Maria Austria

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Maria Austria (bourgeois Marie Karoline Oestreicher ; born March 19, 1915 in Karlsbad , Austria-Hungary ; † January 10, 1975 in Amsterdam ) was an Austro-Dutch photographer who is considered an important post-war photographer in the Netherlands. In addition to socially critical photo reports, the focus of her work, which can be assigned to neorealism , was theater and documentary photography .

Life

1915 to 1936

Marie Karoline Oestreicher grew up in the Bohemian Karlovy Vary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, as the daughter of the district and spa doctor Karl Oestreicher (1864 - March 1915) and his wife Clara, née. Kisch (1871–1945), together with their much older siblings Felix (1894–1945) and Lisbeth (1902–1989) in a middle-class, Jewish assimilated family in an intellectual and artistic environment. Until 1918 she had Austrian citizenship, then Czechoslovakian. From 1928 to June 1933 she attended the local girls' high school, which she graduated with very good grades. During this time she started taking pictures. From the summer of 1933, she lived in Vienna's Rathausstrasse , bought a Leica and a Rolleiflex and began a three-year training course as a photographer on September 18 at the Graphic Education and Research Institute Vienna - Department of Photography and Reproduction Processes, including an internship from February 1934 to July 1935 in the Willinger photo studio in Vienna on Kärntnerstrasse. After graduating with “Very Good” on July 4, 1936, she worked as a freelance photographer. She was interested in culture, attended avant-garde theater productions and small experimental theaters and found inspiration in the circles of left-wing artists and theater people around the Vienna Naschmarkt .

1937 to 1945

In the summer of 1937 she left Austria because of the increasing influence of National Socialist Germany and the growing anti-Semitism and moved to her sister Lisbeth in the Netherlands, who had settled in the weaving mill at the Bauhaus Dessau in Amsterdam after training as a textile designer . Accustomed to demanding jobs from Vienna, Maria first had to earn a reputation in Amsterdam. She learned Dutch, did every little task, photographed her sister's knitting models in their joint studio at Model en Foto Austria (Fashion and Photo Studio Austria) from the beginning of 1938 , and carried out advertising and portrait assignments. She developed her own negatives, delivered reports and slowly got into the magazine business. She published in the magazines Libelle and Wij and made contacts with politically and culturally like-minded people in the Nederlandsche Filmliga . During this time she met the directors Joris Ivens and John Fernhout and the Hungarian photographer Éva Besnyő . When she moved to Noorder Amstellaan in the Rivierenbuurt district in 1939, she only used the stage name Maria Austria.

After the attack on the Netherlands on May 10, 1940 and the occupation by the German Wehrmacht , the living conditions for Jewish people became increasingly difficult due to the growing reprisals during the German occupation, such as reporting obligations for Jews, exclusion from public life, exclusion from associations and work - and writing bans. As she was banned from practicing Jewish photographers, Austria had to give up her job in May 1941 and began to work as a nurse in the Portuguese-Israelite hospital on the Rapenburg peninsula in the Jodenbuurt district and as a photography teacher for the Amsterdam Jewish Council ( Dutch Joodsche Raad voor Amsterdam ). In April 1942 she entered into a marriage of convenience with the German-Jewish businessman Hans Bial (1911-2000), which was divorced in December 1945.

Vondelstraat 110, Amsterdam

Her sister Lisbeth was interned in the Westerbork camp in 1942 , as was her mother and brother and family in 1943, who had fled to the Netherlands in 1938. Maria Austria went into hiding instead, lived in changing accommodations from mid-1943 and began to work for the Dutch resistance . During this time she met her future husband Hendrik ("Henk") Pieter Jonker in hiding in the attic of the house at Vondelstraat 110 in Amsterdam, whom she taught photography. Jonker worked as a civil servant for the Amsterdam Population Register. Together with him and other Jewish photographers like Éva Besnyő, they produced false identity cards for the resistance and Maria took over courier services under the pseudonym Elizabeth Huijnen. Her mother perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 , her brother Felix and his wife died shortly afterwards as a result of their imprisonment in Belsen. Lisbeth survived in Westerbork and took in the three orphaned nieces Beate, Helly and Maria, who were looked after by her and Maria Austria.

From 1945

Willemsparkweg 120, Amsterdam

After the war, she accepted orders for fashion reports and in 1945 founded the Particam (Partizanen Camera) photo agency together with Henk Jonker, Aart Klein and Wim Zilver Rupe after the surrender of the German Wehrmacht on May 4, 1945 at Willemsparkweg 120. The Canadian allies initially provided the photographers with footage to document life in the destroyed cities. With the approval of the National Armed Forces, socially critical photo reports of reconstruction and misery were created for the free Dutch press. The documentary reports, which focused on the everyday life of the population, appeared in newspapers and magazines. From 1949 to the beginning of the sixties, Maria Austria and Jonker had a series on the back of the Algemeen Handelsblad with a fixed photo section on changing social topics.

