Lotte Jacobi

Johanna Alexandra "Lotte" Jacobi (August 17, 1896 – May 6, 1990) was a German-American photographer.

Early Life and Career

Born in Thorn (Toruń) in Prussia (now in Poland), she was the eldest of three children. She spent parts of her life in Berlin (1925-1935), New York City (1935-1955), and New Hampshire (1955-1990). Her portraits of celebrated subjects included Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Robert Frost, Marc Chagall, Eleanor Roosevelt, Alfred Stieglitz, J.D. Salinger, Paul Robeson, May Sarton, Pauline Koner, Berenice Abbott and Edward Steichen.

The name "Lotte" was a nickname given to her by her father.^[1] She always used it professionally and was never known by her birth name outside her family. In 1916 she married Fritz Honig, and a year later she gave birth to a son, John. The marriage did not last, and in 1924 they divorced. She put her son in school in Bavaria and went to school herself in Munich.

After completing her formal studies (1925 – 1927), Jacobi entered the family photography business in 1927. During this same period (1926–27) she began her professional work as a photographer, and she also produced four films, the most important being Portrait of the Artist, a study of Josef Scharl. From October 1932 to January 1933, she traveled to the Soviet Union, in particular to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, taking photographs of what she saw. She returned to Berlin in February 1933, one month after Hitler came to power. As persecution against Jews increased, she left Germany with her son, arriving in September 1935 in New York City, where she opened a studio in Manhattan.

In 1940, Jacobi married Erich Reiss, a distinguished German publisher and writer, a marriage that lasted until his death in 1951. During this time, she continued portrait photography at her studio, while also embarking upon an experimental type of photographic work that artist Leo Katz later named photogenics: abstract black-and-white images produced by moving torches and candles over light-sensitive paper. In 1955, she left New York with her son John and daughter-in-law Beatrice and moved to Deering, New Hampshire, a move that changed her life. There she opened a new studio.

Works

Lotte Jacobi is best known for her photographic portraits, which act as a "chronicle of an era." The list of her subjects reads like a who's who of the 20th century: W. H. Auden, Martin Buber, Marc Chagall, W. E. B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Käthe Kollwitz, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Thomas Mann, Max Planck, Eleanor Roosevelt, J.D. Salinger, Alfred Stieglitz, and Chaim Weizmann, to name but a few. Jacobi traveled around from assignment to assignment with her equipment bringing the studio to her models. She liked to wait until the models were most at ease before taking a photograph.

Jacobi continued to photograph through the early 1980s. She died in her home in Deering, New Hampshire, in 1990.

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