Lotte Jacobi American, 1896-1990

Lotte Jacobi (1896–1990) photographed the faces of a century before turning, in her fifties, from portraiture to abstraction, creating images by moving light across photosensitive paper. Her portraits are direct and unpretentious, often informal, shaped by conversation with her sitters until they forgot the camera. She approached even the most celebrated figures without deference. “Don’t they get dressed in the morning like the rest of us?” she once remarked.

Born in Thorn, West Prussia, in 1896, Jacobi was the fourth generation of a family of photographers. She studied photography and film at the Bavarian State Academy and the University of Munich before taking over her father’s Berlin studio in 1927. During the Weimar years, she photographed the writers, actors, dancers, and intellectuals who passed through her studio, among them Thomas Mann, Käthe Kollwitz, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Max Reinhardt, and Kurt Weill. She also travelled to the Soviet Union and Central Asia to make photographs.

When Nazi officials offered to designate her an honorary Aryan, Jacobi refused. She left Berlin in 1935, travelling first to London and then to New York, where she opened a studio and rebuilt her practice. Her American sitters included Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Marc Chagall, Alfred Stieglitz, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marianne Moore, W. E. B. Du Bois, W. H. Auden, and J. D. Salinger.

In 1938, Jacobi made a series of informal portraits of Einstein at Princeton, showing him seated at his desk in a rumpled leather jacket, his hair askew. Life declined the photographs as too casual. At Edward Steichen’s instigation, U.S. Camera published one in 1942, and the image became one of the best-known portraits of Einstein.

In the 1940s, Jacobi began making what she called photogenics: cameraless abstractions created by drawing with a moving flashlight or candle across photosensitive paper, sometimes through glass. A group of these works was exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in 1948. In 1955, she left New York for Deering, New Hampshire, where she maintained a studio and, from 1963, a gallery in which she exhibited photographers she admired, including Minor White. In 1970, she co-founded the photography department at the Currier Gallery of Art. Her photographic career spanned nearly eighty years, from 1908 to 1986. She died in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1990, aged ninety-three.