Focus on the Soul: the photographs of Lotte Jacobi

Afterimage, March-April, 2004 by Allison Moore

A Self-Effacing "I": The Photographic Practice of Lotte Jacobi The Jewish Museum in New York until April 11, 2004.

Fourteen years after her death, the German-born photographer Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990) is remembered in an exhibition of over eighty black and white prints (and one anomalous color Polaroid) at The Jewish Museum in New York City. This show recently traveled from the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester. New Hampshire. Although the two exhibitions are naturally similar in their celebration of this politically-committed and energetic photographer, each venue's curating strategy had agendas that created surprisingly different effects. The Currier show provided a traditional biographical and art historical context that highlighted Jacobi's portrait style, while The Jewish Museum places more emphasis on aesthetics, while also trying to situate Jacobi in her social-historical context.

A commercial photographer and artist, Jacobi is best known for her portraits of famous historical personages whom she admired, including Albert Einstein, Lotte Lenya, Paul Robeson, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Focus on the Soul encompasses the span of Jacobi's career, including portraits as well as other genres, such as early cityscapes in Posen, Germany (now Poznan, Poland), theatre and celebrity photographs of cabaret-crazed Berlin in the 1920s, and a half-year trip to the USSR in the early thirties. After escaping Nazi Germany in 1935, Jacobi continued her portrait practice in New York. The exhibit includes portraits of famous people and fellow exiles from that time, "photogenics," camera-less prints produced with light in the darkroom, of the 1950s (some not printed until 1981), nature photographs taken in New Hampshire, where she moved in 1955, and photographs from trips to Granada and Peru in the 1970s.

Supplemented by wall panels of text giving historical background, the exhibition follows Jacobi's geographical relocations in a roughly chronological order, starting with her early photographs in Germany, The dreamy, Pictorialist style in such works as Tree in Odenwald (c. 1928) and Church in Bavaria (1924) gives way to a harder-edged but unaggressive form of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a critical movement based on realism in painting. In which the artist or photographer attempts to display the hard realities of life. Jacobi's street scenes of children and prostitutes exemplify this category, yet in Girl Standing in a Street (1934), the photograph retains an air of gentleness, of sadness instead of outrage, despite the child with her hand to her eyes as if afraid. Whether she is truly frightened and alone, or only playing remains ambiguous.

Both presentations of Focus on the Soul reiterate a theme: that Jacobi dissolved her personality as a photographer into the style of her subject. She claimed to be a "blank" in front of the sitter, thus capturing his or her "essence," according to an accompanying film Focus on the Soul (2003), produced by the Currier. Both claims are problematic, taking as they do a timeless, de-historicized concept of subjectivity and of photography. The main flaw of this show--designed to be a crowd-pleaser in many ways--is its lack of critical engagement with the photographer's own claims about her work. It does not overtly question the assumption that a photographic portrait can convey the essence of a person, nor that a photographer can avoid incorporating her own style, or her own "eye." into a portrait.

On the other hand, the presentation at each venue creates a kind of unspoken dialectical relationship that implicitly examines these claims. At the Currier, where Jacobi's statement "My style is the style of the person in front of me," is taken at face value, the show is hung in a disparate, chronological manner. The photographer's lens becomes the node in a confluence of individuals and histories, tying unrelated strands--Bolshevik politics and the New Deal, Alfred Stieglitz and Berenice Abbot--briefly together. Jacobi herself seems to have preferred an historical approach to her photographs, for in the film she reprimands her interviewer. "Don't name [Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein] in one breath just because I photographed them. Einstein's a genius and Thomas Mann is a German official." The most obvious and accessible function of photography as a record of history here downplays the importance of the artist in favor of the immediacy of the subject.

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In contrast, The Jewish Museum's presentation visually illuminates and at the same time questions Jacobi's claim. Here the show, in its less historical and more aesthetic reincarnation, makes the viewer aware of Jacobi's techniques and style, emphasizing the fact that she was an extremely talented artist who worked with her camera, lighting and subjects as needed. One sees that yes, the personality of the sitter influenced the print, while also noticing that Jacobi's overall personal style--never disrespectful or harsh, and almost always striking, with lush, warm gradations of tones--transcends not only genres but decades.