MARIA AUSTRIA
Photographer
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Maria Austria, photographer
Contents 3 5 7 8 10 12 13 14 15
Becoming the professional female photographer (1928-1940) Persecution and resistance (1940-1945) The tireless photographer (1945-1963) The magic of drama, dance, and music (1963-1975) A special photostory: The Achterhuis (1954) Maria Austria’s death and legacy (1975-2017) Maria Austria: the biography and the exhibition (2018) Impressions of the exhibition Timeline (1975-2018)
© Maria Austria, Photographer, Martien Frijns, Doetinchem, the Netherlands, 2018 © Photo’s MAI (Maria Austria Institute), Amsterdam © Photo’s page 14, Kooijmans, Amsterdam All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.
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Maria Austria, photographer
Becoming the professional female photographer (1928-1940) Maria Austria was born as Marie Oestreicher into a Jewish intellectual family in Karlsbad (present-day Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic). In 1933, 18 years old, Marie Oestreicher left home and went to Vienna, attending the “Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt”, because she wanted to become a photographer. This school was one of the few vocational schools in Europe at that time, training professional photography. The photography course focused not only on the technical aspects of photography, but also on special subjects for female students like portraits, fashion and theatre. She was a good student and she became the perfectionist professional that she would remain throughout her career. Many young women, esspecially Jews from the affluent middle classes of Germany, Austria, and Eastern Europe, chose photography as a profession between 1914 and 1937. Within photography, the traditional barriers for Jews did not exist. The “Graphische” produced a number of famous women photographers, such as Dora Kallmus, Trude Fleischmann, and Alice Schalek. All of whom were Jewish. The photographs of Maria Austria during this period show her commitment to persuit a path of her own. She developed in certain genres to which she would remain faithful: portraits, Portraits (± 1934-1935). social reportage, fashion and theatre. The portraits are mainly studies in composition and the use of light, shadow, and contrast. Later she would focus more and more on character. Her early documentary photographs display good observation techniques and attest a constant effort to ensure that the portaited ones appear as natural as possible. In 1937, leaving Vienna for Amsterdam, Maria Austria joined her sister Lisbeth. Both sisters started the agency “Model en Foto Austria”. Maria became the photographer while Lisbeth designed textiles for shops. Lisbeth Oestreicher had studied at the Bauhaus in Weimar. They both belonged to the thousands of Jewish refugees who fled from Germany and Austria in the late 1930s and sought refuge in the Netherlands. 3
Maria Austria, photographer
The first photostory by Maria Austria. Workmen in a glassfactory in Bohemia.
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Maria Austria, photographer
Persecution and resistance (1940-1945) In 1941 Maria Austria was forced to stop her professional activities, when the German occupying forces banned Jews from working. Her photographs couldn’t be published anymore. The agency “Model en Foto Austria” was liquidated. She managed to get a job at the Jewish Council as a photography teacher and as a nurse. In September 1943 her work for the Council couldn’t prevent no longer the possible deportation to the transitcamp Westerbork. After the final raid against the Jewish population of Amsterdam on the 29th of September 1943, Maria had to go into hiding and became active in the resistance, producing photo’s for falsified ID-cards, and she worked as a courier. Her first husband Hans Bial and her sister Lisbeth obeyed the order of the occupying forces and went to Westerbork. Her mother and her brother—together with his family—were all arrested and deported to Westerbork in November 1943. In hiding, Maria Austria met Henk Jonker, a colleague resistance worker. They fell in love. She taught him photography. Immediately after the liberation on the 5th of May 1945, Maria Austria picked up her camera and started to document life in Amsterdam and the ravages of war in the country. About mid-May 1945 she, Henk Jonker, and the photographers Aart Klein and Willem Zilver Rupe founded the photography agency Particam (a contraction of Partisans and Camera). Their main objective was to record the country’s economic, social, and cultural resurrection. Maria Austria lost her mother, brother, and sister-in-law in the Holocaust. Together with her sister Lisbeth, who returned from Westerbork, she took part in the care of her brother’s three young daughters, who had survived the war.
