Margaret Michaelis-Sachs

Margaret (Margarethe) Michaelis-Sachs (née Gross, 6 April 1902 – 10 October 1985) was an Austrian-Australian photographer of Polish-Jewish origin. In addition to her many portraits, her scenes of the Spanish Civil War in Barcelona, Spain, and other places and her images of the Jewish quarter in Kraków in the 1930s are of lasting historical interest.

Early life

Born in Dzieditz near Bielsko in southern Poland (then Austria-Hungary) on 6 April 1902, she was the daughter of Heinrich Gross, a well-to-do Jewish doctor. She studied photography at Vienna's Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt from 1918 to 1921.

Career In 1922, still in Vienna, she first worked for a period at the Studio d'Ora before spending a number of years at the Atelier für Porträt Photographie. She went on to work for Binder Photographie in Berlin and Fotostyle in Prague, and finally returned to Berlin in 1929 to work intermittently for a variety of studios during the hard times of the Depression.

In October 1933, she married Rudolf Michaelis who, as an anarcho-syndicalist, was almost immediately arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis. In December 1933, after Rudolf's release, the couple moved to Spain but they separated shortly afterwards. In Barcelona, Michaelis opened her own studio, Foto-elis. Collaborating with a group of architects, she produced documentary images of progressive architecture which were published in Catalan journals such as D'Ací i d'Allà and, after the start of the civil war, Nova Ibèria.

After returning to Poland in 1937, she obtained a German passport, went to London and, in September 1939, emigrated to Australia, first working as a house maid in Sydney. In 1940, she opened her "Photo-studio", becoming one of the few women photographers in Sydney. She specialized in portraits, especially of Europeans, Jews and people in the arts, many published in the journals Australia and Australian Photography. On the occasion of the Madrid exhibition, Rubio was quoted:

Exhibitions

1987: Retrospective, National Gallery of Australia 1998: Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno Centre Julio González, Valencia 2005: Retrospective, National Gallery of Australia