Focus on the Soul: the photographs of Lotte Jacobi.

A Self-Effacing "I": The Photographic Practice of Lotte Jacobi The Jewish Museum in New York until April 11, 2004.

Fourteen years after her death, the German-born photographer Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990) is remembered in an exhibition of over eighty black and white prints (and one anomalous color Polaroid) at The Jewish Museum in New York City. This show recently traveled from the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester. New Hampshire. Although the two exhibitions are naturally similar in their celebration of this politically-committed and energetic photographer, each venue's curating strategy had agendas that created surprisingly different effects. The Currier show provided a traditional biographical and art historical context that highlighted Jacobi's portrait style, while The Jewish Museum places more emphasis on aesthetics, while also trying to situate Jacobi in her social-historical context.

A commercial photographer and artist, Jacobi is best known for her portraits of famous historical personages whom she admired, including Albert Einstein, Lotte Lenya, Paul Robeson, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Focus on the Soul encompasses the span of Jacobi's career, including portraits as well as other genres, such as early cityscapes in Posen, Germany (now Poznan, Poland), theatre and celebrity photographs of cabaret-crazed Berlin in the 1920s, and a half-year trip to the USSR in the early thirties. After escaping Nazi Germany in 1935, Jacobi continued her portrait practice in New York. The exhibit includes portraits of famous people and fellow exiles from that time, "photogenics," camera-less prints produced with light in the darkroom, of the 1950s (some not printed until 1981), nature photographs taken in New Hampshire, where she moved in 1955, and photographs from trips to Granada and Peru in the 1970s.

Supplemented by wall panels of text giving historical background, the exhibition follows Jacobi's geographical relocations in a roughly chronological order, starting with her early photographs in Germany, The dreamy, Pictorialist style in such works as Tree in Odenwald (c. 1928) and Church in Bavaria (1924) gives way to a harder-edged but unaggressive form of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), a critical movement based on realism in painting. In which the artist or photographer attempts to display the hard realities of life. Jacobi's street scenes of children and prostitutes exemplify this category, yet in Girl Standing in a Street (1934), the photograph retains an air of gentleness, of sadness instead of outrage, despite the child with her hand to her eyes as if afraid. Whether she is truly frightened and alone, or only playing remains ambiguous.

Both presentations of Focus on the Soul reiterate a theme: that Jacobi dissolved her personality as a photographer into the style of her subject. She claimed to be a "blank" in front of the sitter, thus capturing his or her "essence," according to an accompanying film Focus on the Soul (2003), produced by the Currier. Both claims are problematic, taking as they do a timeless, de-historicized concept of subjectivity and of photography. The main flaw of this show--designed to be a crowd-pleaser in many ways--is its lack of critical engagement with the photographer's own claims about her work. It does not overtly question the assumption that a photographic portrait can convey the essence of a person, nor that a photographer can avoid incorporating her own style, or her own "eye." into a portrait.

On the other hand, the presentation at each venue creates a kind of unspoken dialectical relationship that implicitly examines these claims. At the Currier, where Jacobi's statement "My style is the style of the person in front of me," is taken at face value, the show is hung in a disparate, chronological manner. The photographer's lens becomes the node in a confluence of individuals and histories, tying unrelated strands--Bolshevik politics and the New Deal, Alfred Stieglitz and Berenice Abbot--briefly together. Jacobi herself seems to have preferred an historical approach to her photographs, for in the film she reprimands her interviewer. "Don't name [Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein] in one breath just because I photographed them. Einstein's a genius and Thomas Mann is a German official." The most obvious and accessible function of photography as a record of history here downplays the importance of the artist in favor of the immediacy of the subject.

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In contrast, The Jewish Museum's presentation visually illuminates and at the same time questions Jacobi's claim. Here the show, in its less historical and more aesthetic reincarnation, makes the viewer aware of Jacobi's techniques and style, emphasizing the fact that she was an extremely talented artist who worked with her camera, lighting and subjects as needed. One sees that yes, the personality of the sitter influenced the print, while also noticing that Jacobi's overall personal style--never disrespectful or harsh, and almost always striking, with lush, warm gradations of tones--transcends not only genres but decades.

