Exile at Work: The Portrait Photography of Gisèle Freund, Lisette Model, and Lotte Jacobi, 1930-1955

My dissertation examines the emergence of photographic portraiture as a vehicle for illuminating the experience of European exiles and their cultural migrations under the threat of fascism. I anchor my study in the works of three women European émigrés, each of whom produced a series of portraits while in exile: the German-born French Gisèle Freund (1908-2000), the Austrian-born American Lisette Model (1910-1983), and the German-born American Lotte Jacobi (1896-1980). Despite different working trajectories and methods, each photographer grounds her work in an idiom of traditional portraiture that was subject to testing, revision, preservation, and critique. My dissertation demonstrates that exile granted these artists a double vision, leading them to turn to the human figure to address the end of European modernism (and its attendant form of subjectivity) and to assess the new mass culture and subjectivity on the rise in the United States. Chapter One considers Gisèle Freund's volte-face from the portrayal of collectivities in interwar Frankfurt to the depiction of individual faces of French intellectuals in color during her period of exile. I describe this abrupt turn to individuality and color - the latter of which was an emblem of American mass culture - as Freund's attempt to address the joint failures of leftist politic in Weimar Germany and the French Popular Front in its fight against fascism's spectacularization of culture. Chapter Two discusses how Lisette Model adapted the caricature style in her portraits, using it as a means to critique the French bourgeoisie in interwar Europe. This is followed by a discussion of how the photographer later used the caricature style to articulate the conditions of the American lumpenproletariat in 1930s and 1940s New York. Chapter Three reads Lotte Jacobi's close-up portraits of the mass-mediated personalities in Weimar Germany as a symptom of the transition from a bourgeois culture of secrecy and autonomy during the nineteenth century to a culture of spectacle in the twentieth. This is followed by a consideration of the aesthetic and commercial “failure” of Jacobi's work in the American visual market during her time of exile, which I argue resulted from a lack of mnemonic space in post-war America. As a whole, this dissertation addresses how the gaze of exiled photographers created new ways to conceptualize the representation of the human form as the specific instrument for transmitting exiles' experiences of dislocation and continuity.History of Art and Architectur