Laelia Goehr: The Wider Context     
by John March

Laelia Goehr’s biography is an arresting one, profoundly affected as it was by political upheavals as well as diverse cultural influences. Her life span almost exactly matched the preceding century and illuminates important parts of its history. The purpose here is to ask how exceptional her life story was, by contextualising the biographical narrative, and drawing upon the experiences of others – in particular twentieth century European women, who lived as exiles from their place of  birth, and who in different ways and at different times in their lives, worked as photographers. In Laelia Goehr’s case the same kind of contextualising approach could be taken with a focus on music and music-making. But that is a story for another time and place.  This website looks at her life and work through the lens and illustration of her work as a photographer, and so that is the tack that is taken here.

Background
A 2020 exhibition at the Four Corners Gallery, entitled Another Eye, celebrated the lives and work of some twenty women photographers who were refugees from Nazi Europe and who settled in Britain, a fate shared by Laelia Goehr[I]. Their work was shown, their often hidden personal histories were brought to light, and the impact of their work was described. Laelia Goehr’s work was also presented in the exhibition.  

For a modestly staged, and COVID19- emergency- truncated event, the exhibition garnered a lot of attention. It did so by telling compelling human-interest stories, showing striking images of people, places and events, and also highlighting how the British visual landscape was influenced and extended, rendered more accessible and democratic, more interesting and more varied through the work of these photographers. In short, a hitherto neglected corner of European and British cultural history was illuminated.

Drawing together the work of twenty photographers naturally invited the question as to how far their life experiences and their backgrounds allowed collective generalisations about them to be made. Some common characteristics were clearly discernible: they came from middle class backgrounds, they all had a Jewish heritage, grew up in urban settings, were well- educated and culturally attuned. Almost all were formally trained as photographers at some stage in their life, most were supported by family in their career aspirations. The big differences in their experiences lay in how old they were when they became refugees, and the paths they took into photography. For some it was a life-long commitment from the start, for others it was a second choice (when other options were closed) or else a more passing interest and occupation.

This collective story of women photographers who settled in England, left out of the picture those women from Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and Prague who also became refugees but who migrated further to North and South America, Australia and other parts of the world. They too tended to share the same middle-class Jewish heritage, were from various German-speaking regions and took their photography work seriously.

What lies behind these individual stories of resilience and aspiration was the particular coincidence of circumstance, which allowed middle-class women to take up photography in Germany and Austria at a time when training opportunities were opening up and welcoming to women, the demand for photographs of all kinds was booming and the attractions of this newly invigorated visual medium were never more celebrated and practised. Berlin and Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s had many women-owned and run studios, active in all genres of work. The women photographers were often not merely recorders of metropolitan life but recognised cultural actors in their own right.[ii]

Nach Berlin 
Laelia Goehr’s flight from a wealthy life in Kiev to Berlin in 1921 was part of wider European migrations that marked the era. The Bolshevik revolution and subsequent civil war resulted in an estimated over one million people leaving the newly formed Soviet state. This highly heterogeneous group included former military and administrative servants of the Tsarist regime, as well as aristocrats and bourgeois families, artists and intellectuals, leftist political opponents and Jews from various parts of the Soviet Union. It has been calculated that up to 400,000 of these refugees made their way to Berlin in the early part of their exile. The impact on the city saw the district of Charlottenburg being re-dubbed Charlottegrad, as the Russian - speaking diaspora made its mark.[iii]

