Lotte Jacobi
Biography
Lotte Jacobi Biography
Lotte Jacobi was born in Thorn, Germany, where she made her first photograph—using a pinhole camera—at the age of twelve. Between 1912 and 1917 she studied literature and art history at the Academy of Posen, then took up the profession that had defined three prior generations of her family: her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, the last of whom had trained under Daguerre. She went on to study at the Bavarian State Academy of Photography and the University of Munich. From 1927 to 1935 she ran her father's Berlin studio, where her portraits of figures such as Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill, and László Moholy-Nagy captured the energy of the city's cultural scene and reflected the influence of both Alfred Stieglitz and Albert Renger-Patzsch.
Fleeing Nazi Germany, Jacobi settled in New York and opened a studio that she kept until 1955. Her first solo exhibition in the United States came in 1937, and in 1942 her work appeared in the Museum of Modern Art's Twentieth Century Portraits. After closing the New York studio, she relocated to Deering, New Hampshire, running a studio and gallery there from 1963 to 1970 and co-founding the photography department at Manchester's Currier Gallery of Art in 1970. Her photographs were later featured at ICP in the 1979 exhibition Recollections: Ten Women of Photography and in a 1993 retrospective at the same museum.
By the time she left Germany, Jacobi was already recognized as a leading portraitist of major cultural figures. Portraiture remained the foundation of her reputation, but her work shifted as her circumstances did: in the 1950s she turned to abstraction and landscape. Her "photogenics" from that decade are cameraless images made by placing glass fragments or twisted cellophane between a flashlight and a sheet of photographic paper, interrupting the light as it fell.
