Madame d'Ora (1881–1963)
The photographs were taken through the lenses of Madame d’Ora’s and Lothar Rübelt’s cameras and are photos of everyday life, art and sports in the 1920s.
Madame d’Ora is one of the most important female artists in Viennese modernism. When she was 23 years old, Dora Kallmus—her given name—purchased her first camera and made up her mind to become a professional photographer. That was not exactly what a woman was expected to do in 1904.
A daughter from a wealthy family, she was able to complete an internship in Berlin and courses at the Viennese Education and Research Institute for Graphic Arts. As a woman, she was only allowed to attend theory courses. In 1907, only three years after deciding to become a photographer, she opened the d’Ora Photo Studio in the First District of Vienna.
She quickly made a name for herself with her remarkable portrait photographs. She photographed numerous artists, intellectuals and personalities in Viennese society—and even members of the royal family.
She had always been interested in fashion. She was also keen to try to capture modern dance on camera. She became internationally renowned and moved to Paris in 1925.
Madame d’Ora’s photographs you see here reflect the new attitudes of the 1920s, when self-confident expressions of femininity, open hair, the bob as a symbol of the “new woman” came into the picture—and even naked women. Here they are no longer only objects of desire, but the images capture a shift in how the body and society can be seen. Madame d’Ora created an influential visual language that was completely her own. Inside her studio, she composed each image down to the tiniest detail.
In 1940 the German Wehrmacht invaded Paris, and a wave of persecution and deportations began. Although Madame d’Ora had converted to Christianity, she was still considered a Jew and was forced to go into hiding until the war was over. She managed to find a place to hide in the South of France. Many of her relatives were murdered in the Shoah.
These experiences left an impact on Madame d’Ora’s later work. In 1946, the artist took her first documentary photographs outside her studio. She photographed refugee camps in Austria and the destroyed city of Vienna. This radical shift in style can also be seen in the photo series of slaughterhouses in Paris that she made later on.
After a car crash in 1959 she lost her memory, and lived in Frohnleiten, Styria, where she passed away four years later.