One feature of the life of west central Berlin was the number of photographic studios operated by women photographers, who simultaneously recorded the cultural and political life of the capital as well as being part of that cultural milieu. The portraiture work of these women photographers, who were all about ten to twenty years older than Laelia Goehr, represent a who’s who of the cultural scene in Weimar Berlin. Practitioners such as Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990)[iv], Frieda Reiss (1890-mid 1950s)[v], Gerty Simon (1888-1970)[vi], all with studios on or near the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, shared an assimilated Jewish heritage and like Laelia Goehr made their way into exile in the 1930s; Jacobi to America, Riess to Paris and Simon to London. While at the time, in the 1920s, the young Laelia Goehr was engaged with musical training and striving to establish a musical career, these women of an older generation were making their marks in the field of photography which ultimately would also become Goehr’s field of activity. That both Jacobi and Reiss were also new arrivals in the city, from contested territory in what became Poland after the post-war settlement, speaks of the draw of the capital and the opportunity the Weimar years offered to young women to follow independent careers. It is also striking the degree to which these photographers were able to integrate themselves into the different cultural spheres of the city – theatre and cinema, fine arts, dance – and through their work to present in modernist form, a composite picture of the people and events of these different realms. Such an approach mirrored the later experience of Laelia Goehr when, through her portraits of musicians and composers in London after 1960, the post-war classical musical scene of Britain was presented.

With Berlin and Vienna as the centres of photography in the two countries, and the cities where the number and status of practicing women photographers was highest, it is little surprise that many women refugee photographers began their path into exile from here. Ellen Auerbach (1906-2004)[vii] and Grete Stern (1904-1999)[viii] who had established an innovative advertising studio in Berlin in the late 1920s both left shortly after the Nazi assumption of power and were briefly reunited in London in the mid-1930s, from where they later migrated and experienced exile from exile; Auerbach to New York and Stern to Buenos Aires. Lucia Moholy (1894-1989)[ix], who had been so instrumental in securing what became iconic photographic images of Bauhaus buildings, objects and people, left Berlin immediately when the Nazis came to power, and after arrival in London maintained her career as a portraitist, teacher, writer and later was involved in the development of the potential of microfilm technology.  Adelheid “Heidi” Heimann, (1903-193)[x] originally from Berlin, pursued a career as an art historian in Hamburg, before returning to Berlin to train at the women-only training institution, the Lette Verein, and thence moving to London where she worked in the photographic department of the Warburg Institute. Two younger women, Erika Koch (1915 -2010)[xi] and Ursula Pariser[xii] (1917-2010) were both residents of Berlin who became photographers and developed careers in London after they arrived there in the 1930s.

While Laelia Goehr’s life path and careers in music and photography were, of course, unique, it is telling that the exodus of talent from Nazi Germany embraced a group of young women Berliners who were generally not known to each other, but who all found their way into photography either before or after exile.

Music and A Musical Life
Music was a driving theme in Laelia Goehr’s life, first as a girl attending elite music schools in Kiev and Berlin, then as a performer as part of a cabaret-style double act, marriage to a leading conductor, composer and arranger, and finally as a photographer in England, where she photographed musicians, conductors and composers.

Again, it is striking to see parallels in the lives and work of other refugee photographers. In some ways a direct engagement with music by members of this group is unsurprising, given their backgrounds in that stratum of society characterised by a strong and disciplined commitment to German culture, of which music was a pivotal part. Nevertheless, powerful echoes of Laelia Goehr’s musical life emerge.

Gerti Deutsch (1908-1979)[xiii], born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, as a girl took a musical direction, and was taught privately and then at the Music Conservatory. How far her career might have progressed is uncertain, although her daughter, Amanda Hopkinson, writing of her mother, records that “she had serious thoughts of becoming a concert pianist.”[xiv] In any case, this aspiration was snuffed out by the development of neuritis in her right arm. With this potential career stymied, she took up photography. It is not known how many other of the refugee photographer group were promising young musicians, although in a brief biographical sketch in the catalogue for a prestigious photographic exhibition, Gerty Simon is described as having been formerly a “musician” although of what kind or with what stature is unknown.

Following training at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna Gerti Deutsch fled to London in the late 1930s and began a successful career, notably with Picture Post, the mass circulation weekly illustrated magazine (to which Laelia Goehr also contributed). Part of the portfolio she brought to London included photographs taken at the 1935 Salzburg Festival and featured, among others, the conductor Arturo Toscanini and soprano Marian Anderson.  

