Lotte Jacobi

Lotte Jacobi (17 August 1896 – 6 May 1990) was a leading German-American portrait photographer and photojournalist, known for her high-contrast black-and-white portrait photography, characterized by intimate, sometimes dramatic, sometimes idiosyncratic and often definitive humanist depictions of both ordinary people in the United States and Europe and some of the most important artists, thinkers and activists of the 20th century. Ruth Jacobi was her sister.

Work

Jacobi's photographic style stressed informality, and sought to delve deeper into the traits of her subjects than traditional portraiture. She made a point of photographing subjects in their own environments, and talking to them while she worked.

Jacobi is perhaps best known for her "portrait of Albert Einstein (Princeton, 1938), whom she photographed candidly, seated at his desk, dishevelled and dressed in a leather jacket, a work that was refused by Life magazine for its simplicity." Other personality-driven portraits include "Eleanor Roosevelt sitting back, gesturing, and obviously speaking in midsentence; Marc Chagall depicted as a jovial family man; Thomas Mann appearing as thoughtful as his work; and more candid, gentle portraits of Einstein." as well as joining her uncles, aunts and sister in the field. Jacobi also began producing films. She returned to Berlin in February 1933, a month after Hitler came to power. As persecution against Jews rose, the left-wing and Jewish-born Jacobi found her work praised by German officials for its "good examples of Aryan photography". The pair arrived in New York City in September 1935 and, within three weeks, In 1955, Jacobi left New York with her son and daughter-in-law, and moved to Deering, New Hampshire, a move that changed her life. There, she opened a new studio, where she both continued her own work and displayed work by other artists. She became interested in politics and was a fervent Democrat, representing New Hampshire at the Democratic National Convention in 1980. She traveled extensively and enjoyed new-found fame in the 1970s and 1980s. She bequeathed 47,000 negatives to the Lotte Jacobi Archives established at the University of New Hampshire.

Jacobi's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

Education Jacobi studied literature and art history at the from 1912 to 1917, and completed her formal artistic training at the Bavarian State Academy of Photography and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München from 1925 to 1927.

Public collections Her work is included in prestigious museum collections world-wide, including the MOMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Israel Museum, Berlinische Galerie, and the National Gallery of Art.

Personal life The eldest of three children, born to parents Maria and Sigismund, Jacobi and her sister Ruth were fourth-generation photographers. ("A brother Alexander died at age 20." Jacobi went on to adopt it as her professional name. In 1916, she married Fritz Honig, and a year later she gave birth to a son, John. The marriage did not last, and in 1924 they divorced. She then relocated to Berlin in 1925. In 1935, she fled Nazi Germany for New York City where she would remain for the next 20 years. In 1940, she married Erich Reiss, a distinguished German book publisher and writer, a marriage that lasted until his death in 1951. In 1955, she relocated to New Hampshire where she remained until her death in 1990.