They also photographed people in the performing arts in the Netherlands. These photographs appeared in program booklets and theater showcases. You were invited to document the first performances in the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam . From 1947 the Holland Festival in Amsterdam became an important client . They also photographed performances in De Nationale Opera ( Dutch Opera Foundation (De Nederlandse Operastichting)) and orchestras from 1949 , such as the Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1951 . Maria Austria married Henk Jonker in March 1950 and was naturalized in Dutch. Increasingly, she concentrated on reporting on theatrical performances and experimental music and dance performances, opera and ballet productions. After the departure of Wim Zilver Rupe and Aart Klein in 1956 and the divorce from Henk Jonker in 1963, she continued the Particam office on her own, employed assistants and apprentices, among others. a. Vincent Mentzel, Jaap Pieper and Bob van Dantzig. The marriage with Henk Jonker was dissolved on October 28, 1969. Until her death in 1975 she was the in-house photographer of the Mickery Theater, which has been located in Amsterdam since 1972, a venue for international, alternative experimental theater and one of the most important stages for independent ensembles in Europe. For the Holland Festival and Mickery Theater she photographed the receptions and rehearsals during the day, the performances or concerts in the evening and then developed the photos in order to deliver them to national newspapers and agencies in the morning before going to press. The photos of the top-class performances earned her national fame.

Maria Austria was a member of the Nederlandse Vereniging van Photojournalisten (Association of Dutch Photojournalists) and from 1945 until her death a member of the board of the photography department of the Vereniging van Beoefenaars der Gebonden Kunsten (later: Gebonden Kunstenaars federatie (Association for Applied Art) (GKf) ). In this capacity, she advocated the recognition of photography as a full art discipline and pleaded with the Ministry of Education, Art and Science for a separate budget in the state budget for the purchase and exhibition of photographs in museums. She insisted on naming her photos when she published her photos in magazines and prohibited her photos from being cropped. Maria Austria died on January 10, 1975 in Amsterdam after a severe flu.

In 1976 the Stichting Fotoarchief Maria Austria-Particam (Foundation Photo Archive Maria Austria-Particam) was set up to make her estate accessible and at the same time to build up an archive for Dutch photographers (since 1992 the new Maria Austria Institute (MAI) foundation ). Today the archive is housed in the Stadsarchief Amsterdam and contains over 50 archives of important photographers, including the estates of Maria Austria, Particam, Hans Dukkers, Henk Jonker, Carel Blazer .

The Amsterdam Fund for the Arts awards the Maria Austria Prize for Photography every two years .

Act

Maria Austria's photo style is assigned to neorealism . Unaffected by avant-garde trends, she renounced artistic alienation and created "snapshots that capture the social contradictions of the post-war period". She was known for her perfectionism and craftsmanship. Her pictures “are razor sharp and characterized by strong contrasts. You can see every wrinkle, no matter how small. It seems to capture the people and what is happening immediately. "

Already in 1937 she took fashion photos in the Amsterdam studio exclusively with a Rolleiflex. She justified her preference with the fact that you are "much more agile with the Rolleiflex than with a large box". Until the 1970s she used a Rolleiflex camera, for which she had a cover made in order to be able to take photos as silently as possible during theater and dance performances. She often worked with a tripod and her own lighting and, based on her experience, even in difficult lighting situations without a photometer . Only shortly before her death did she take photos with a 35mm camera .

Maria Austria’s turn to social reporting is already visible in her pictures from her training time in Vienna. She photographed workers playing cards in Vienna, girls at the lake, glassblowers in Bohemia and their environment. As a freelance photographer in Vienna, she photographed celebrities from the international art scene, such as Benjamin Britten , Maria Callas , Josephine Baker , Martha Graham and Albert Schweitzer . After she went into hiding in Amsterdam in 1943, she secretly photographed German troops in the streets from her hiding place in the Vondelstraat through the attic window.

For her photo agency Particam (Partizanen Camera), founded in 1945, she made socially critical photo reports such as about the Hongerwinter 1944/45, the return of Jewish inmates from the Westerbork camp in 1945, the arrest of Dutch collaborators , about the children's camp for Jewish Romanian orphans Ilaniah in Apeldoorn 1948 and from “Asocial camp” Drenthe , in which the Dutch government housed socially disadvantaged families and until 1950 forced them to do hard labor for the purpose of “rehabilitation”. It documented the destruction of the Amsterdam Centraal train station , the misery after the war, the reconstruction and life in the liberated Netherlands, as well as the flood disaster of 1953 . In December 1954, through Otto Heinrich Frank and mediated by the theater director Rob de Vries, she and Jonker received the order to document the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family in Prinsengracht 263 . Jonker photographed the front building and Maria Austria photographed the rear building Het Achterhuis in over 250 photos . The photo documentation was the basis for the construction of the sets for the theater production on Broadway in 1955 and the film adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank in 1959. In 1958, her photos were shown in a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam .

