographed by Moholy-Nagy were, in fact, created by Moholy.

Additionally, the great Walter Gropius, the man who founded the Bauhaus movement, committed a similar transgression when he presented dozens of prints he’d made from Moholy’s negatives – left behind when she hurriedly fled Germany for England soon after Hitler became chancellor – at an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, without crediting the photographer.

The senior lineup at the ANU exhibition forms a genuine A-lister cast, with the likes of German 1920s New Objectivity flag bearer Aenne Biermann; Lou Landauer, who gained fame for book cover shots, street photography, and carefully crafted botany subjects; and Viennese-born Edith Tudor-Hart, who escaped to Britain in 1933.

Besides her compelling work, Tudor-Hart’s bio is spiced up by the fact that she doubled as a spy for the Soviet Union and was instrumental in recruiting members of the Cambridge spy ring that was active from World War II through to the Cold War era.

The possessive pronoun “Her” in the exhibition moniker alludes to the project’s philosophical subtext.

The gender gap, in terms of social standing and the professional fields considered to be beyond the bounds of “good taste” for women to pursue, led quite a few females to pick up a camera.

That was physically facilitated by technological advances made in the 1920s and 1930s when portable, and more affordable, cameras became available, with companies such as Leica of Germany and the Japanese Canon enterprise manufacturing 35 mm. apparatus that did not require brawn and capacious vehicles to get around.

The unwitting combination of the societal shifts of the day and the advent of more diminutive photographic equipment made it possible for women to get out and about and snap life around them, as well as creating more artistically learning frames.

“It was not viewed as something serious, so the men allowed women to take pictures.”

Thankfully, quite a few female photographers emerged between the world wars, which included Jewish women in Germany and Austria, many of whom managed, after Hitler’s rise to power, to flee to Britain, the US, and other pastures beyond the demonic reach of the Nazi mass murder machine.

Some, such as Landauer, headed this way to pre-state Palestine and brought with them new ideas about how to approach the discipline, offering innovative styles and techniques, including such previously locally unknown idioms, and experimental and avant-garde photography, photo montage, and double exposure.

During her relatively short stay here, before relocating to the United States, Landauer became a driving force behind photographic endeavor here, working as a photojournalist and book cover artist, and becoming the first teacher of photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

Notwithstanding that breakthrough in educational development, after losing the battle to establish an independent photography department at Bezalel, Landauer eventually stopped banging her head against a brick wall and left the country.

At first – and second – glance, the subject appears to be a young man with rakishly swept-back, close-cropped coif.

“Claude related to herself as non-binary and flitted between genders as she felt when she got up in the morning. This photo was taken in 1928,” says the curator as we get up close to the adroitly designed self-portrait among the spread of delectable frames by the foremothers that greet you as you enter the exhibition display area. The picture might have just as easily been taken in the 1960s or 1970s.

Therein, Houminer enlightens me, lies an unsuspected link to one of the leading lights of the early ‘70s glam rock subgenre of commercial music in Britain.

“When she was a teenager, she adopted a stance whereby she declared herself to be neither a man nor a woman. In most of her photos, she dresses up as all sorts of characters,” Houminer adds.

That leads straight to one of the icons of the pop-rock world. “David Bowie took her as a source of inspiration in the 1970s – the clothes, the look.” The resemblance between Cahun and Bowie is, indeed, uncanny.

Interestingly, almost all the older generation of exhibitors survived the Holocaust, and most lived on well into old age.

The exception in that regard is Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon – known by her professional moniker, Yva – who was an industry leader during Germany’s Weimar Republic and a pioneer in the advertising field. She was murdered at the Majdanek concentration camp in 1944.

Aenne Biermann pre-deceased the Nazi era, dying of a liver disease at the age of 34, two weeks before Hitler entered office.

Naturally, all the older generation prints are monochrome, which serves to underscore the deft use of lighting in the photographers’ work.