SS-forces marching through the streets of Amsterdam. This photo was made by Maria Austria from the house where she was hiding in 1944.
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Maria Austria, photographer
From september 1943 untill the 5th of May, the liberationday in the Netherlands, Maria Austria went into hiding. She met there Henk Jonker, a resistance worker, whom she married in 1950.
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Maria Austria, photographer
The tireless photographer (1945-1963) Immediately after the end of the war Maria Austria started her professional career. She worked day and night. She produced documentary photo’s, theatre photo’s, fashion, portraits and classical concert photo’s. The Particam photographers were among the best published and best-known photojournalists of the day. They had their own weekly photographic feature in the daily newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad. Maria Austria was at that time one of the few female photographers in the Netherlands. Jewish Romanian war orphans in a refugee camp in the Netherlands preparing for immagration to Palestine (1947).
Maria Austria had no special affinity with the Jewish community in the Netherlands. She seldom discussed her background, or the war. Nonetheless, some of her reportages display an unmistakable personal connection with Jewish life in the post-war years. For instance, she photographed Jewish people returning from Westerbork, Jewish Romanian war orphans, and Amsterdam’s vanishing Jewish Quarter. She also made two journeys to Israel. One of her most striking and compelling photostories is that of the Achterhuis, the hiding place of the Frank family. Maria Austria, particularly, photographed thousands of plays, concerts, operas, and ballet performances. She was the photographer of the Holland Festival since its beginnings in 1948. She made remarkable portraits of virtually all the national and international stars among the writers, musicians, conductors, dancers and actors of her day such as Benjamin Britten, Thomas Mann, Igor Stravinsky, Maria Callas, Albert Schweitzer, James Baldwin, Martha Graham, Bernard Haitink, and so on and so forth. While documenting the country’s reconstruction, Maria Austria also was concerned about the poverty and housing problems that dragged on for years. Her fotostories stand out for their focus on people and their living conditions, especially on women and children, capturing them undisturbed and natural.
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The magic of drama, dance, and music (1963-1975) In 1963 Maria Austria and Henk Jonker divorced. Maria Austria continued the photography agency on her own. From then on she concentrated especially on photographing the world of theatre and music, which was her true passion. She remained a prolific producer of portraits. She became the most important theatre photographer in the Netherlands, raising theatre photography to the status of a specialised genre. Maria Austria was fascinated by the innovative and experimental developments in the performing arts. She closely followed the development of avant-garde theatre and experimental music during the Holland Festival. In 1969 she became the photographer of the Mickery Theatre, where the performances of international avant-garde companies were bringing about a revolution, not only in the Dutch theatre. In response to these companies’ dynamic and expressive acting, Maria’s photo’s became more and more lively, penetrating and as abstract as the plays itself. She moved around the actors on stage and often came very close. She displayed endless patience, waiting for the right moment to take the photo she wanted. With her mastery of technique in the darkroom, she created a strong play of contrast, producing a superb velvety black. These spectacular photographs were often used for programmes and theatre books, and were much in demand for publication in newspapers and magazines in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
The original (above) and the final print of Ama Virikiti by Robert Serumaga, Theatre Unlimited, Kampala, Oeganda, performed at the Mickery Theatre, Amsterdam (1974).
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Maria Austria, photographer
Ellen Edinoff, danser. This photo is known as ‘The scream’ (1964).
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Maria Austria, photographer
A special photostory: The Achterhuis (1954) One of the most interesting photostories in Maria Austria’s oeuvre is a series of over 260 photographs of the Achterhuis, where Anne Frank and her family lived in hiding during the Second World War. She received this commission in connection with the first production of the play “The Diary of Anne Frank” on Broadway in New York, by the playwright couple Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. The photographs served as research material for the play’s set designer, Boris Aronson.
