A FACE IN THE CROWD

 7 portraits found at Spitalfields Market

“I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.”

Frida Kahlo

At London’s Spitalfields Markets on a Thursday (which may not be heaven for photo collectors but is close enough) one of the stall operators was busy cutting up proof sheets of portraits. Each sheet had about fifty photographs, each of these three by three centimetres, and wisely or otherwise she had decided that selling the photos individually rather than the sheet was more profitable. You’d think someone would snap up a sheet of fifty portraits of the same person, each from a different angle or with a different expression, but then just one photo is a find in itself. These probably came from the same studio and one is dated July 1943. With the exception of the one above, the subjects have written a message on the back to someone else.

 

 To dear Pat, wishing you all the best Daphne.

Now, several weeks and a few thousand kilometres away from Spitalfields, I regret not buying the lot, but if I had a dollar for every time I held back from an impetuous buy … In any case, seven is a good number being just a little more than too few without being so many as to be monotonous. Pollsters use the term ‘snapshot’ to describe a sample that is too small to be statistically relevant but which might reveal a trend. Here we have a snapshot of a part of society that mattered a lot in 1943 – young middle class women who were too young to be married but wouldn’t be in a couple of years, when Adolf and his horde of storm-troopers had been vanquished and society was on the road to being put right again. As the old vicar might put it in his Sunday sermon; thousands may have died defending Britain but from the loins of these young lasses would spring forth England’s future. I believe that is exactly how vicars spoke back then.

 To Knock Knock with love from Jeanne.

‘Knock Knock’ is, I suspect, the nickname of a woman. At least, in a Muriel Spark short story Knock Knock would be a girl’s name, belonging to someone who either possessed a ‘dear’ sense of humour, meaning that she tried awfully hard but seldom raised so much as a snicker, or she was famed for her bad timing. We don’t need to know anything about Knock Knock’s milieu; her nickname tells us everything. She will marry a nice, professionally adequate, emotionally ineffective man. Jeanne won’t, but she might wish she had.

 To Patricia, in memory of many awkward moments in the back line and a few blissful moments of graduation, with much love from Sonia.

Well this tells us something we might have already guessed but needed evidence to confirm. These girls are graduating from high school, or as the English had it back then, Fifth Form. This idea of getting a block of photos printed that could then be distributed among school friends is a custom we have seen in Turkey and in France and it makes sense as lives are now about to diverge and in some cases plunge headfirst into the unknown. Others will have things mapped out, including marriage to that lad currently flying his Spitfire above the Channel in search of the Hun. The back line, if we are talking sports, is most likely hockey or netball. Awkward moments probably refers to goals let through, and perhaps it was fat, ungainly Patricia who took the (dis)credit for that.

 To one of the sacred-ites, love and best wishes, Nancy.

Sacred-ites tells us we are dealing with what the English confusingly refer to as a public school (meaning one that is ruthlessly exclusive) and it remains a rule that a public school with ‘sacred heart’ in its name is for girls because that is a distinctly feminine concept. We can’t be sure; perhaps there was a clique of young lasses known as the sacred-ites on account of their direct access to the headmistress in matters of class discipline, but I think Nancy was writing out farewell messages as fast as she could on account of her hurry to be rid of the place. Not for her a year in secretarial college followed by marriage to Captain Smithers-Jones with his one leg and his war pension. No. We think Nancy had been seeing an American G.I on the side and was already convinced that Oklahoma was everything London wasn’t.

 To dear old Pat, in memory of all those good old times and I hope some more in the future. Much love Audrey, July 1943

The idea of having these small portraits taken then distributing them among your classmates, even girls you could not have walked past without a shudder in the last five years, touching, not the least because it would be unthinkable today. Whatever the younger generation exchange today (I rather hope it is smallpox and they all die out soon) there is something very much symbolically permanent about the photograph. It says, ‘remember me always, but remember me as I was, not what I shall be’. Somehow we leave school and get thrown into life’s gnashing jaws without taking stock of that simple plea. Years later we read a story in the newspaper of some sad event and all we have is that fleeting memory of a face to give it substance. How much sometimes we’d like a photo, a physical reminder of someone we once knew, even if that was against our will.

 To Grandma, with all the very best in your dancing career, Joy Gelden.

The best is saved for last; a brief message laced with cruelty. Grandma? In my day there were only two reasons girls at a public school would call one of their own that and it had to do with either her outdated principles or a physical handicap. Perhaps Grandma refused when it came to having a fag behind the gardener’s shed but in my experience dancers are more than fond of that idea. And let’s not ignore the obvious, that ‘grandma’ and ‘dancing career’ shouldn’t go together without at least a little vinegar to bind them. The feeling is that Joy couldn’t care less about Grandma’s dancing and actually finds the idea of turning it into an earner more than preposterous. But this is wartime and things are changing. Let’s go forward ten years, to the Royal Albert Hall, and as Grandma returns for the third encore she bows and through the dense tobacco smoke catches a glimpse of a sweaty, bilious figure in the fourth row. “Is that Joy?” She thinks as she bows again. “Heard she married that MP who got done for young boys last month. Poor girl.”