Although Jacobi's claim of complete objectivity in her portraiture seems naive today, when the aged, wispy and fairy-like Jacobi speaks in the film one is tempted to believe her. The truth of her claim may lie more in defining what Jacobi sees as the subject's "real" self. Her ability to make her subjects comfortable in her presence--such as the Vermont poet laureate Robert Frost, who initially rejected her requests to photograph him--shows that her desire was clearly to make her subjects at ease, so that they represented their most interesting and individualized selves. Jacobi's real affection and respect for her sitters obviously affected their poses in front of the camera. Her photographs of Einstein were rejected by Life in the 1950s for precisely this quality of seeming candidness and familiarity.

Key curatorial decisions in hanging and inclusion or exclusion of works subtly differentiated the impact of each show. For example, the portrait of the Expressionist printmaker "Kathe Kollwitz (c. 1930), given its own wall as an introduction into the last and largest gallery at the Currier, hangs less conspicuously at The Jewish Museum beside one of Jacobi's most modernist and abstract portraits, "Head of a Dancer" (Niura Norskaya), (1929). The Currier's emphasis on Kollwitz highlights her relevance to Jacobi art historically, for her radical politics and her importance as an older female artist, while the pairing of Kollwitz's blurred, dignified, suffering face and streaming gray hair with the strikingly cool face of Norskaya, whose near-perfect kewpie doll beauty shows minimal expressiveness, provides an illuminating aesthetic contrast.

The Jewish Museum also notes that Jacobi photographed Kollwitz for the cover of the magazine Die Schaffende Frau (The Creative Woman) and makes other efforts to remind the viewer that photography was Jacobi's source of income. For example, the display window from her studio in New York, with four poses of Einstein inside, hangs a little awkwardly on one wall.

Another pointed difference between the two venues is the treatment of a series of photograms Jacobi created by moving a flashlight across photographic paper in a darkroom. At The Jewish Museum the beautifully shaded "photogenics" are laid flat on obtrusive tables that make viewing difficult by skewing one's angle of vision. The horizontal format physically reminds the viewer that these abstract prints were not conceived through the vertical eye of a camera, and highlights their difference from Jacobi's portraits. It is a worthwhile conceptual distinction but the layout results in an uncomfortable viewing experience. At the Currier, the photogenics hung on a wall divider in the middle of the largest gallery, providing a counterpoint to the portraits and creating a welcome looseness to the more strict chronology of that show.

The differences between the two exhibitions most obviously comes down to museum politics. The Currier has a stake in presenting Jacobi's local ties to New Hampshire, such as when the Clamshell Alliance used her image of Einstein for their poster to protest the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in the 1980s, while The Jewish Museum has a stake in pointing out the difficulties Jacobi encountered as a refugee from Nazi Germany, a point not mentioned at the Currier. Both approaches discuss important aspects of Jacobi's life and work, however, providing a broader picture of the artist.

But the greater difference between the two presentations of Focus on the Soul could be the difficulty with situating Jacobi in the canons of 20th century photography. The fact that this show is appearing in venues segregated by genre--local, Jewish, female (it will travel to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.)--illuminates this problem. Wholly a humanist, with a firm belief in the individual's persona and a visible respect for her subject, Jacobi's claim to erase herself behind the camera betrays not only an outdated notion of portraiture but an outdated notion of subjectivity as well. Nor is her style avant-garde, although Jacobi's subjects themselves--avant-garde artists, photographers, politicians--reflect Jacobi's radical political stance.

In contrast to the anxiety and alienation of modern American life conveyed in the photographs of another Jewish female photographer, Diane Arbus (at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University through March 27), Jacobi's portraits affirm, through their dramatic beauty and eloquent tonal technique, a sympathetic and individualistic view of her subjects. Like Arbus, Jacobi's choice of subjects as well as her depiction of them results in a style of her own, but unlike Arbus, her photographs do not traffic with irony or fragmented subjectivity, and thus Jacobi is decidedly out of fashion for the contemporary moment.

As Focus on the Soul will travel to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., it will be interesting to see how Jacobi's photographs are re-presented once again: one would hope that, as necessary as it is to see underrepresented female artists, the celebratory appreciation of Jacobi's work and claims are balanced with a broader criticality towards the act of creating photographic portraits.

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