Maria Austria made this photostory during the playwrights’ visit to the Achterhuis. She had been recommended for this commission by the actor Rob de Vries, whom she had met in the resistance and who was the director of a theatre company in Arnhem. Rob de Vries played Otto Frank in the Dutch production of the play in 1956. The photographs convey an impressive, tangible sense of the meaning of the Achterhuis. For Maria Austria, photographing the interior, as well as meeting Otto Frank, must have been an emotional experience—all the more, because both realised that they had a similar family history. Otto Frank lost his two daughters in Bergen Belsen. Maria Austria lost her mother and brother in Bergen Belsen. Her two young nieces survived Bergen Belsen, as well as her brother’s third daughter who survived war in hiding. She will have noticed the newspaper cutting on the wall of Anne’s room with a photo she had made herself: a portrait of a little girl with blond curls, published in the women’s magazine Libelle in 1942. The historical significance of these photo’s became relevant at the end of the 1950s, when the Achterhuis was rescued from threatened demolition plans, and the start of its restoration was made. By then, the building had fallen into such a state of disrepair. Many of the original parts of the interior and numerous items of furniture could only be recaptured by Maria Austria’s photographs.
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Maria Austria, photographer
The playwright couple Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett in front of the bookcase entrance of the Achterhuis, together with director Garson Kanin.
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Maria Austria, photographer
Maria Austria’s death and legacy (1975-2017) Maria Austria died rather unexpectedly on the 10th of January 1975. She was only fifty-nine years old. She was still working hard, although her health was fragile. Her sudden death shocked the Dutch cultural world. For decades she had been a familiar and much-loved photographer in the theatre, ballet, and concert hall. She was hugely memorized in the media, and she was acclaimed the most important theatre photographer of her day. Obituaries praised her unbridled commitment, perfectionism, ambition, and also mentioned her sometimes demanding character. The tributes were full of admiration, respect, and sympathy. Shortly after her death, the Van Gogh and Stedelijk Museums held exhibitions of her work, and a book of her theatre photographs was published. In 1976 her family and friends set up the foundation Fotoarchief Maria Austria–Particam. In 1992 the FMAP became the Maria Austria Institute (MAI), which preserves and manages 57 photo archives of Amsterdam-based photographers such as Eva Besnyö, Carel Blazer, Paul Huf, Sem Presser, and Ad Windig. “Bluebeard’s Castle”, the only opera of Bela Bartok, is the final photostory of Maria Austria.
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Maria Austria, photographer
Maria Austria: the biography and the exhibition (2018) It would last another 40 years before Martien Frijns (publisher, designer, author) and Helly Oestreicher (artist and a niece of Maria Austria) in cooperation with the MAI and the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam realised a biography called Maria Austria, Photographer (AFdH Publishers, 2018) and a retrospective called “Maria Austria, Living for Photography”. The biography Maria Austria, Photographer contains more than 750 photographs and approximately 100 historical documents. The photographs are chonologically arranged from 1929, her first photo of a couple at a lake, until the 3d of January 1975, the final photoshoot of Bela Bartok’s only opera “Bluebeard’s Castle”. The exhibition is based on the research of Martien Frijns. He discovered a great many previously unknown photographs and photostories that enabled him to correct the image that excisted of Maria Austria. The multi-faceted nature of Austria’s photography is very surprising. She was as much at ease mixing with the stars of theatre, ballet, or concert, as with ordinary people at home or in the factory. She was a documentalist of ordinary life in all its rich-layered quality. Her work is an inexhaustible visual source of how the Dutch renaissance after the Second World War established. There is one constant factor in her oeuvre, namely: the central place of the individual human being. Maria Austria is a people’s photographer, depicting their character and life experiences. Rich and poor, young and old, in the Netherlands or abroad, from dancers and labourers, she made wonderful photo’s with great commitment, compassion, and love.
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Maria Austria, photographer
Impressions of the exhibition
The “Chronological Survey� containing some 200 photographs.