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A FACE IN THE CROWD

THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD

Edwardian era fashion postcards 
“Fashion is made to become unfashionable.”

Coco Chanel

 I have been informed, politely and otherwise, that I am unqualified to discuss fashion. It is true that when the words ‘fashion’ and ‘photography’ appear next to one another a yawn needs stifling. It is the least interesting genre, one reason being that it is so pervasive. It is one thing to encounter fashion photography in the cosmetics department at the local pharmacy, another when it turns up in hardware stores, as though using this power drill will bestow some kind of glamour upon us. Also, the genre has run out of ideas. People speak of a golden age of fashion photography that lasted from 1920 to the 1950s, which was a long time ago now.

 

 This ‘golden age’ began with technological processes that made it possible to reproduce photographs to a high standard in magazines. Previously they had to rely on line drawings. It coincided with the rise of Parisian fashion houses such as Chanel, the diffusion of modernist principles in photography and suffrage for women, which shifted the balance of power so they were not just portrayed as elegant but having authority as well. But if we look to the years immediately before, we discover that the most important medium for transmitting the latest ideas about fashion was the common postcard.

 

 What made the postcard special was that it was cheap, intended to be sent, and also collected. Typical messages on the backs of these postcards from the first two decades of the twentieth century are: “What do you think of this?” (meaning the costume) or: “Here’s another for you”, meaning the recipient – inevitably a young woman - collected fashion postcards. With the popularity of postcards, studios were pumping them out so someone in Paris could send a postcard to someone in London, who got that season’s fashion tips hot off the press. If her mother was relying on Tatler for fashion advice, she might have to wait weeks for what her daughter received in a few days.

 

Another advantage postcards had over magazines was that they could be hand-coloured. Fashion advice from the era places a lot of emphasis on colour; gowns and robes are not merely green but chartreuse; burgundy is in; vermilion is out. Japan had been a source of inspiration for European designers since at least the 1880s. Japan meant delicate, which itself meant pastel shades rather than bold colours. When Hermann Kiesel’s studio photographed this model, it most likely received specific instructions on what shades of ink to use. 

Despite the postcard publishers promoting fashion, labels are rare to non-existent on the postcards, suggesting that the designer didn’t matter. We know that in the 1910s the fashion house was still emerging as a distinct force but another explanation for the absence is that the outfits on postcards weren’t strictly haute couture but copies. Department stores in New York imported fashion items from Paris but they also copied the designs. If a broad-brimmed hat complete with ostrich feathers and silk bands direct from Paris cost too much for anyone but the wealthy, most middle class women could afford an accurate replica. Also, the market for the postcards belonged to young, unmarried women. We know that because on the back the cards are usually addressed to Miss or Mlle Someone. Actual haute couture was out of their reach financially, and also maturity-wise, since that was supposed to arrive with the debutante ball, or if they couldn’t afford that, marriage.

 

Which brings us to that borderline between fashion and erotica. The frontier has always been vaguely marked out, given that one is often an intrinsic element of the other, and there are postcards that make us wonder whether the real attraction was the fashion or the impertinence, but young women were supposed to have thresholds. They might have gone for the flapper look, with the cloche hat and the woollen outfit. Showing the suspenders however was perhaps too indecorous. The risk of sending a postcard like this to a friend is that the parents could find it, so casting her in their eyes as an immoral vixen. It isn’t the evidence of the suspenders that would have necessarily caused offence but the woman’s posture. In fashion, a woman’s expression could be sultry, provocative or downright lubricious but her physical pose was always supposed to be demure. 

 In 1931 Jeanne Jullia of France won the Miss Europe beauty contest. Some time later it was discovered that in the 1920s she had posed nude for Julian Mandel, the infamous and mysterious producer of erotic postcards. The revelations created a minor scandal but they were handled with more savoir-faire than they would be today. She was not stripped of her title, bundled off to rehab or made to grovel before the press, probably because a sullied past was nothing to get excited about in 1930s France; everybody had one. As with the designers, the women who appeared in these fashion postcards were unnamed but look at enough postcards and certain faces become familiar. Usually they were actresses or singers without the status to warrant a caption. Although some women worked as professional models the job was so poorly paid it was something they’d do on the side. Like acting, it was still a disreputable occupation for a woman but at least in the theatre she could redeem herself by becoming a star. 

 This card was sent to Mlle Sarah Parent at 1197 St Catherine St Montreal on April 25 1907 and asks if she can still come to the theatre that evening. (Mail was commonly delivered three times a day back then, which is why you can find postcards mailed from Brighton to London arranging to meet that afternoon.) A Sarah Parent turns us in the Quebec records as born in 1893. If this is the same Sarah, she fits the profile. At fourteen she would be going to the theatre with friends and have an interest in fashion. Notice that the girl in the photo is only a few years older, about eighteen; in other words, a suitable role model. This was sent at the height of the fashion postcard era. That ended with the First World War. It wasn’t so much that the war created a break in the culture but that the customers grew up. Post war, Sarah Parent would be twenty five, possibly married and if she were still interested in fashion she would be turning to the magazines that were aimed at older women. Like the extravagant Edwardian hats, fashion postcards belonged to the past.