In addition to social reports, in the years after the war she took many portrait photos of intellectuals and artists of her time, including Bertolt Brecht , Thomas Mann , Igor Stravinsky , Mstislaw Rostropovich , and James Baldwin . Increasingly, she devoted herself to theater, music, dance and circus photography, concentrated on reporting on theater performances and experimental music and dance performances, photographed many opera and ballet productions, famous guest conductors and soloists, especially at the Holland Festival in Amsterdam and as In-house photographer for the experimental Mickery Theater. She photographed the guest performances of the post - war avant - garde in the stage world, such as the troupe from the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club from New York and the performances of the Tenjo Sajiki Theater founded by Shūji Terayama . She photographed the actors unnoticed during their play. This way of working produced expressive and sometimes blurry images that convey a dynamic and haunting impression. Her strictly composed black and white photographs were characterized by their combination of precision and expressiveness, which captured the emotions staged on the stage.

Maria Austria was also interested in the socio-political theater that formed in the Netherlands in the early 1970s. She photographed the performances of the theater collective Het Werkteater, founded in 1970, and the theater groups Prolog , Baal and Sater , for which she also campaigned personally. In addition, they were fascinated by the expressive, existentialist, new forms of expression of dance. She tried to reproduce in her photographs the beauty and perfection that she saw in it, such as the performances by Kurt Stuyf and Ellen Edinoff from the Contemporary Dance Foundation .

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1953: Post-war European Photography . Museum of Modern Art , New York
  • 1958: Maria Austria exhibition . Stedelijk Museum , Amsterdam (solo exhibition)
  • 1975: In memoriam Maria Austria - theater photography . Van Gogh Museum , Amsterdam
  • 1977: the Maria Austria exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum is transferred to Amstelveen, Hilversum and Arnheim.
  • 1977: Theaterfoto's van Maria Austria . Schouwburg Gallery, Tilburg
  • 1991: Model en Foto Austria . Dutch Textile Museum (Nederlands Textielmuseum), Tilburg
  • 2001: Maria Austria - Holland zonder Haast . Joods Historisch Museum , Amsterdam
  • 2002: Maria Austria - Photographs from the 1950s and 1960s . The hidden museum , Berlin
  • 2018: Maria Austria - photographer . Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam; The hidden museum, Berlin
  • 2018/2019: Maria Austria - An Amsterdam photographer of neorealism . The hidden museum, Berlin. Selection of around one hundred black and white photographs and documents from the exhibition at the Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam

Literature (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Dörte Nicolaisen: Bauhauslers in exile in the Netherlands . In: Crossing Borders: Women, Art and Exile . Ursula Hudson-Wiedenmann, Beate Schmeichel-Falkenberg (eds.), Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 978-3826031472 , pp.  29-33
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Oestreicher, Marie Karoline (1915-1975) . In: Biographical Woordenboek van Nederland . Volume 5, The Hague 2002, website of the University of Leiden (Dutch)
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Das Verborgene Museum: Austria, Maria: Biographie . Retrieved June 7, 2020
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Verena Nees: Her photos tell a story - the discovery of the Jewish photographer Maria Austria on November 22, 2018. In: World Socialist Web Site . Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Ingeborg Ruthe: Maria Austria in the hidden museum Berlin: The hiding place of Anne Frank from October 31, 2018. In: Berliner Zeitung . Retrieved June 9, 2020
  6. ^ A b Anton Holzer : The Austrians of the Netherlands . In: Wiener Zeitung of March 7, 2015. Accessed June 30, 2020
  7. ↑ biografiA: Lexicon of Austrian Women , Volume 1. Ilse Korotin (Ed.), Böhlau, Vienna 2015, ISBN 978-3205795902 , p.  163
  8. ↑ a b c d Maria Austria - An Amsterdam photographer of neorealism . Exhibition flyer Hidden Museum 2018/2019. Retrieved June 11, 2020
  9. ↑ a b c d Private website Helly Oestreicher: Leven . Retrieved June 11, 2020
  10. ↑ a b c d e Maria Austria Instituut: Maria Austria: 1915 - 1975 . Retrieved June 9, 2020
  11. ↑ a b c d e Miriam Lenz: Overflowing life from January 7, 2019. In: Der Tagesspiegel . Retrieved June 9, 2020
  12. ^ A b Carla van der Stap: Maria Austria . In: Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Photography in monographs and themed articles . Volume 4, No. 7, Amsterdam September 1987, on the Depth of Field page . Retrieved June 30, 2020
personal data
SURNAME Austria, Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Oestreicher, Marie Karoline (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch photographer
DATE OF BIRTH March 19, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Carlsbad
DATE OF DEATH January 10, 1975
Place of death Amsterdam