Elsbeth Juda

Elsbeth Ruth Juda (née Goldstein) (2 May 1911 – 5 July 2014), known professionally as Jay, was a British photographer most notable for her pioneering fashion photography and work as Associate Editor and Photographer for The Ambassador magazine between 1940 and 1965.

Early life and Education Juda was born in Darmstadt, Germany on 2 May 1911 to Margarete Neumann (1885–1954) and Julius Joel Goldstein (1873–1929), a philosopher. As a young woman, she moved to Paris, where she found work as secretary to a banker.

In 1931, Elsbeth married her childhood love, Hans Peter Juda (1904–1975), and they went to live in Berlin where he was a financial editor at the Berliner Tageblatt. In 1933, they fled Nazi Germany for London with nothing but two suitcases and a violin. However, after 1940 when Amsterdam came under control of the Germany army, the magazine proved too difficult to continue. It was published monthly in four languages (English, German, French and Portuguese), had subscribers in over ninety countries, and a circulation of 23,000 copies. The critic Robert Melville described Ambassador as "the most daring and enterprising trade journal ever conceived...no other magazine...has so consistently and brilliantly demonstrated the relevance of works of art to the problems of industrial design."

Juda's shoots for The Ambassador combined elements of fashion, modernism and trade. Her series of photos of the famed British model Barbara Goalen modelling Scottish textiles among the heavy machinery of working textile factory are especially representative of her unique visual aesthetics.

Painting and collage

Following the death of her husband in 1975, Juda returned to her early interest in painting, and in the late 1980s took a small studio in Fulham Road, London where she painted and evolved her work in collage. She produced several series of collage works based on her love of the paintings of Henri Matisse and around her fascination with the self-portraits of Rembrandt. An exhibition of her collage works, "Elsbeth Juda: 90 x Rembrandt" was held at England & Co gallery, London in 1994, with the catalogue featuring an introduction by Bryan Robertson.

Photography

Juda was a portraitist who photographed many British artists, models and other personalities of the 1950s and 60s. These included artists Henry Moore, John Piper, Joe Tilson, William Scott, Graham Sutherland, Kenneth Armitage, Lynn Chadwick, Osbert Lancaster, and Peter Blake. Models she photographed included Barbara Goalen, Fiona Campbell-Walter, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Shelagh Wilson and Marla Scarafia. Further, famous personalities of the time she photographed included Margot Fonteyn, Richard Burton, Anthony Armstrong-Jones, and Peter Ustinov; and friends like Norman Parkinson, Mark Boxer, and Madge Garland were all affectionately portrayed.

Juda photographed and documented Graham Sutherland's portrait of Winston Churchill, which was commissioned in 1954 by the past and present members of the House of Lords and the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in celebration of Churchill's eightieth birthday. Sutherland's resulting controversial portrait became infamous because Churchill openly hated it and stated that it "makes me look half-witted." Churchill was unwell at the time; he drank heavily at lunchtimes, and in the previous year he had suffered a stroke and, although he had recovered, the effects of age and illness were increasingly apparent. According to Juda, during the session Graham Sutherland would say, 'A little more of the old lion, sir' and he'd sit up and then flop after a minute.

In 1980 Juda presented the National Portrait Gallery a collection of bromide prints, negatives, contact sheets, and news cuttings relating to her photographs of Winston Churchill and Graham Sutherland.

In 2009, the gallery L’Equipement des Arts held an exhibition of Elsbeth Juda's Photographs from 1940 to 1965, the first major exhibition of her photographic work. This followed an extensive research project on The Ambassador Archive at the V&A Museum which led to negatives being loaned by the V&A and by the National Portrait Gallery to produce prints of 140 historic images by Juda, many of which had never been seen or exhibited before. These included a unique record of Graham Sutherland's ill-fated portrait of Winston Churchill commissioned by the House of Commons to celebrate his 80th birthday. The exhibition also showed, for the first time, a series of photographs which illustrate Elsbeth Juda's unprecedented access to Henry Moore and his studio as he worked on the sculpture King and Queen. The exhibition also featured dramatic photographs of a model draped in only fabric and photographed on the roof of Lancashire mill to promote the British textile industry.