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THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD

WINGS OF DESIRE

Transgressive images from Weimar cinema

 "I’m sincere in my preference for men’s clothes. I do not wear them to be sensational. I think I am much more alluring in these clothes."

Marlene Dietrich

 Berlin in the Weimar years: a city rampant with leather wrapped, cross-dressing S&M fetishists, or not. Depending on whom you ask (or what you read), that image is either an invention or a conflation. There were bars like the Silhouette, where a customer could take a table and watch a parade of men in make-up and dresses and women in tuxedos, but reliable advice suggests most of the night spots were a lot tamer than that. Apparently we can thank films like The Night Porter and Cabaret for seizing on a rumour and treating it as fact. If the Nazis were perverts by definition, it was assumed that for night time amusements they’d prefer watching a couple of transvestites spanking each other rather than a blonde fraulein singing banal operetta, but when you think it through, the latter is darker, stranger and altogether more disturbing. One of the hallmarks of the Nazi leadership was an abject lack of imagination. These were people who dreamed of a world where everyone shared their passion for kitsch, which meant blonde girls in gingham singing folk songs, not sexual ambiguity. Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood’s original book on which Cabaret was based has no scenes set in a cabaret, but can we really blame Michael York and Dirk Bogarde for helping create the enduring image of Berlin C1930? Not entirely. Thanks to the Ross Verlag postcards we have thousands of surviving images that show the photo studios pushed the idea of a city where taboos were broken as a daily habit. Yet, coming from the cinema world, they were images of what the world could be, not what it was. Lya de Putti’s attire may have looked fabulous but it was impractical, and it was easier to imagine a world where women strolled along the Kurfürstendamm in sheer, glistening black rather than live in one where they actually did. After all, for a lot of ordinary citizens struggling with hyperinflation and massive unemployment, to dress like Ms Putti does in this photo was like waving a red flag at a National Socialist rally. The photograph is by M. I. Boris, aka the Bulgarian Boris Majdrakoff, who arrived in New York in the 1920s with a past respectable thriller writers would have dismissed as too unlikely. 

 

 Look at contemporary fashion images of women wearing suits and ties and we are meant to think of them as daring experiments in gender reversal, but so many of the Ross postcards show women wearing men’s clothing, or a close approximation, that we realize they were a trend back in 1920s and ‘30s Berlin. What makes us think they are about playing a game rather than making a statement is that so many of the actresses portrayed did not have reputations for challenging convention. From what we know of Carola Tölle, she played solid roles in films that are largely forgotten because there is no compelling reason to remember them. Her private life can’t be accounted for but it appears scandal free.

 

 Henny Porten’s fame and reputation have endured, for her roles as a gentle or long suffering earth mother type. Comparing the photo of her with that of Ms Tölle, we begin to see a pattern, or rather, a style. Only a decade earlier the notion of a woman wearing a suit and tie would have still caused a stir. In 1919 however, German women won the right to vote.  What had changed had less to do with Weimar Berlin’s free thinking than fashion designers’ understanding of how to accommodate radical into chic. Ms Porten’s sleeveless waistcoat has a decidedly feminine cut. She is not wearing a business suit. In the 1970s Diane Keaton revived the suited look in Annie Hall. If it didn’t make the jump to the pages of Vogue that was because it was too idiosyncratic: it was one thing to look like Diane Keaton, another to look like Annie Hall. And maybe the crusty old editors at the magazines took one glance, recalled their youth in Vienna wearing Papa’s silk ties and thought it had all been done before.

 

 Having never seen Marcella Albani in a film, commenting on her strengths as an actress is pointless, but in every other photograph of her in the collection she is portrayed as the embodiment of graceful elegance; a woman with a preference for haut couture and intelligent conversation. That doesn’t mean she lacked a sense of humour. When she fronted up to the studio on this particular day, she might well have been bored with the idea of yet another soft focus study suggesting she had just emanated from the mists. Perhaps Herr Binder was bored too and together they concocted an image the very opposite of what was expected. She was an actress; it was her job to be out of character. 

 

 Russian born Hella Moja dressed as a baroque era noble (or Mozart) looks to be having the last word on androgyny here, and in a way she is. We know from photographs by Walery and Reutlinger that the Ancien Regime look was popular around the Parisian music halls a generation before Karl Schenker took this portrait. So too were the matador, the Gypsy and even the blacksmith. They were too exaggerated to be subversive, more like fancy dress, and never began with the premise that other women might want to dress that way in the street. Also, it was always more acceptable for women to dress as men than the other way around. How many of the leading male stars were willing to don corsets and bustles?