Deutsch contributed photographs to over fifty photo-essays in Picture Post. One theme evident in the post-war stories to which she contributed was the re-emergence of cultural life, especially musical life, after the wartime trauma. Photographs of performers and scenes from the first Edinburgh International festival in 1947, featuring informal portraits of Kathleen Ferrier and Peter Pears projected a more promising future, and the role that the arts might play in a rejuvenated Britain. The international and European character of music was also illustrated in photo-essays such as “Musicians on Holiday” (Picture Post 9/1950), portraying Yehudi Menuhin and Louis Kentner informally and enjoying an Alpine setting, and a report from the post-war reopening of the Salzburg Festival in 1948 (Snapshot from Salzburg).

It is interesting to remark that while Gerti Deutsch illustrated the youthful faces of music in the immediate post-war period, Laelia Goehr undertook something of the same task for the next generation of performers when photographing rehearsals for the celebrated performance of “The Trout” at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1969 by outstanding young soloists of the period. The book “Musicians in Camera” published in 1987 extended the timeframe of portrayal, although many of the musicians who were photographed in their mature eminence, had themselves been photographed by refugee photographers before that.

Yehudi Menuhin became perhaps the most popularly recognised figure of classical music, nationally and internationally, in the post-war decades. He wrote the foreword to “Musicians in Camera”, and was the subject of a photo-essay by Gerti Deutsch. Powerful and widely seen photographs of Menuhin, were created by another refugee photographer, both before and after the Second War. Lotte Meitner-Graf (1899-1973)[xv] was born in Vienna, and after training at the Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt, opened a photographic studio specialising in portraits of musicians and scientists. Her exile after 1938 brought her to London, where she opened up her own studio, again producing portraits of a wider range of eminent sitters, including those from the worlds of politics, the theatre (and film) and letters. However, her interest in and engagement with music and musicians intensified. Her meticulously constructed images of musicians came to be used in the post-war period, the elite of international classical music living in, or passing through London, were her portrait subjects. The compositions featuring the musicians with their musical instruments are distinctive, with the hands of the players given prominent and delicate focus. The example of “Mstislav Rostropovich's Hands” which concentrates on just this, marks a departure from the more conventional treatments. A connection between the Viennese portraits of musicians and the London studio can be gathered from correspondence found in the Meitner-Graf archive between the Meitner-Graf and the musical impresario Victor Hochhauser, who, also exiled in London, contracted for promotional photography work to be done for visiting musicians. 

For Lotte Meitner-Graf, especially in her London portraits, her subjects and the generally austere and dramatised images of them, can be seen as the visual stamp of a particular and recognisable strand of post-war British intellectual and cultural, especially musical life. In the two photographs reproduced below, staged lighting effects and highly assertive self-presentation by the sitters produce images that would be carefully employed by the individuals to cement their public persona, and were sometimes used on record covers.

This point is well made at the opening of the obituary written by Professor Frisch:

“There can be few educated people who have not seen one of Lotte Meitner-Graf’s photographic portraits, either on a book jacket (for instance, Bertrand Russell’s autobiography, or Antony Hopkins’s Music All Around Me) or on a record sleeve or concert programme. Her portrait of Albert Schweitzer had wide circulation on a poster, urging young people toward voluntary service abroad.”

 The black and white portraits can be seen as the visual accompaniment to the written and spoken word of an “educated” of post-war British culture. They served as personifications of the musical world experienced through radio, concert hall performances and the long-playing record.  

Twenty-nine credits for photographic illustrations of record sleeves are listed[xvi] for disc releases between 1958 and the late 1960s. All are recordings of classical music (mainly produced by Decca and Columbia), including Britten’s War Requiem (1963), Peter Pears and Julian Bream (A Recital of Lute Songs, 1960), and a variety of works conducted by Klemperer, as well as Beethoven and Mozart sonatas played by Wilhelm Backhaus. 

