Focus! Click! Maria Austria
For the first time, the work of the Austro-Dutch photographer Maria Austria is being recognized via a retrospective exhibition in Austria
Servus!
For the first time, the work of the Austro-Dutch photographer Maria Austria is being recognized via a retrospective exhibition in Austria. Focus! Click! Maria Austria: Photographer in Exile opened at the Jewish Museum Vienna on June 21, and follows several exhibitions of her work in Germany and the Netherlands, where she relocated in 1937 and survived the Holocaust in hiding as part of the resistance against Nazi occupation, running errands and producing photographs for fake passports and identification papers.
Maria Austria was born Marie Karoline Oestreicher in 1915 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Karlovy Vary in the contemporary Czech Republic. At that time, the town was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and known as Karlsbad by its German-speaking majority. After graduating high school, Austria moved to Vienna in 1933 where she studied photography. Her tightly-framed portraits reflect the modernist style of her time. In the mid-1930s, she had her first works as a press photographer published in Viennese newspapers, though in fascist Austria, work for Jews became ever harder to come by.
Unable to see a future for herself in an antisemitic country, in 1937, Amsterdam became her new home. She resided there with her sister, Lisbeth, who had studied textile design at the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Germany. After the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, while her sister reported to the Westerbork transit camp, Austria came part of the underground. Focus! Click! Maria Austria contains an arresting image, taken from a hiding place, of Wehrmacht soldiers marching in formation down Vondelstraat past the Vondelpark, as two women stop on the sidewalk to watch them pass. Austria’s mother and brother would die in the Holocaust.
Besides her four-year residence in Vienna between 1933 and 1937, Austria returned only once more to Vienna in 1960. Her black-and-white snapshots of everyday life there capture men in conversation in the Opernpassage, a woman in a fur hat reading the newspaper in a coffeehouse, and an ornament hanging at a Christmas market as a customer gazes at it. They are remarkable to the extent that they are unremarkable. Austria’s camera sees the city through the eyes of a visitor, not a resident. The style is that of a professional, but the subjects those of an amateur, a tourist.
After the war, Austria remained in Amsterdam. There, she founded the Particum photo agency together with her future husband, Henk Jonker, and worked primarily as a press photographer as she had in Vienna in the interwar period. Her early work captured a country in ruins: a broken-down wreck of twisted metal, mined beaches, and hungry children with blackened feet. Over the span of her working life, which lasted for thirty more years after the war, Austria recorded the Netherlands’ reconstruction and rebound. In 1954, she was recommissioned to photograph the filming on location of The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).
Focus! Click! Maria Austria also exhibits Austria’s work from Israel. In 1965, she went to Israel for the first time to attend the opening of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, making a second visit to the country in 1967. Her eye moves between the bourgeois world of the museum and the concert hall and the simple, arid beauty of the desert—an Israel between two worlds, past and future; nascent, burgeoning, but poor and waiting to be developed. In 1975, aged just 59, Maria Austria died of the flu. Her tangible legacy as a photographer who found something striking in the mundane is waiting to be rediscovered in this exhibition.
Focus! Click! Maria Austria: Photographer in Exile runs at the Jewish Museum Vienna until January 14, 2024.
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