 

 Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays famously turned up in the U.S and turned women on to smoking. He took his lead from home, where the habit was already associated with modern sophistication, added a bit of volume and general crassness and earned the undying gratitude of his employers. A lot of the Ross postcards show women smoking; by the mid 1920s a cigarette in the hand was a sign of elegance, of adulthood, but not necessarily of rebellion. Ms Haake’s forte was light comedies and socially concerned dramas and she’d go on to a long career, appearing in films into the 1980s. If the idea of a woman smoking was as scandalous in Germany as it was in America, she’d be one who’d put hers out before the photographer was ready with the camera.

  Not so Fern Andra, the great, unsung heroine of early cinema. American born but European by preference, she promoted herself as a woman who liked a cigarette and a stiff drink and would be disappointed by any man who did not offer her both. In reality she was an intensely serious worker who understood the dangerous gulf between public image and private life. She paid a price, but not for smoking or dressing in men’s clothing or any of the standard contraventions. As actor, director, producer and even photographer, she controlled her image so closely that when it began to fade no one was on hand to help her revive it.

 

 Which brings us to that most infamous figure of the early screen, the vamp. Her modern history began with the nineteenth century music halls, she came of age with silent film and died with its passing. It was difficult to be a real vamp in the 1930s. The Hays Code in Hollywood was very much opposed to any young woman who thought a man’s marriage was a speed hump not a stop sign. According to the new rules she had to pay for her crimes, which was an obligation no genuine vamp ever considered. The Nazis weren’t keen on her either. For all the bondage and S&M imagery bestowed upon them, publicly their ideal woman was blonde, virtuous and enthusiastic about the outdoor life. She could suffer but never inflict pain herself. The vamp was dark, saturnine and came alive when the sun went down, like Valerie Boothby in this image from Iris cards. Despite her very English name, Ms Boothby was German. Her career was short but included such titles as Girls on the Cross (1929), Adam and Eve (1928) Inherited Passions (1929) and Marriage in Name Only (1930); all which suggest some poor fool learns a lesson about love the hard way. 

  The vamp and the femme fatale were subtly different creatures; though the man who fell victim to either was seldom astute enough to know that. Both depended on exploiting male vulnerabilities but where the first was essentially amoral the second had principles and objectives. Sometimes she was looking for a way out and figured the man would lead her to it, and sometimes she was genuinely in love with him. If the last scene saw the vamp heading down the street with a man in her arm, you knew they were going back to her lair. If it was the femme fatale on the other hand, she may well have been persuaded that the path to true happiness lay in marriage, children and a home in the suburbs. Lissi Arna is one of the many German actresses of the silent screen forgotten now by all but the most devoted fans of the era, yet throughout the 1920s she was one of Weimar cinema’s most popular stars. Her reputation today, such as it is, rests on several films where she played the prostitute (hard hitting exposé) or the seductress (comedy, melodrama) but as it transpires she made more of the routine romances that were the bread and butter of the film business. The Kiesel Studio was located at Kurfürstendamm 11, meaning the address was fashionable but real information beyond that is hard to find. Alongside the celebrity portraits are many more showing children with oversized Easter eggs, or (that other inexplicably popular genre) dressed as their parents. What we see here is one of those minor shifts in the way women were portrayed that don’t raise the number of eyebrows today that they should. There is nothing vulnerable in Ms Arna’s expression. She knows what she wants and how to get it. 

  The secret had less to do with women discovering an independent spirit than technicians realizing the power of lighting. Photographers were learning that a shift in angle to throw a shadow could do more than animate a portrait. It could transform Elizza La Porta, generally sensible star of such morally didactic films as The Right of the Unborn and The Vice of Humanity (abortion and drugs respectively) into a siren of the night. Silent Hollywood gave the vamp fame and notoriety but in Los Angeles she was a European construction. Think of the number of famous Hollywood mantraps from the silent era, how many have ‘European’ names, and what their actual names were: Theda Bara (Theodora Goodman), Dita Naldi (Mary Dooley), Olga Petrova (Muriel Harding). She was by definition exotic because part of the danger of becoming involved with her lay in being unable to penetrate her closed, enigmatic mind. In Germany, America was a strange, distant land (witness the popularity of Karl May’s Native American novels), but so too were places just beyond its borders. The Balkans, home of the vampire, Oriental Turkey and the Arab lands, the Russian steppes; they were all breeding grounds for women who could crush a man’s soul with as much thought and effort as it took to flick a cigarette into the gutter. Romanian born Elizza La Porta may not have played the seductress on screen but she knew how to for the Manasse studio. Operated by Olga Solarics and Adorjan von Wlassics, it specialized in glamour photography and in surreal, modernist erotica. After years of relative neglect, the erotica was rediscovered and in the process became representative of decadent Berlin. The studio was equally adept at portraying actresses as sweet and wholesome as a strudel. But any fool with a camera can do that.

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WINGS OF DESIRE

SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS

 Cartes de visite from gold rush era Melbourne

“A portrait is not made in the camera but on either side of it.”