Music on BBC radio, trailed in the Radio Times was also illustrated with photographs. For Lotte Meitener-Graf the use of her, often miniaturised, photographs meant that her work formed part of the visual backcloth, albeit fleetingly perceived, for millions of British people. In 1955 the Radio Times circulation peaked at 8.8 million, while actual readership was of course higher. The connection between the visual representation of musicians, radio words and music, and direct experience of the London classical music world coalesced in two BBC Radio programmes about Otto Klemperer that were broadcast in 1972 and 1976, to which Lotte Meitner-Graf contributed her memories and opinions. The observer behind the camera had entered the picture. The 1972 programme was narrated by Bernard Levin, another of her portrait subjects. 

Examples here of the work of Gerti Deutsch and Lotte Meitner-Graf speak of the popularising reach of their work photographing musicians. The meticulous quality of the portraits by Lotte Meitner-Graf are outstanding in the genre and serve to elevate the status of the sitters, who are often portrayed as dedicated and serious to the point of other-worldliness. Laelia Goehr’s work in the same realm is somewhat different with its ambition to show musicians in action, making music, especially guiding the making of music by conductors. In this sense Goehr’s work can be seen as an extension of earlier photographs of musicians, sometimes informal and newsy, sometimes austere and formal, and shows the changing ways in which photographs were used to try and illuminate the human source of the thing that can’t be shown – the music itself.

Mentors
Laelia Goehr’s serious engagement with photography began at the point at which she was mentored and tutored by Bill Brandt (1904-1983). The exact nature of her studies and the support she received from Brandt is not known. It was informal, and fell outside the frameworks of academic or practical apprenticeship training. No written or oral testimony is available to help with this gap in knowledge.

It is noticeable when considering the training of the wider group of refugee women photographers who settled in England, that there is a divide between those who had been active in the field before exile, and those who took up photography after exile. For those entering young womanhood in Germany and Austria in the 1920s and earlier, the formal training at Bauhaus, the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna, and the Lette Verein in Berlin were institutional avenues open to women. Further, opportunities to pursue formal apprenticeship training were also available, although these shrank after the Nazi seizure of power.  In any case, the self-taught, were exceptions – Gerty Simon described herself like this, and it is not known if she was tutored informally, before or during her brief and successful portraiture career in Weimar Berlin and London in the mid-1930s. 

After 1933 in Germany the photographic training experiences of the refugee photographers were mixed. For example, the art historian Heidi Heimann, whose career was disrupted by the relocation of the Warburg Institute to London, managed to secure a place at the Lette Verein in 1935 just prior to her departure to England, while Erika Koch was denied a place there because of a quota on Jewish students. Erika Koch did manage to become assistant to Umbo (Otto Umbehr 1902-1980), the celebrated photographer, after unsuccessful attempts to secure an apprenticeship, because of her Jewish heritage. Her quasi-apprenticeship, although influential on her developing skills and approach, was incomplete, and her formal qualification was secured much later from the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1943, after forced exile and internment experiences. Inge Ader (1918-2006)[xvii] in Hamburg had a similar experience to Erika Koch in seeking an apprenticeship, being rejected multiple times because of her Jewish background, before being given a chance with Gertud Andresen and eventually successfully completing the necessary examinations in 1937 before her exile to London.

As noted, the professional and personal relationship that Laelia Goehr had with Bill Brandt is not recorded. However, the experiences of photographers being influenced by others, being tutored and assisted in their work, is widely evident during the era. (Bill Brandt himself was influenced by Man Ray, during his time in Paris in 1930.) Among the women refugee photographers, working relationships and friendships between themselves and with more recognised and experienced practitioners are apparent. For example, Elsbeth Juda[xviii], prior to fully developing her own career assisted Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) and was taught photography informally by Lucia Moholy in London, after both became exiles. Both Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach were given assistance and were influenced by the Bauhaus teacher Walter Peterhans (1897 -1960), during their time in Berlin, early in their careers.

It is also the case that the refugee photographers themselves became teachers and role models later in their careers.  Lotte Meitner-Graf’s long career in photography encompassed work at the Georg Fayer studio where she was assisted by another refugee, Lore Lisbeth Waller [1918-2010])[xix] and on her own account at her Old Bond Street studio where one of her assistants was a young Anthony Crickmay (1937-2020)[xx].   

