Historical Women’s Portraits

Until 28 March, 2016, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany, puts art photography from 1900 on display that shows rather other-worldly beings than female faces.

Madonna, mother, fairy, luminous figure with halo, princess with jewel-studded coronet – these are a few of the roles turn-of-the-century photographers assigned to women of their time. Under the heading “portrait”, the international art photography movement assembled images completely different from those made by studio photographers for their paying customers. The art photographers aspired neither to produce real studies nor to show contemporary women in the changing world of industrialization. Instead, in their works they envisioned spherical figures whom they staged as other-worldly beings.

The exhibition 'From Mary to Salome: The Photography Department in Context' features some thirty works by well-known photographers of Germany and beyond, dating from the period around 1900: James Craig Annan, Emma Boaz Barton and Julia Margaret Cameron (Great Britain), Adolphe de Meyer, Robert Demachy and Pierre Dubreuil (France), Minya Diez-Dührkoop, Rudolph Dührkoop and Hugo Erfurth (Germany), Atelier d'Ora (Austria) and Annie W. Brigman, Felix Benedict Herzog, Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence Hudson White (USA).

Accompanying program:
Thursday, 21 January 2016, 7 pm
Tour through the exhibition with the curators Dr. des. Esther Ruelfs und Sven Schumacher, Sammlung Fotografie und neue Medien.

Please find more information at MKG Hamburg