Emma Kirchner

Emma Kirchner (born Johanna Frederika Doris Emma Kirchner; 30 March 1830 – 10 February 1909) was a German photographer who lived and worked in the Netherlands. She was the first, and for over 30 years, the only professional woman photographer working in Delft and the surrounding area.

Early life, education and influences in Leipzig Johanna Frederika Doris Emma Kirchner was born in Leipzig on 30 March 1830, the eldest daughter of Johanna Frederika Fritzsche and Carl Pancras Kirchner, a tailor. Three years later, her sister Maria Amalia Louisa was born, but her father died just four months later. Her mother continued to run the family tailor's shop. In 1841 the family moved into a house at 7 Neukirchhof in the centre of Leipzig (destroyed in the Second World War, and now called Matthäikirchhof). Not far from there, her mother opened a new tailor's shop at 24 Große Fleischergasse. and of printed instructions for taking photographs using the daguerreotype being published in the city.

There was a photographic studio in the Große Fleischergasse, the street where Kirchner's mother ran her tailor's shop. Not far away at Burgstraße 8, Europe's first professional woman photographer, Bertha Wehnert-Beckmann, like Kirchner the daughter of a tailor, ran her photographic studio. Beckmann had previously worked in Dresden and travelled as a self employed photographer, opening her studio in 1843 with daguerreotypist Eduard Wehnert who she then married. By 1847 Wehnert-Beckmann was widowed and ran her Leipzig studio with employees. From 1849 to 1851 she worked in New York in her own successful photo studio on Broadway, then on her return to Leipzig, she bought a property in a good residential area and had a house with a studio built. Researchers assume that Emma Kirchner received her training as a photographer from Wehnert-Beckmann, but there is no definitive evidence for this. in Leipzig until she was effectively banned from the profession by the Lex Otto (the colloquial term for the twelfth paragraph of the press law of the Kingdom of Saxony of 14 March 1851, which prohibited women in Saxony from publishing or co-editing newspapers. The law was named after Otto-Peters and was introduced specifically for her case ). Otto-Peters lived permanently in Leipzig from 1860 and published the socially critical novel Neue Bahnen in 1864, The business cards for their studio show different house numbers and, for a short time, her residential address. Historian Petra Notenboom concluded from her research that this occurred through several periods of alterations to the studio.

In 1875 Kirchner entered into a new business partnership with Henri de Louw (full name Johannes Hendricus Jacobus de Louw), who married her daughter Doris in July of that year. She had employed him as an apprentice about three years earlier. From then on, the studio advertised vitreous enamel portraits and the enlarging of visiting cards. In 1876 the younger couple moved into their own flat and had their first child. After about a year of working together under the name Henri de Louw en Emma Kirchner, the business partners separated and de Louw opened his own photography studio at the Koornmarkt in Delft.

After retiring, Kirchner first moved to The Hague, where her daughter Doris's family now lived. After her daughter's divorce in 1901, she moved with her to Amsterdam. She spent the last years of her life with her daughter, living with the family of her granddaughter, who had married the Dutch composer Bernard Zweers.

Daguerreotypes and Photographs Portraits from all walks of life: ladies, gentlemen, children, families and business people. Photographs of working situations, especially of women