Emma Kirchner

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Emma Kirchner's self-portrait on her business card (between 1863 and 1871)

Emma Kirchner , actually Johanna Frederika Doris Emma Kirchner (born March 30, 1830 in Leipzig , † February 10, 1909 in Amsterdam ) was a German photographer who worked and lived in the Netherlands. She was the first and for more than 30 years the only female professional photographer in Delft and the surrounding area.

Childhood and youth in Leipzig

Emma Kirchner was born in 1930 in Leipzig as the eldest daughter of Johanna Frederika Fritzsche and Carl Pancras Kirchner, a tailor . Her sister Maria Amalia Louisa was born almost three years later. Only four months later, the father died. The mother continued the tailoring independently. In 1841 the family moved to Neukirchhof 7 in the center of Leipzig (destroyed in World War II, today Matthäikirchhof). Not far from there, the mother opened a new tailor's shop at Grosse Fleischergasse 24 .

At the age of 22 and unmarried, Emma Kirchner gave birth to her daughter Elisa Augusta Doris Ida (nickname Doris) on December 26, 1852. The father was the Leipzig publisher and bookseller Rudolph Löes. A few days earlier, her sister Maria had also given birth to a daughter who was named Emma.

Kirchner's apprenticeship or professional activity in Leipzig cannot be proven, but she must have learned the photographic craft during this time as well as the basic knowledge of corporate management. When she moved to the Netherlands , she announced her profession as a photographer upon arrival and opened her photo studio only a little later.

Photographic and emancipated environment

Emma Kirchner at around 25 years of age (around 1855). Photographer: Bertha Wehnert-Beckmann

Due to the residential area and the place of work of the mother, the photo studios of the early days with their large daylight windows were part of the familiar street scene for Emma Kirchner . In 1839 Louis Daguerre had published a photography process that was released as a daguerreotype for free use by everyone (except in England) from August 19, 1839 . The application for Leipzig is documented for the same year. Also in 1839 and in the years that followed, printed instructions for taking photographs with the daguerreotype appeared in the book city of Leipzig.

There was a photo studio in Grosse Fleischergasse , where Kirchner's mother ran the tailor's shop, and another not far in Burgstrasse . In Burgstrasse 8 , Europe's first professional photographer Bertha Wehnert-Beckmann , like Kirchner's daughter of a tailor, ran her photo studio. Before that, she had already opened it as a photographer in Dresden and traveling, together with the daguerreotypist Eduard Wehnert . Soon afterwards, the two married, but Wehnert-Beckmann was widowed as early as 1847 and continued the studio in the following years with employees, but without a new business partnership. From 1849 to 1851 she worked in New York in her own photo studio on Broadway , which flourished. When she returned, she bought a piece of land in a good residential area and had a house built with a studio. Research assumes that Emma Kirchner received her training as a photographer at Wehnert-Beckmann, but there is no evidence.

The writer and women's rights activist Louise Otto-Peters founded the women's political weekly newspaper Frauen-Zeitung in Leipzig in 1849 and published it here until she was actually banned from her profession by the so-called Lex Otto in 1850. Otto-Peters lived permanently in Leipzig from 1860. In 1864 she published the socially critical novel Neue Bahnen . In the book, the author first addressed the problems of a working, single woman from higher circles. The fictional character is trained by a freelance photographer with her own studio.

Living and working in the Netherlands

In 1860 Kirchner's sister Maria married the gunmaker and blacksmith Frederik Gräfe from Delft and lived there from then on. On November 6, 1863, Emma Kirchner and her mother also moved to Delft. There they lived at Wijk 1, No. 179 (today Vijverstraat 11 ). Kirchner was registered as a photographer by the Delft Wijkmeester (civil servant responsible for a district). Before the end of the year, she and her brother-in-law Frederik Gräfe opened a photo studio under the name E. Kirchner & Co in the Zuiderstraat , which was parallel to their residential street. The business cards of the studio show changing house numbers and, for a short time, the home address. The historian Petra Notenboom concluded from her research that this was due to several times of renovation at the studio.

