Lotte Jacobi (1896 – 1990)

Lotte Jacobi was born in Thorn, WestPrussia (then Germany), in 1896 and took her first photograph with a pinhole camera at the age of twelve. She studied literature and art history at the Academy of Posen before continuing the tradition established by her photographer father, grandfather and great-grandfather who had studied with Daguerre. She attended the Bavarian State Academy of Photography and the University of Munich before she managed her father`s studio in Berlin from 1927 to 1935. She then did portraits and established herself as a leading photographer of major cultural personalities.

She had to flee the Nazis to New York where she opened her own studio until 1955. The character of her work then changed in the 1950s and became more abstract. Her `photogenics` of this time were cameraless photographs, in which pieces of glass or twisted cellophane were used to interupt the beams of a light above the photographic paper.

She moved to New Hampshire in 1963 where she stayed until passing away in 1990.