Palestine/Israel in View

Forgotten Works: Ten german-jewish female photographers and their visual perception of Palestine/Israel.

Women photographers such as Alice Hausdorff, Ellen Auerbach, Liselotte Grschebina, Lou Landauer Marli Shamir, and Ricarda Schwerin and others were part of the avant-garde currents of the Weimar Republic and played a significant role in shaping it. Under the threat of the Nazi regime, they left Germany and emigrated to Palestine/Israel, where they managed to continue their photographic work under extremely deprived circumstances. The photographs illustrate forgotten and unknown female perspectives on the Weimar Republic, experiences of flight and exile during the Nazi era, and the nation-building process in Palestine and the early state of Israel.
But they also show an art and cultural transfer of avant-garde photography that the women photographers brought with them to Palestine/Israel and translated into new conditions there. For reasons of gender and exile, the significant artistic lives and works of these women photographers have been largely forgotten. Anna Sophia Messner has uncovered the estates, some of which have been lost, in terms of material aesthetics and history, raising new research questions and impulses, particularly with regard to the relevance of previously marginalized voices.

Anna Sophia Messner, born 1981, is a research assistant at the Institute of Art History at LMU Munich in the field of Jewish art and cultural history. She studied Art History and Jewish History and Culture in Munich and Paris, was a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute in Florence -, and completed Language Studies and research stays in Israel. In 2020, she received her doctorate from LMU Munich.