In September 1871 Kirchner and Gräfe separated as business partners. From then on, his brother-in-law worked as a photographer on the same street until 1898, ran a second branch in Rotterdam from 1882 to 1886 and also made a name for himself as purveyor to the court , lithographer and printer.

In 1875 Kirchner entered into a new business partnership with Henri de Louw (actually Johannes Hendricus Jacobus de Louw), who married their daughter Doris in July and whom she had employed as an apprentice about three years earlier. Since then, the studio has advertised with the offer of email portraits and the enlargement of business cards . In 1876 the couple moved into their own apartment and had their first child. After about a year of working together under the name Henri de Louw en Emma Kirchner , the business partners separated and de Louw opened his own photo studio at the Koornmarkt residence in Delft.

Emma Kirchner's mother died in 1878, her sister Maria in 1883. Kirchner ran her studio for several years until she gave it up in May 1899, now 69 years old. From 1863 until the end of her working life she had been the only female professional photographer in Delft and the surrounding area. She sold her studio to Johannes van Doorne. He had received his training at Gräfe and worked as an assistant at Kirchner from 1890.

After leaving the studio, Kirchner first moved to The Hague , where her daughter's family had since moved. After their divorce in 1901, she followed her to Amsterdam . She spent the last years of her life with her daughter with the family of her granddaughter, who had married the composer Bernard Zweers . She died on February 10, 1909 at the age of 78.

The Delft City Archives have a collection of photographs from Emma Kirchner's hand and describe her as a talented portraitist whose photographs attract attention through art-loving compositions.

Works

  • Daguerreotypes and photographs
  • Portraits of all social classes of women, men, children, families and business people
  • Recordings in work situations, especially of women

literature

  • Petra Notenboom, Marjan Reinders and others: Emma Kirchner. Een 19de-eeuwse fotografe exposure. Museum Paul Tetar van Elven, Delft 2003, ISBN 9789068240146 . (Dutch)

Web links

Commons : Emma Kirchner  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Petra Notenboom: Emma Kirchner. In: Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse fotografie in monografiën en thema-artikelen (FotoLexicon) , No. 35, August 2003, online , website of the Open Access journal Depth of Field on photography and media culture in the Netherlands, Leiden University, accessed on 8 April 2003 February 2020. (Dutch)
  2. ↑ Thomas Liebscher (Ed.): Leipzig. Photography since 1839. Exhibition catalog, Passage-Verlag, Leipzig 2011, accessed on February 9, 2020.
  3. ↑ Writings on the daguerreotype. Website of the digitization project Photo History Library of the Albertina Vienna and the Photoinstitut Bonartes, accessed on February 9, 2020.
  4. ↑ a b c Gerlinde Kämmerer: Wehnert-Beckmann, Bertha Ernestine Henriette (née Beckmann). Website of the city of Leipzig, database of Leipzig portraits of women , accessed on February 8, 2020.
  5. ↑ Jens Kassner: Europe's first professional photographer - Bertha Wehnert-Beckmann presents an opulent book. Article from the Leipziger Volkszeitung from April 23, 2014, accessed on February 9, 2020.
  6. ↑ Elizabeth Leisker: The first professional photographer in Europe. A portrait of Mephisto 97.6. Radio broadcast on March 9, 2015, 7:28 pm, (manuscript) , accessed on February 9, 2020.
  7. ^ Louise Otto: New courses. Ersther Theil, Verlag Herm. Markgraf, Vienna 1864. (digitized version of the Bavarian State Library) , accessed on February 9, 2020.
  8. ↑ Frederik Gräfe , data sheet in the rkd.nl portal (RKD - Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis, Dutch), accessed on February 8, 2020.
  9. ↑ oA: Ridder Van Doorne, 102 jaar photography in Rijswijk. Article dated August 8, 2016, Rijswijk.tv local television website , accessed February 10, 2020. (Dutch)
  10. ↑ above: Doodsportret. Article dated November 1, 2018, Delft City Archives website, accessed February 9, 2020 (Dutch)
personal data
SURNAME Kirchner, Emma
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kirchner, Johanna Frederika Doris Emma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German professional photographer in the Netherlands
DATE OF BIRTH March 30, 1830
PLACE OF BIRTH Leipzig
DATE OF DEATH February 10, 1909
Place of death Amsterdam