Edward Steichen

 

Here’s a coincidence of absolutely no historical importance. In 1835 William Fox Talbot made his first successful paper negatives, marking for some the birth of the invention of photography (purists prefer to look back a couple of decades earlier). The same year but on the other side of the world, John Batman, a grazier from Sydney via Van Diemen’s Land, had raised interest among investors for a settlement at Port Philip Bay on Australia’s south coast, making the case that it was excellent country for sheep. He wasn’t the only one with an eye on the land. Purists also argue that the real credit for the foundation of the settlement that became Melbourne should go to John Fawker. All Batman wanted was enough land and a good port to make a sheep industry viable. Fawker was the one who imagined a city. Without him Melbourne might have remained a big farm, called Batville, which is of course an excellent name for a state capital. Not a lot happened, certainly not much worth photographing, until 1850, when gold was discovered in the nearby foothills. Within a year the population had quadrupled, from approximately 10 000 to 50 000 and it kept growing. By 1854 the local newspapers were calling Melbourne the cultural capital of the British Empire. Quite a few in London were inclined to agree. As a new city fuelled by new money it sparkled next to London, which was old, polluted and generally thought to be hopelessly riddled with crime.  

Naturally, the gold rush city needed a few photographic studios. The best known of the portrait photographers was Perez Batchelder, subject of a post a couple of years back, but his story is worth recapping. Operating out of San Francisco during the Californian gold rush, when news of the Victorian gold discoveries broke he packed up, sold off and boarded a ship. The ‘flying studio’ that Eadweard Muybridge made famous in the 1860s may have been bought off Batchelder. Perez’s brothers followed him and Batchelder’s, at 41Collins St, became what today we’d call a name brand.

One of the (few) interesting details about the studios in gold rush Melbourne has to do with the connections that emerge. Actually, this is true of studios around the world. People start working for one, break away to start their own, employ someone else, who sets up their business a couple of years later and before long there is a web of relationships spread across town based on commercial photography. Originally employed by Batchelder’s as a miniature painter, John Botterill was one of the driving forces in creating an official Melbourne arts society. By the late 1850s he had a solid reputation as a commercial photographer and a society painter. This is a statement that requires some elucidation. To be a society artist in Melbourne in the gold rush era meant acknowledging that no matter how many claimed it was the most exciting place to be right now, the real centres of the art world, London and Paris, were on the other side of the planet. One heard of new ideas in art months after Parisians had forgotten them. Cartes de visite from the Botterill studio are fairly common. Unfortunately, the work he probably wanted to be remembered for, his landscapes and society portraits, are not. The stamp on the reverse of the first image, from the Batchelder Studio, lists Botterill as one of the proprietors.

 

Most Australians have not heard of Charles Nettleton, though they probably know his portrait of Ned Kelly, taken the day before the outlaw/national hero was hanged. Nettleton began his photographic career working for Townsend Duryea, who like Batchelder arrived from America at the height of the rush, realized what a drag digging for gold was and promptly made his fortune in photography. Duryea is one of those people whose personal contribution to culture is not as impressive as the debt a long line of artists owe to him. He could plausibly claim that one of the leading art schools in the world, the Art Institute of Chicago, would not exist today had not one of its founders, Henry Spread, had his start in Duryea's Melbourne studio. Nettleton then belongs in a long line of grateful acolytes, but that is not to belittle him. Unlike Botterill, who it seems had standards when it came to what he would photograph, Nettleton covered the whole waterfront, meaning he was often the only photographer available to record important events, such as the prelude to Kelly’s execution.  

Photo-historians spend their lives chasing down information on obscure commercial photographers, all the while knowing that what attracted them in the first place wasn’t the person behind the camera but the people in front of it.  This woman is identified on the back of the carte as “Christina Elizabeth Smith, wife of William Smith and daughter of J. McPherson”. Searching genealogical records for the surname Smith is too tedious to bear thinking about, made harder because, during the gold rush, Melbourne was a city of immigrants. Her family could have arrived from Tasmania, Scotland, the USA, Canada, South Africa or even India. Suffice to say, a search for her records requires a professional commitment, but the really interesting thing about Christina Elizabeth is that she looks so typical. The ringlets in her hair and lace collar tell us at once she is a woman of the 1860s. We’d know the look at once if the photo had been taken in Chicago or Edinburgh. 

But there was something special about Melbourne. Up until the 19^th century most cities in the world had long histories; if they possessed something as dubious as a personality it had been created over centuries. Like San Francisco, Melbourne’s birth as a city came about through exceptional events. By 1860s it had the appearance of having arrived fully formed. When people called it the cultural capital of the Empire, they were also saying it was more British than any actual British city. That idea persists. People used to compare Sydney and Melbourne by saying the first was hedonistic and the second reserved, or prudish (or Victorian). Maybe that had nothing to do with any supposedly definable character but that it looked like a British city ought to with a new coat of paint; like London without the mistakes.

Yet if Melbourne was politically part of the British Empire, culturally it was one of the new international cities, so full of Irish, Chinese, Russians, French. Italians, Swedes, Dutch and Americans that it was normal to assume your neighbour did not speak your language. Just like San Francisco, as soon as people disembarked from their ship they reinvented themselves and assumed new names and life histories. These portraits might look like they could have been taken anywhere, but being Melbourne C1860 we have to assume that nothing is what it seems.