Animals and Humans
One particular feature of Laelia Goehr’s later photographic career is her collaborative work illustrating books about animals. Contributions to two books showing household pets (The Beauty of Cats, 1958 and The Beauty of Dogs, 1960) were followed by two collaborations, first with Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) (Faces, Profiles of Dogs, 1961) and then with Elsbeth Huxley (1907-1997) (Suki – A Little Tiger 1964).  

Family lore has it that Laelia Goehr had a fondness for pets and animals. This can be seen in her photographs of the dogs included in the Sackville-West collaboration, where it can be fancied that many photographs were taken until the right canine expression was captured, so as to give an opportunity to Vita Sackville-West to construct her particular brand of whimsical anthropomorphic sketches: for example, “It must be a nuisance to go through life with a Father Christmas moustache like that, but no doubt the Schnauzer gets used to it.” The enduring appeal of this kind of playfulness, and indeed of dog ownership, is suggested in the republishing of “Faces” some sixty years after its first publication.

The photographing of animals and then placing them in juxtaposition with photographs of humans was a theme in publications of the time. These double page juxtapositions were features of the editorship and style of Hungarian-born exile Stefan Lorant (1901-1997) who founded Lilliput and edited Picture Post, before later migrating to the USA. The clever juxtapositions, presented to amuse and provoke, were a hallmark of the publication to which Laelia Goehr contributed in post-war years.

Simple captions like “The Ruler of Germany” and “The Terror of the Jungle” managed to convey contempt as well as mockery. The photograph of the tic-tack man, made by Bill Brandt (appearing in Lilliput in March 1938) is also seen with the other tick-tack man, the term suggesting not just a parasitic wide-boy presence but also another English type – the flim-flam man.) 

An example from the work of Edith Tudor-Hart that appeared in Lilliput in 1939 which juxtaposed a poodle parlour and pampered dog with miserable housing conditions of the London poor, is a triumph of visual polemical story-telling. And in case the point was missed, the captions rhetorically reinforce the message with “Should we have this?” and “Must we have this ?”  

This device of visual compare and contrast was one that originated in political organs in Austria, such as Der Kukuck[xxi] as well as the eclectic Der Querschnitt [xxii] in Weimar Germany. It clearly provided lasting amusement for Laelia Goehr. In a more innocent and informal context, a self-made birthday card, held by the family, shows a none too comfortable, but funny, juxtaposition of man and beast. 

One of Many
In the context of the life and career paths of the wider refugee photographer group Laelia Goehr’s experiences and achievements intersect in important ways. The rupture of a settled existence and a post-exile shift into a new creative endeavour, the assistance from a mentor, and the opening up of avenues for sale and publication of work (for example, Picture Post and Lilliput), are all features that chime with the experiences of others. Engagement in portraiture work during wartime is likewise echoed in the activities of many of the exile photographers. 

In two respects Laelia Goehr’s work could be seen as distinct from the influences on, and outlets for, the creative output of the wider émigré photographic community.

One underlying commonality that is shared by many of the photographer exiles who spent their formative years as active practitioners or students in Germany and Austria until the 1930s, is the modernist features in photography, then so influential. In Laelia Goehr’s work by contrast there are few examples of experimentation with angular and unusual compositions, high and low camera angles, concerted social documentary inquiry, or austere objective presentation of people or objects. There are examples of candid “street” photographs of children, and the close-up photographs of plants, but these do not constitute a body of work that add up to a consistent style or approach. One explanation of this absence of a driving stylistic form maybe the influence of Bill Brandt whose work has been viewed in part as having been informed by a rejection of any constraining orthodoxies[xxiii].  It may also be that Laelia Goehr was simply uninterested or not drawn to modernist ideas that had been so in vogue some twenty years before the most active period of her photographic career.  

