In just 10 years, Marianne Breslauers (1909-2001) career as a photographer had marked her out as an ambitious photojournalist of the late Weimar Republic, before emigration and the outbreak of war brought this auspicious beginning to an abrupt halt. Educated from 1927 to 1929 at the renowned Lette-Haus in Berlin, Marianne Breslauer went next to Paris. Her first posting was with Man Ray, who told the 20-year-old that she could do everything already and warmly invited her to make use of his studio. Her intrinsic domain remained the the street: the quays of the Seine, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the street performers on the Rue dOrléans. These photos attracted the attention of the illustrated German newspapers, who soon furnished her with commissions. She photographed everyone who was anyone in the art world of late-1920s-Berlin, travelled to Spain with Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and portrayed Erika Manns cabaret, The Pepper Mill, in Zurich. In 1936 she had to emigrate from Germany, taking all her photography materials in her bag. The photographer Marianne Breslauer was only around for a single, brief decade. Following the Second World War, she became the art dealer Marianne Feilchenfeldt. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her birth, in this catalogue of works, her distinctive pictures will finally be visible once more.
The authors show how photographs reflected Western culture's fascination with black women's bodies, reinforcing beliefs about racial differences and hierarchies, and how the images created by twentieth-century photographers increasingly challenged these beliefs. They discuss about 200 images of black women, made by celebrated photographers like Nadar, Eugène Atget, Gertrude Käsebier, Renée Cox and Lorna Simpson.