 Anybody searching through boxes and albums of Australian cartes de visite will quickly realize that most of the early one come from Melbourne. It is a sign of the city's prosperity and of its population boom. Reports from Sydney at the time describe how the city suddenly emptied of people. Most of the cartes come from the Batchelder, the Botterill and Nettleton studios. Someone mad enough could attempt to track down all the surviving examples. There are probably tens of thousands out there; enough to give us a comprehensive visual record of the city's population. It sounds like an admirable project and ought to be encouraged.

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SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS

IDENTITY ISSUES

5 Portraits of European film stars and their strange stories.

“A girl should be two things: who and what she wants.” 

Coco Chanel

The idea of the silent film star rescued from obscurity has been played out often since the arrival of sound in cinema, when hundreds of actors discovered they were no longer wanted and sent off to seek their fortunes elsewhere. It’s the motif in Sunset Boulevard, of Paul Auster’s Book of Illusions and I recall reading an Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators mystery with a reclusive genius who’d been wronged by the studios, though that was years ago. The point to all these stories is that the actors use their seclusion as a way to get attention. In the real world they tended to vanish, and that was that.

Vera Voronina’s whole life is a mystery. She existed – we have the photos to prove it – but who she really was and what happened to her are unknown. All the records on her, such as they are, say she was born in Russia in 1905, though the date always has a question mark after it. Having acted in three films in Germany, she arrived in Hollywood in 1926, the publicity describing how she had escaped the Bolsheviks by the skin of her teeth. Naturally there were references to her noble birth. She made four films in the U.S and one in Britain. The best known of them, The Patriot, was directed by Ernst Lubitsch and had Emil Jannings in the lead, and like Voronina, it has vanished from sight. She left Hollywood, made four more films in Europe and that was the last heard of her.

What actually happened may not be that mysterious. As sound came in, foreign accents went out, even in Europe, and she could have retired, married, taken on her husband’s name and lived out her years in quiet domesticity. But tracking her down could be impossible. We don’t know that Vera Voronina was her real name, when she was born or even that she was Russian.

The photo incidentally is by Eugene Richee, one of Hollywood’s top portraitists in the 1920s and 30s. I thought I’d find a bit about him too but the one source who would know these things, John Kobal, admitted in his book, The Art of Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers 1925 - 1940, that Richee was a bit of an unknown to him. Two riddles for the price of one. 

In the early 1930s Hollywood realized that its public loved a certain type of foreign woman. She was blonde, sultry, mysterious, and Germanic. Everybody was out searching for the new Greta Garbo, even MGM, which had Garbo under contract. Samuel Goldwyn took the credit for discovering Sigrid Gurie. She was beautiful, blonde (or could be) and Norwegian. She never quite lived up to Goldwyn’s hopes but then she was cast in a string of ordinary films. The best known was Algiers (1938) in which she played someone called Inez. For all his boasting, it didn’t seem to occur to Goldwyn to cast Gurie as a Norwegian, or at least a Northern European. He was probably sitting at his desk in 1941 and grumbling over her failure to overtake Garbo when the scandal broke.

Gurie was born in working class Flatbush, Brooklyn. True, her parents were from Norway and they had moved back there when she was three. Her passport acknowledged her dual citizenship and she had spent longer in Norway than America, but that wouldn’t have satisfied Goldwyn. He promptly dumped her, muttering at how he’d been fleeced.

So: here is Sigrid Gurie in The Adventures of Marco Polo. She is playing Princess Kukachin, the daughter of Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan. MGM had no problem casting her as a Mongolian but refused to recognize she was Norwegian. Some people still think Samuel Goldwyn was a genius.

In the early 1920s aspiring actress Kathe Dorsch was engaged to World War 1 fighter ace and morphine addict Hermann Goering. She broke the engagement off, which sent Hermann into a tailspin. How could any woman spurn one of the only living heroes of the war?

Fifteen years later, Ms Dorsch was an acclaimed star of cinema, the stage and opera and Goering was the head of the Gestapo. He was also still her friend and would do anything she wanted. By now Jews could not marry non-Jews let alone leave Germany without a pass officially signed by Goering. The actual number of passes Goering signed for Dorsch isn’t known but the evidence suggests she frequently went to his office, got what she asked for and saw that many of her Jewish friends and acquaintances escaped to safety.

We could phrase that another way and speculate on how many Jewish people Goering knowingly arranged safe passage for except that it doesn’t exonerate him. If anything it shows what a fool he was and how easily Kathe Dorsch could manipulate him: not so much Schindler’s List as Hogan’s Heroes.

On May 18, 1945 U.S Army officers went to Leni Riefenstahl’s villa in Austria and arrested her, not to face criminal charges but rather to assist them with their investigations. Hitler had killed himself just over a fortnight earlier and Germany had surrendered on May 8. They wanted information in order to draw up a list of suspects and charges as quickly as possible. Riefenstahl was just one of hundreds who would be brought in for questioning and she was an obvious target as her friendship with Hitler had been well known since the international release of her films Olympia and Triumph of the Will in the mid-1930s.

