from NWSA Journal Volume 15, Number 3

Excerpt from

Fashion Photography and Women’s Modernity in Weimar Germany: The Case of Yva

MILA GANEVA

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This paper examines the relevance of fashion photography as a source for the study of women’s modernity in Germany between the wars as it focuses on the work of a fascinating and prolific professional photographer of the late 1920s and early 1930s—Else Neuländer Simon—known by her artistic name Yva. Yva discovered her own unique visual language somewhere between the commercial clichés and the modernist idioms of her time. As a successful professional photographer, she continuously searched for an image of the woman in fashion and advertisement photography that was not reductive and degrading. In an era when images of the woman as a sexual symbol were dominating mass media and were proven to attract customers, Yva positioned her photographed female model in a way that did not diminish her to a mere eye-catcher for the male spectator.

Keywords: fashion / Germany / photography / modernity / Weimar Republic / women

The most striking proof of photography’s extraordinary validity today is the increase in the number of illustrated newspapers. In them one finds assembled everything from the film diva to whatever is within reach of the camera and the audience. . . . The new fashions also must be disseminated, or else in the summer the beautiful girls will not know who they are.

—Siegfried Kracauer ([1927]1995, 57)

Photography is a wonderful, interesting and, at the same time, difficult profession for women. . . . In reality, photography is a large, all-encompassing field offering a variety of opportunities.

—Lotte König (1931, 292)1

As the above quotations testify, many of the present debates about women and their role in modernity have their origins in the early twentieth century. After lagging for decades behind developments in England and France, post-World War I Germany entered a period of unprecedented social, economic, and cultural modernization, a period that coincided with the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933). Dazzling changes took place in all spheres of everyday life, and the emergence of the "New Woman"--both as a mass-produced image and as a sociological phenomenon--constituted one of the most visible, and thus, most debated trends among the new realities. In his famous 1927 essay "Photography," Siegfried Kracauer discusses with apparent irony the ubiquitous presence of women’s images in the mass press and hints at the manipulative power of photography, especially of fashion photography, to attract female consumers and cultivate their tastes. Unlike Kracauer, Lotte König, herself an "enthusiastic photographer," focuses on women in photography not as objects of representation but as active agents in modern life. In her essay, "Die Frau als Photographin" ("The Woman as a Photographer"), König describes in very practical terms the institutional conditions that allowed women in Weimar Germany to become professional photographers and also highlights the actual achievements of individual freelance female photographers.

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