Viennese-British Gerti Deutsch’s self-portrait is a symphony in black and white, with manifold intermediary shades. It is also more than a little reminiscent of German-born Israeli photographer Werner Braun’s striking portrait of writer Leah Goldberg taken in 1964, looking less than happy and with ubiquitous cigarette to hand.

Deutsch’s frame of semi-clad young children engaged in some form of calisthenics captures the epitome of movement and corporeal suppleness. The interplay of light and shadow is perhaps best displayed in Landauer’s self-portrait, whereby the subject-snapper’s face is brightly illuminated, and the long lens of the hulky camera protrudes as a lurking darkly threatening presence.

The contemporary lineup is pretty impressive too, with many of the exhibitors from here and elsewhere leaders in their chosen fields.

The current crop have their pictures displayed in tandem with work by their illustrious predecessors, thus spawning an alluring and informative overarching dialogue as the members of the younger generation feed off and pay tribute to the likes of Russian-born British photographer Dorothy Bohm; Laelia Goehr, who escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s; Polish-born photojournalist Julia Pirotte, who worked with the French Resistance during WW II; and Austrian-born American photographer Trude Fleischmann, one of the few older group members who found success after relocating away from their country of birth.

The current-day professionals were given free rein to select the 20th-century artists they wanted to pair with. They expound on the reasoning behind their choices in video interviews shown on screens dotted around the exhibition, strategically located near the prints in question.

This tactic, Houminer and Galay contend, offers more than a window into the annals of photography and salutes the greats of the past.

They say the hybrid approach bridges the temporal divide and reanimates the work of Biermann, Landauer, Lore Krüger, Maria Austria, et al.

“We believe that this combination – the new with the old, the Leica with Instagram – creates a dialogue that enhances the acquaintance with contemporary works, and breathes life into the works of the women photographers who were born over a century ago, who offered aesthetic and social worldviews that are still relevant today. Through their photographs, they demonstrated a humane perspective, inventiveness, and talent that have not grown faint in the 21st century.”

Naomi Harris goes along with the idea of an artistic and thematic continuum to the present day.

She had unwittingly discovered one of the last places where senior Jews went to spend their last years on terra firma. “I became a sort of surrogate granddaughter of everyone there,” Harris recalls about taking up a temporary tenure at the retirement home which had seen better days, as had its residents.

Notwithstanding the yawning generation gap, Harris bonded with the occupants and clearly gained their trust. That enabled her to catch the golden agers in all sorts of moments, including intimate junctures, with the folks she snapped not always looking their best.

All that is succinctly conveyed in Harris’s book titled Haddon Hall, which came out two decades later in 2021, long after the elderly folk had passed away.

Her slot in the exhibition features just three items from the 176-page book of photographs, showing the senior citizens in repose, getting medical care, and even flaunting their looks.

One frame is reserved for Harris’s beloved canine companion, Maggie, who died recently. It resonates with the photographer’s dry sense of humor and also goes some way toward explaining her choice of exhibition running mate.

Laelia Goehr, a Russian-born, Berlin-raised promising classical pianist and popular entertainment artiste, escaped Nazi Germany to London, where she took up photography with serious intent. The Harris-Goehr display combo features Goehr’s alluring close-up of a dog which Harris noted when visiting Goehr’s London-based granddaughter, Julia Crockatt, herself a photographer.

That sealed the exhibition pairing deal for Harris, who waxes enthusiastic about the shot and Goehr’s ability to home in on the precise shutter-activating moment.

Noa Sadka was also moved by her choice of senior foil’s snap of an animal.

One of Landauer’s prints that really caught her eye, and heart, featured a quirky take on a feline. “People asked her why she took a picture of a cat. They said: ‘Where is Treblinka? Where is Majdanek? Where is your reaction to things going on in this country [pre-state Palestine of the 1930s]?’ They asked where the big headlines and horrific tragedies were, while she photographed a cat,” Sadka notes.

She takes a similar line to Landauer when out on the prowl for stuff to document, preferring to point her camera at things she espies in and around her own domestic backyard.

For more information: anumuseum.org.il/lens-of-her-own/