The man in charge of the arrest team was Budd Schulberg, not yet known as a scriptwriter but well aware of Riefenstahl’s reputation as a director. He would later say that he had been given reels of footage and needed someone to help him identify people and events. In the car, Riefenstahl began to talk, of her own free will, or more accurately she began to complain. It wasn’t her fault. She’d done nothing wrong. She knew nothing of the Final Solution. She was not a criminal, only a film director. Back at headquarters she protested that had she said anything, Goebbels would have had her sent to the gas chamber. Schulberg pounced. If she knew nothing, how did she know about the gas chambers? The world's greatest female film-maker had just damned herself.

According to the caption on the back, this wire photo was taken by Associated Press photographer James Pringle at Riefenstahl’s villa as she was being arrested. Pringle’s World War 2 work is well known but look at this image. This isn’t a woman facing interrogation for one of the worst genocides in history. At this moment she still believes she is a glamorous star and an internationally famous film director: so does Pringle. 

In Viking lore a dead nobleman or woman or great warrior was placed on a longship, it was set alight and pushed out into the sea or the lake. Bear this in mind.

Like Sigrid Gurie, Danish born Gwili Andre arrived in Hollywood on the tails of Garbo and Dietrich having either been convinced or persuading herself that with the fashion for blonde Germanic or Nordic women she was a natural star. Her acting career was not spectacular; a handful of unremarkable films, but she did become reputedly the highest paid model in the U.S in the 1930s. It was as a model that she was photographed by Cecil Beaton, regarded then and today as one of the great fashion photographers. Gravures from the 1932 Beaton sessions – this is one – are relatively common, probably because they were cut from high quality mass circulation magazines.

To be a highly paid model in the era of Beaton, Steichen and Blumenfeld might strike some people as a dream come true but we only have snippets of information about Andre and none of the underlying causes behind what happened on the night in 1959 are ever considered.

On February 5, after years of reported alcoholism and frustration at her failed acting career, Andre gathered together a bundle of press clippings, photographs and other souvenirs from her career, piled them in the middle of her apartment and set them alight, then she lay down. It was reported that only after her body was pulled out of the apartment and identified did her neighbours have any idea of her past. The comparison to a Viking pyre isn’t crass; it appears that was exactly what she had in mind.

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Weimar photographic studios

 “People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment. This is our time.”

Barack Obama, 2008

Between 1924 and 1935 the Ross company (Ross Verlag) published over 40 000 real photo postcards of European, American and especially Weimar German actors. It’s surprising then that few film historians have done work on the company. The most thorough resource can be found on the Ross Cards website, but what’s missing is the commerce. The company was instrumental in promoting cinema stars throughout Europe and promotion wasn’t just about churning out thousands of postcards. It had as much to do with the cultivation of an image and the presentation of a look. It would be good to know how closely Ross worked with the studios in creating the image, who bought the cards and who collected them.

The relationship between Ross Verlag and the film studios isn’t clear. If Heinrich Ross bought a concession from the studios then the use of some of the same images by other German companies such as Photochemie doesn’t make sense. But it doesn’t either that the studios would pay him to publish postcards when they could do that themselves. If it operated according to regular publishing models, which vary between countries, the cards were produced and distributed then percentages were divided up. If that was the case then Ross had a close role in marketing and could presumably reject some images for being outside its interest.

What is also noticeable is that cards usually carried the film studio stamp (UFA, MGM) or the photographer’s but it is unusual to find both. That suggests that Ross Verlag bought images directly from the photographic studios. Most surveys of German photography from the era concentrate on the obvious names, ignoring some studios because it is assumed they were commercial and don’t represent the avant-garde of German modernism. Whether the studio principally worked in portraiture or advertising, familiarity with the new aesthetics was essential. The clients demanded it so every photographer knew the basic principles. What about the customers? How much was Ross working to demand and how much was he creating it?

A recent post was devoted to Alex Binder, the photographer most commonly associated with Ross Verlag but work from studios across Europe was used. The Ross cards website lists over fifty studios from Berlin alone. Assuming that most of the actors who sat for portraits were well known enough to pick the studio, that gives us an idea of how active the business was at the time.

 Below are examples from some of the Berlin studios most likely to be found on Ross cards.  A couple have long been recognized as being at the forefront of German modernism and some have recently become the focus of revived interest. Others remain neglected. 

Becker & Maass

One of the unjustly forgotten studios, it was probably established in the 1870s by Otto Becker with Maass joining as a partner some time in the 1890s. If Becker was still alive when these cards were produced he had been in the business for fifty years. More likely then a family member inherited the business or its success meant that new owners kept the name.

The Becker & Maass name appears on Sterne cards, the precursor to Ross, and early Ross Verlag cards, C1925 but not in the 1930s. It has one of the most distinctive styles. Strongly influenced by the soft focus painterly style of Pictorialism, Becker & Maass avoided the sweet, wholesome look some film studios preferred. Ross cards often hinted at eroticism while very, very rarely being explicit but Becker & Maass suggested something even more troublesome; the independent, self-possessed woman.

