Photography => Portraits, Abstracts
Lotte Jacobi is an important figure in the history of photography, both in portraits and abstract images.
Lotte Jacobi was born in Thorn, Germany, in 1896. First, she aspired to be an actress, a farmer, or a beekeeper.
At the age of twelve she took her first photograph with a pinhole camera.
She then studied literature and art history at the Academy of Posen from 1912 to 1917 before continuing the tradition established by her photographer father, grandfather, and great-grandfather (who had studied with Daguerre), and attending the Bavarian State Academy of Photography and the University of Munich.
Jacobi managed her father’s studio in Berlin from 1927 until 1935. She fled the Nazis and opened her own studio in New York, which she maintained until 1955. After closing that studio, Jacobi moved to Deering, New Hampshire, where she maintained a studio and gallery for 7 years, starting in 1963. She co-founded the photography department at the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester in 1970.
Her Berlin portraits were stylistically influenced by both Alfred Stieglitz and Albert Renger-Patzsch, and illustrate the city’s vibrant cultural life.
When Jacobi left Germany, she had already established herself as a leading photographer of major cultural personalities. She built her reputation on the strength of her portraiture, but later in her career as her surroundings changed, so did the character of her work: in the 1950s, she began to make abstract images and landscapes. Her “photogenic” art pieces of the 1950s are cameraless photographs, in which pieces of glass or twisted cellophane were used to interrupt the beams from a flashlight positioned above a piece of photographic paper.
In a long and prestigious career, she captured images over an almost 80-year period, from 1908 to 1986, throughout various parts of the world including Berlin, the Soviet Union, New York City, and the state of New Hampshire. She is famous for her black and white theater and dance images and portraits of prominent 20th century figures.
Lotte Jacobi died in 1990 at the age of 93 in New Hampshire.
Agreed, Jacobi is not a world-class scientist (the topic of this list), but her use of and influence on photography is remarkable