Masters of photography
Emil Mayer (1871 – 1938) was a Viennese street photographer in the early 20th century. He was almost certainly the greatest of the European bromoilists in the 1920s and 30s. He and his wife committed suicide in 1938 when the Nazis annexed Austria and much of his work was destroyed.
I personally arrived slowly at photography. I studied languages at university, took some courses in journalism, worked first as a translator and then as an editor for the Information Services Branch of the occupying American Forces in Salzburg, later in Vienna. In my spare time I wrote playlets for the Red-White-Red network and articles for various illustrated magazines, among them the Wiener Illustrierte. I started to be asked to supply some suitable photographs with my stories, which left me at a loss. I had never seriously occupied myself with photography; I did not even know a photographer. I had always been passionately interested in painting and drawing, but the artistic poverty of the “Third Reich,” where our only chance to see the major achievements of contemporary art was in (from my side at least) eagerly awaited exhibitions hung in school corridors under the title Entartete Kunst (degenerate art, including Picasso, etc.), provided no possibility for an education in visual matters. So I started to buy LIFE Magazine and photographic books and in my search for photographers I met Lothar Rübelt and Franz Hubmann and Erich Lessing and Ernst Haas.
Meanwhile I had become the Austrian editor of Heute magazine, published by the Americans in Munich, and started to work with Ernst Haas as a photography-writer team. Heute editor Warren Trabant forwarded a couple of our stories to Robert Capa, who summoned us to join the young Magnum Photos in Paris. Supplied with much food and a little money we boarded a train, left Vienna and stayed in Paris. Besides my work with Ernst, I started to write texts for the photographs sent to the Paris office by the then members of Magnum from all kinds of countries: Cartier-Bresson from the Orient, George Rodger from Africa, David Seymour from Greece, etc. I started to accompany different photographers on assignments for which also I had done the preparatory research, and later edited their contact sheets. I think that it is from this work that I learned the most.
A short marriage to an Englishman brought separation from Magnum and a move to London. I continued to write stories but found to my amazement that suddenly now that I was no longer accompanied by photographers the world around me seemed to be filled with things that wanted to be photographed. I had finally discovered my own way to express what interested or obsessed me in a way with which I could live. After the war I had often suffered from the fact that my native language, German, was for most of the world the language of the enemy, and although I was able to write stories in English or French it did not touch the roots. So turning to the image felt both like a relief and an inner necessity.
I took up a period of apprenticeship with Simon Guttmann, who had the reputation of a querulous genius of the picture magazine world; he had played a role in the early days of the Berliner Illustrierte under the Ullsteins. Somewhere along the way, Robert Capa had been one of his apprentices, too. Now Simon Guttmann worked as an adviser to Picture Post. I bought a used Leica, worked incessantly and, as I was known as the only non-photographing person in this milieu and knew I would not be taken seriously if I suddenly showed up with photographs, I turned my name around and, as Egni Tharom, started sending my picture stories to any magazine I thought might be interested. Sometimes I sold something, sometimes I got letters praising my eye but deploring my technique. I spent nights in the darkrooms of professionals, learning a lot as a free assistant. For Mr. Guttmann I stood in front of theatres to take pictures of arriving luminaries, and covered catastrophes like floods and fires.
As I was selling more pictures, my confidence grew. I went back to Paris and worked for three months on a story about the Prêtres Ouvriers (worker priests), the first militant Catholic priests who, as “missionaries within their own country” and with permission from their orders, lived the life of workers in factories and the poorest quarters of Paris. It was a difficult story, and when I finally was finished, pictures enlarged and text written, I decided to risk it. I showed it all to Capa, asking his opinion about the photographs which he liked. So I confessed that I had taken them and after the first shock he said, “Ok, show me the rest of your work; if it is as good we’ll take you.”
So I was invited to join Magnum, first for a year as an associate, then as a full member. There followed many years of constant travel, shooting stories in different parts of the world, as well as industrial work, stills for movies and theatre, fashion, works for art magazines shot with big cameras and, more and more, portraits. In 1956, my first book Fiesta in Pamplona appeared. And so it has really more or less been going on until today.
Margaret Michaelis-Sachs was an Austrian-Australian photographer of Polish-Jewish origin. In addition to her many portraits, her architectural scenes of Barcelona and her images of the Jewish quarter in Kraków in the 1930s are of lasting historical interest.
Born in Dzieditz near Bielsko in southern Poland (then Austria-Hungary) on April 6, 1902, she was the daughter of Heinrich Gross, a well-to-do Jewish doctor. She studied photography at Vienna’s Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt from 1918 to 1921
In 1922, still in Vienna, she first worked for a period at the Sudio d’Ora before spending a number of years at the Atelier für Porträt Photographie. She went on to work for Binder Photographie in Berlin and Fotostyle in Prague, and finally returned to Berlin in 1929 to work intermittently for a variety of studios during the hard times of the Depression.
In October 1933, she married Rudolf Michaelis who, as an anarcho-syndicalist, was almost immediately arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis. In December 1933, after Rudolf’s release, the couple moved to Spain but they separated shortly afterwards. In Barcelona, Michaelis opened her own studio, Foto-elis. Collaborating with a group of architects, she produced documentary images of progressive architecture which were published in Catalan journals such as D’Ací i d’Allà and, after the start of the civil war, Nova Iberia.