The other aspect of her career that stands apart from the work of others is the success she enjoyed contributing to books. Others did write and contribute to books on various topics, including a history of photography, illustrations for campaigning books and pamphlets, children’s books, technical and academic volumes. However, no other figure from this cohort was so centrally involved in contributing to so many books. The books about dogs and a tiger cub, musicians making music, and the study of Yemeni Jews have her photographs at their heart, and it is testimony to her skills and scope that she was able to address such diverse subjects so successfully.

This brief contextual essay ends as it began, recognising Laelia Goehr’s place amongst the many talented women photographers forced from their homelands by Nazi persecution, and yet equally recognising her unique experiences and contribution. 

John March is an independent researcher and an associate faculty member of the University of Leeds.

[i] See https://www.anothereye.org for virtual tour of the exhibition.

[ii] See Eskildsen, U., Ed. Fotografieren hieß teilnehmen: Fotografinnen der Weimarer Republik 

(Düsseldorf:Richer, 1994) and Meder, I., and Winklbauer, A., Vienna’s Shooting Girls - Jewish Women Photographers from Vienna (Jewish Museum Vienna, 2012) for the wider background of women photographers in Germany and Austria in the 1920s and 30s

[iii] https://russkiymir.ru/en/publications/152635/

[iv] Lotte Jacobi: Beckers, M. and Moortgat, E., Lotte Jacobi, Berlin New York (Das Verborgene Museum, Nicolai, Berlin, 1997).

[v] Frieda Riess:  Ehrsam, T.Die Riess: fotografisches Atelier und Salon in Berlin 1918-1932 York (Das Verborgene Museum, 2008).

 [vi] Gerty Simon: Warnock, B. and March, J. The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon (Wiener Library, London, 2019).

 [vii] Ellen Auerbach: Eskildsen, U., Baumann S., Ellen Auerbach, Berlin, Tel Aviv, London, New York (Pestel Verlag, München, 1998). 

 [viii] Grete Stern: Mandelbaum, J.,and Sandler, C.,. “Grete Stern." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. <http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/stern-grete>.

 [ix] Lucia Moholy: Madesani, A., Cavadini, N.O. Between Photography and Life (Silvana Editorale, Centro Culturale Chiasso, Italy, 2012.)

[x] Adelheid Heimann: Kaufmann, C.M., The Burlington Magazine (Vol. 135 No. 1087, Oct 1993).

 [xi] Erika Koch: Kennedy, A. and Wiblin, I. Erika Koch’s Apprenticeship in Umbo. Photographer. Works 1926 -1956. Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft, 2019

 [xii] Ursula Pariser: https://www.doaks.org/library-archives/garden-archives/biographies/ursula-pariser

 [xiii] Gerti Deutsch: Kaindl, K., Editor, Gerti Deutsch Photographs 1935-1965 (Fotohof Edition, Salzburg, 2011).

 [xiv] Hopkinson, A., Gerti Deutsch Photographs 1935-1965 (Fotohof Edition, Salzburg, 2011) P.8.

 [xv]Lotte Meitner-Graf: http://lottemeitnergraf.com/the-archive.html

 [xvi] http://www.discogs.com/artist/2195266-Lotte-Meitner-Graf?page=1,

[xvii] Inge Ader: Interview 18: Inge Ader, 04 Jun 2003, London. Audiovisual Material. Volume Number: 018. Author: Ader, Inge. Joint Author: Lewkowicz, Bea. Accessible at Wiener Library, London.

 [xviii] Elsbeth Juda: Breward, C. and Wilcox, C. Eds., The Ambassador Magazine (V&A Publishing, London, 2012).

 [xix] Lore Lisbeth Waller: Another Eye Exhibition catalogue, 2020.

 [xx] Anthony Crickmay: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp60256/anthony-crickmay

 [xxi] Edith Tudor Hart: Forbes, D., Editor, In the Shadow of Tyranny (Hatje Cantz, Ostfilden, Germany,2013). P.69

 [xxii] Grove, V. So Much To Tell (Penguin, 2010).

 [xxiii]  https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/bill-brandt-working-methods