Emil Otto Hoppé (1878-1972)

Hoppé was the most famous photographer whose work appeared on Ross cards, as well known in the 1930s as he is today as a leading figure in German modernism. The British also lay claim to him as he lived and worked in London throughout the 1920s and ‘30s but for my money the most interesting book of his work is devoted to his Australian photographs taken in 1930. He travelled across the country, from Tasmania to the Northern Territory and Queensland, the south-west forests to the central desert at a time when these regions were only barely connected to one another. The Australian photographers he met, like Harold Cazneaux, were still excited by ideas that had become outdated a generation earlier. His celebrity portraits however are rarely exceptional. You could argue the difference between this portrait of Lucy Doraine and one Alex Binder might have taken but the distinction is fine. It is clear however that whoever took it was astutely professional.

Angelo Photos

Pál Funk (1894-1974) is better known today in his native Hungary than outside of it though in the 1930s he was recognized as one of the most prominent studio photographers throughout Europe. His connections through work with Hoppé, Leopold Reutlinger and Rudolph Dührkoop and as a cinematographer for Michael Curtiz are impressive as is the list of awards bestowed on him in his later years. These days it is his highly stylized Pictorialist nudes that are most sought after. You can see why in this study of Vilma Banky. Few studio photographers really understood that artificial lighting was meant to evoke rather than expose. Funk did.

 Frieda Riess (1890 - C1955)

It’s surprising how many rediscovered photographers weren’t lost at all. Everything; photographs, documents, biographical information is there, waiting for someone to eventually give it some attention. There has been a revival of interest in Reiss lately, in Germany at least, with a biography and a major exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie. When you consider her sitters included Einstein, Mussolini, Josephine Baker and Jack Dempsey, her social connections extended through Berlin’s art world and she worked as the stills photographer on Fritz Lang’s films, you could wonder why she doesn’t rate a mention in histories of German photography until recently. Part of that was through her design. Around 1930 she married the French ambassador, Pierre de Margiere, and moved to Paris, retreating from photography and Berlin society.  Note the abstract design on the backdrop in this portrait of dancer and actress Grit Hegesa. There are several portraits of dancers Reiss took against such backdrops but it is hard to say whether they were part of a series or if she just liked the effect.

Karl Schenker (C1880-C1952)

Around 1930, Schenker took a series of fashion portraits of store mannequins carefully painted and arranged so that at first glance it is easy to mistake them as real women. Schenker is another who apparently disappeared from view. His work never appears in the surveys of German photography despite adjectives such as ‘famous’ and ‘highly regarded’ occurring before his name. Like a lot of the photographers here, his best known works today are his Pictorialist nudes. Here’s the problem. Having been away from the spotlight for so long, you might think his return would excite more interest: who was this photographer who took these extraordinary nudes? Unfortunately for Schenker the world is awash with Pictorialist nudes and if he was something of a radical experimentalist in 1913 he no longer is. 

Atelier Manassé

Polish couple Adorján von Wlássics (1893 - 1946) and Olga Spolarics (1896 - 1969) began the Manassé studio in Vienna during the 1920s and relocated to Berlin in the late 1930s. Maybe they tired of Pictorialist nudes early on because although the erotica is their best known work it is highly surreal; women in birdcages, crawling out of snail shells, trapped in bottles, pursued by giant beetles – you get the idea. Monika Faber published a book of the studio’s surrealist images, Divas and lovers: the erotic art of Studio Manassé, in 1998.

Ernst Schneider

If a single magazine represented Weimar Germany it was Berliner Zeitung Illustrirte. Not as experimental with graphics as its later rival AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung) it was still the place to get your work seen and most photographers here had images appear in it, including Ernst Schneider. In 1908 he published The Human Form and Beauty: templates to study the naked human body, which as the title suggests was erotica wearing the thinnest gauze to disguise itself as art. It came out just after Heinrich Pudor published Nacktkultur in three volumes, which espoused the virtues of nudity, vegetarianism and racial purity. Historians can’t help but make the association between books like Schneider’s and the rise of Nazism. 

Martin Badekow (1896-1983)

These days a vintage print by Badekow will set you back a few hundred dollars but you can still buy a Ross real photo postcard for the price of a bus fare. Overlooked for a long time, his photographs from the Berlin cabarets have become emblematic images of Weimar Germany. Like Funk and Reiss he is frequently referred to in the press of the time as famous or world renowned yet post-war he disappeared from the radar. Today, with the increasing interest in fashion photography, it would be an oversight to leave him out of an exhibition.

Balázs Studio

Nothing can be found about this studio despite its work appearing frequently on Ross cards. Balázs is a common Hungarian surname and Berlin in the 1920s was full of émigrés from central and eastern Europe who had either escaped for political reasons or had moved to where the money and the ideas were. Considering how popular a lot of the actors were when they sat for the studio it must have had a good reputation, in a city full it seems of world class photographers.

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WEIMAR PHOTO STUDIOS