Lotte Herrlich

Lotte Herrlich (1883–1956) was a German photographer. She is regarded as the most important female photographer of the German naturism. This mainly was during the 1920s, in which the Freikörperkultur (Free Body Culture) was popular within Germany, before the Nazi Party assumed power (1930s), promptly prohibiting it.

Life

Lotte Herrlich was born as Olga Clara Katharina Herrlich, at Chemnitz, in 1883. She spent most of her life in Hamburg.

Lotte Herrlich began in photography after her son Rolf was born. She started doing family photographs and child portraits for a pastime. Then she continued her self-taught art with portraits and landscapes, nevertheless Lotte found herself particularly engrossed through the years, for portraying the physical development of her son with a collection of naturist photographs. Lotte Herrlich's intense interest of naturistic photography so awoke.

Such work was discovered by the Naturistenzeitschrift Die Schönheit (The Beauty, nudist magazine), and it then published Lotte Herrlich's ensuing production: a thousand photographs of children, nine hundred of poses, and still some photographs of landscapes too.

Lotte Herrlich shot her naturist and conventional studio photographs mostly within two improvised rooms inside her small home of Hamburg, exploiting lighting and simple furniture, and so portraying the nude bodies, which were mostly of female models. The poses always were calm, ordinary-world scenes, whereas the models seemed resting, instead of posing. Karl Toepfer wrote: "In her interior shots, Herrlich avoided altogether the secretive atmosphere of the studio, the pose, and the cosmetic artifice, with the result that the naked body appeared as an extension of nature into the timeless bourgeois home."