Deborah Bell Photographs presents the online exhibition Industry & Urban Life, 1928-1930 by Else Thalemann.
Else Thalemann was born in Berlin in 1901. Her training in photography began in about 1926 in a photographer’s studio on the Leipziger Strasse. In the early-mid-1930s she worked on assignment for advertising clients from a studio and darkroom in her Berlin apartment.
In January 1930 the book Schwarzes Revier, the photographer and filmmaker Heinrich Hauser’s influential sociological study of work and life in the factories and mines of Germany’s Ruhrgebiet region, where heavy industry flourished in the early 20th century, was published in Berlin, with all photographs credited to Hauser. Over the past few decades, however, photography scholars re-attributed many of these photographs to Thalemann, as well as pictures of vibrant city life and architecture in Paris and London made ca. 1930.
During World War II Thalemann’s Berlin apartment building was struck by bombs and burned to the ground. She died in 1984 during a trip to the Lauterbach Abbey in the Black Forest. In 1993 the Hidden Museum in Berlin mounted the exhibition Else Thalemann: Industrial and Plant Photography of the 1920s and 1930s. That same year, the Getty Museum featured several of Thalemann’s photographs in the group exhibition Women on the Edge. Thalemann’s photographs can be found in the collections of the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Chicago Art Institute; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Folkwang Museum, Essen; and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal; among many other institutions worldwide.
Deborah Bell Photographs
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