Lotte Jacobi

A signed first edition of the photobook by Lotte Jacobi, with a signed photograph of Albert Einstein laid in.

• Lotte Jacobi (American).
• Edited by Kelly Wise.
• Danbury, New Hampshire: Addison House, 1978.
• Quarto.
• 187, [5] pages.
• Black-and-white photographs by Lotte Jacobi, printed in gravure.
• Number 86 of 125 copies signed and numbered by Jacobi on the half-title, with a gelatin silver photograph laid in.
• Signed in pencil in lower right of image, small area of mirroring in lower left quadrant.
• White cloth-covered boards, spine and front stamped in brown, publisher's cloth-covered dropback box.

With Jacobi's signed portrait of Albert Einstein. Deluxe issue, with the often missing original photograph, 'Albert Einstein, Physicist, Princeton, NJ., 1938.'

Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990) was responsible for some of the most striking and enduring photographic portraits of the twentieth century. Her style, characterized by experimentation with unusual perspectives, cropped heads, and high or low angles, places her work in line with the Neue Sachlichkiet (New Objectivity) school of German photography. She was the fourth generation of her family to take up photography, following an apprenticeship with her father, she took over the 'Jacobi Studio of Photography' in Berlin. Between 1927 and 1935, she photographed many prominent figures from the arts and sciences, including Bertolt Brecht, Peter Lorre, Käthe Kollwitz, and Kurt Weill. John Heartfield was a customer of the studio from 1929 – 1932, and Jacobi made photographs for Heartfield's montages and book covers.

After 1933, Jacobi concealed her Jewish identity by working under various pseudonyms, and in 1935, she immigrated to New York City, where she re-established a studio and successfully resumed her career. In 1938, she was the first woman to photograph on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange; her picture of the deserted floor was one of many of published in the New York Herald Tribune. Despite efforts to retrieve her archive, much of Jacobi's early work was lost when she left Germany.