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Timeline 1915 Maria Austria was born as Marie Oestreicher in Karlsbad (present-day Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic). Her father was a district physician. He died shortly before she was born. She grew up in a liberal Jewish intellectual milieu. Her brother Felix, was 20 years older, attended university, and studied medicine. Her sister Lisbeth was 13 years older, studied textile design at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. 1933-1936 After graduating from grammar school in Karlsbad she went to Vienna, where she attended a three-year course in photography at the “Grapische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt”. 1937 Flight from Vienna to Amsterdam in response to the rise of Nazism in Austria. She moved in with her sister Lisbeth, who had emigrated from Dessau to Amsterdam in 1930. Lisbeth designed knitting patterns and other textiles. Together they founded the agency “Model en Foto Austria”. Marie changed her name into Maria Austria. 1937-1940 The two sisters lived in the new district in the south of the city known as De Rivierenbuurt. Here they met many Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. Maria produced portraits on commission and published in a number of Dutch magazines, such as Libelle and Wij. In 1938 her mother and brother Felix, together with Felix’s wife Gerda and their three children, fled from Karlsbad to Amsterdam. 1941 During the Second World War, after the occupying forces banned Jewish people from ordinary work, she got several jobs at the the Jewish Council. 1942 Maria Austria married the German Jewish salesman Hans Bial, who obeyed, as well as her sister Lisbeth, the summons of the Nazis, ordering Jews to report to the transitcamp Westerbork. 1943-1945 After the final raid in Amsterdam on the 29th of September 1943 Maria Austria went into hiding. At the beginning of November her mother and brother, together with his family, were sent to Westerbork. Maria Austria became active in the resistance. She fell in love with the resistance worker Henk Jonker and taught him photography. 1945 Her mother, her brother and sister-in-law died in Bergen Belsen and Tröbitz. Her sister Lisbeth, and their brother’s three nieces survived the war. Maria Austria and Hans Bial, who also survived the war, divorced immediately after the war. After the liberation on the 5th of May, she started the photography agency Particam together with Henk Jonker, Aart Klein and Wim Zilver Rupe. Particam’s studio was based at Willemsparkweg, in the heart of cultural Amsterdam. Austria made a lot of photostories documenting the debris of Amsterdam and other parts in the country. Together with the photographers Cas Oorthuys, Carel Blazer, Paul Huf, Sem Presser, Emmy Andriese and Eva Besnyö, she founded the Photography Section within the society of applied arts—GKf —and joined the Association of Photojournalists. She would dedicate herself promoting the interests of photography until her death. 15
Maria Austria, photographer
1946-c. 1963 She made countless social documentary reportages on the country’s reconstruction. They were published in newspapers and magazines. At the same time she made photoshoots at the Holland Festival, the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Netherlands Opera Foundation. 1949-1961 Particam published a weekly photostory in the daily newspaper Algemeen Handelsblad, covering a wide range of topics. 1950 Marriage to Henk Jonker. 1954 Photostory of the Achterhuis, the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family. 1963 Divorce from Henk Jonker. Maria Austria continued Particam Pictures on her own. Aart Klein and Wim Zilver Rupe had left the agency in an earlier stage. 1963-1975 She focused increasingly on theatre photography, working for a limited number of clients. In the late 1960s she started photographing experimental theatre. Her photographs earned her fame at home and abroad. In this period she took on a number of trainee assistants, including Dick Vermaas, Vincent Mentzel, Jaap Pieper, and Bob van Dantzig. 1975 Death of Maria Austria. 1976 Family and friends set up the foundation Fotoarchief Maria Austria-Particam. The main target was to safeguard the continued accessibility of her archives. In 1992 the FMAP became the Maria Austria Institute (MAI). 2018 Publication of Martien Frijns’ Maria Austria, Photographer (AFdH Publishers) and a retrospective called “Maria Austria – Living for Photography” (Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam, 25th January until 2d September 2018).
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Albert Schweitzer being photographed by Maria Austria during a selebration dinner on his behalf in ZĂźrich (1951).