After returning to Poland in 1937, she obtained a German passport, went to London and, in September 1939, emigrated to Australia, first working as a house maid in Sydney. In 1940, she opened her “Photo-studio”, becoming one of the few women photographers in Sydney. She specialized in portraits, especially of Europeans, Jews and people in the arts, many published in Australia and Australian Photography. A member of the photographers’ associations of New South Wales and Australia, in 1941 she was the only woman to join the Institute of Photographic Illustrators.
Margaret Michaelis’ photographic career came to an end in 1952 as a result of poor eyesight. In 1960, she married Albert George Sachs, a glass merchant. She died on 10 October 1985 in Melbourne.
In her early life, Michaelis used the sharp focus and sometimes unusual vantage points of modernist photography while her portraits sought to reveal the psychological essence of her sitters. Her portraits were primarily focused on capturing the lives of Jewish immigrants. Of particular significance is the small set of scenes from the Jewish market in Kraków taken in the 1930s. Helen Ennis of the National Gallery of Australia stated the images “carry the weight of history, offering a visual trace of a way of life that was destroyed by fascism”.
The famous ocean sides neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro’s South Zone are known the world over and are the picture postcards of the city if not the country as a whole. About 35 kilometers inland, in the North Zone of the city, far from the famous beaches these are the suburbs and the hottest neighborhoods of the city. Decidedly working class there is no tourism to be found here but there is a vibrant scene of youth culture and underlying creativity. Despite the tiny bikinis seen on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro the culture of the rich, “white” South Zone is inherently conservative and conformist with a eurocentric view of representation. In the suburbs of the North Zone the picture is another, here the countries african heritage has historically been part of everyday life and individuality is celebrated. The mainstream representation of the poorer parts of society in Rio focus on the favelas and violence, this installation of 110 quase formal portraits focuses on the joy, energy and pride of residents of those suburbs who are usually left out of the local canon of visual representation on TV, the visual arts and the news media.
Erich Lessing was born in Vienna in 1923 as the son of a dentist and a concert pianist. His father died of cancer in 1933. Sixteen-year-old Erich Lessing managed to escape to Palestine in 1939, but his mother and grandmother were murdered in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Lessing studied radio engineering at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Working as a taxi driver and a carp breeder in a kibbutz, he eventually found his way back to the hobby of his youth, photography. He started out as a kindergarten and beach photographer before joining the British 6th Airborne Division.
Returning to Austria in 1947, Lessing was hired as a photo journalist for the American news agency Associated Press. In 1951, David ‘Chim’ Seymour invited him to join Magnum Photos,
a photographic cooperative with offices in Paris, New York, London and Tokyo. He became a full member in 1955 and is currently a contributor.
In the course of his career, Erich Lessing covered many significant political and social events.
His photographs illustrate the atmosphere of post-war Europe, such as Allied occupation in Vienna, reconstruction in war-damaged Germany, life under communist rule in Eastern Europe, several political summit conferences, Charles de Gaulle’s visit to Algeria in 1958 and the dramatic events of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.
Erich Lessing’s photographs were published in renowned magazines including LIFE, Paris Match, Epoca, Picture Post, and Quick. Many of his images, such as the photograph showing the presentation of the Austrian State Treaty on the balcony of the Belvedere palace in front of a cheering crowd, have become iconic. Lessing’s portraits of politicians like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Konrad Adenauer or Nikita Khrushchev, and artists like Herbert von Karajan or Oskar Kokoschka won him international acclaim. He took pictures of the actors and crew on the film sets of Moby Dick, Zorba the Greek and The Sound of Music, and continued to vividly capture everyday life and unusual events, such as the ‘Miss Sopot’, the first beauty contest to be held in communist Poland.
From the 1960s, Lessing increasingly turned towards art and historical subjects, specializing in large-format colour photography. He photographed thousands of works of art in museums and visited historical sites and places of archeological interest. His work was published in more than sixty art books by international publishers: Szene about the Viennese Burgtheater and Opera,
The Voyages of Ulysses in the footsteps of Homer, Imago Austriae, an Austrian history, The Bible as a history of the Jews, The Travels of Saint Paul, Florence and the Renaissance, The Louvre: All the Paintings and many more. Recent volumes include Von der Befreiung zur Freiheit – Österreich nach 1945 and Anderswo, portraying a world away from the familiar and habitual.
Having taught photography in Arles, at the Venice Biennale, at the Salzburg Summer Academy and at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Erich Lessing has been honored with numerous international awards such as the Art Directors’ Club Award for his work during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prix Nadar for his book The Voyages of Ulysses in 1966. In 2013, Lessing received the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art, First Class. This award was bestowed by the Republic of Austria in recognition of his lifetime achievements. He is a member of UNESCO’s International Commission of Museums (ICOM).
The Erich Lessing Kunst & Kulturarchiv (www.lessingimages.com), his archive and photo agency based in Vienna, organizes and licenses his photographic collection of more than 40.000 images and works closely with a network of international distribution agents. The collection covers a wide range of subjects such as religion and history, landscapes, historical portraits, music, fine art and archeology. In 2012 Lessing opened a photo gallery in the heart of Vienna, where he showcases his work.
Erich Lessing is married to the Time magazine journalist Traudl Lessing and has three children, four grandchildren, and one great-grandson
Bernd Preiml, Austria, 1973, makes photographs that look like dark and sinister fairy tales. His images contain both magic and mystery, they are haunting like a beautiful nightmare. He uses this in his own projects aswell as in fashion and editorial shoots. His style roots from growing up in the mountanous region outside of Vienna where folk tales were told about ancient creatures who inhabit the forests.
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