Jewish Museum Berlin shows "Ruth Jacobi: Photographs"

Sunday, 18 January 2009 21:54

 

Berlin - Jacobi and Photography: When the name Jacobi is mentioned in the same sentence as photography, the reference is generally to Lotte Jacobi, the renowned Jewish photographer. The works of her younger sister Ruth, in contrast, are hardly known at all. Her works, comprising portraits, still lifes, reportage and travel photographs as well as botanical and experimental photography from the 1920s and 30s  at the Jewish Museum Berlin in "Ruth Jacobi. Photographs," the first extensive exhibition of her work. On view through 8 February, 2009.

The Exhibition "Ruth Jacobi. Photographs"Portraits, still lifes, reportage and travel photographs as well as botanical and experimental photography: Ruth Jacobi, born in Posen in 1899, left a diverse and hitherto unseen collection. 400 prints and a larger number of negatives from her bequest were given to the Jewish Museum Berlin archive in 2005. Although this is only a fraction of the photographs she took, her diverse range of subjects is represented. A selection of around 70 photographs will now be shown in the exhibition "Ruth Jacobi. Photographs."

The majority of the exhibited photographs were taken in the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, a time when photography was experiencing a revival of interest. Though Ruth Jacobi was not a prominent figure in the modern age of photography, the "new sight" is reflected in her pictures: Many of her portraits are taken at close range. In close-ups such as a detail of a cactus, the original subject moves into the background, thus creating an individual structure - a pattern which itself becomes the subject.

Born into a family in the business of photography for three generations, Ruth Jacobi received her photographic training from 1920-22 at the Lette Verein's Photographic Academy, founded in Berlin in 1890. Following five years employment at the Berlin family studio, she went to the USA in 1928. An impressive photographic series from this period shows the streets and markets of the Lower East Side, where poor Jewish street traders displayed their wares. At the end of 1930s, Ruth Jacobi returned to Berlin where she ran the Jacobi Studio with her sister Lotte in the Joachimsthalerstraße and from 1933 in Kurfürstendamm. While her sister Lotte focused on portraits, Ruth Jacobi seems to have been primarily responsible for fashion and object photography.

On the day of the boycott in April 1933, the Jacobi Atelier was stormed by the Nazis and the publishing of photographs by the press forbidden. The atelier's archive, which contained around 40,000 photographs, was lost in the Second World War. Ruth Jacobi emigrated to the USA in 1935 and ran a photographic studio with her sister Lotte in New York for a year, after which she opened her own studio. However, she had withdrawn from professional photography for the most part by 1940. Only after her husband's death in 1972 did the talented and yet during her lifetime unknown Ruth Jacobi turn her attention back to photography again. Today, 13 years after her death, her work is a late and for that all the more wondrous discovery.

An exhibition book is available containing Ruth Jacobi's memoirs alongside the photographs:
"Ruth Jacobi. Fotografien" (Ruth Jacobi. Photographs) - Edited by Aubrey Pomerance
Nicolaische Publishing House - Bound, 120 pages, 60 illustrations - ISBN 10: 3-89479-509-3
ISBN 13: 978-3-89479-509-2 - Price: 24.95 euros, (press price: 7 euros) - First edition: November 2008

Visit The Jewish Museum Berlin at : http://www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de/site/EN/homepage.php?meta=TRUE

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