June 21, 2016
Netflix carries a movie How to make an American quilt that was scripted after a novel by Portland author Whitney Otto. One of her more recent books which introduced me to the person I would like to meet today, has not yet been translated to the screen as far as I know. I’m sure it would be a huge hit – the brilliant book Eight Girls taking Pictures is a favorite of mine. Whitney is a gifted story teller. She has a talent for making you care about her characters, to bring their historical place and time effortlessly to the fore, and she weaves plots that are a pleasure to follow.
Eight Girls taking Pictures introduces several radical women photographers who were well ahead of their times, and had a price to pay for their breaking with tradition in the social, intellectual and sexual realms. You never know whether you are witnessing true biographic history or spun tales from tidbits, but it doesn’t really matter since the personalities of, among others, Imogen Cunningham, Lee Miller, Tina Modotti, Ruth Orkin and Sally Mann come across vividly, and the times in which they lived are accurately realized. Go read for yourself!
My pick of all of them is Hannah Höch, one of the pioneers of photomontage, a member of the Dadaist movement (although not recognized, maybe even edged out, until the lat 1960s when her works started to appear regularly in major retrospectives.) Two years ago her works were shown in Great Britain by the Whitechapel Gallery – here is a review of her and her art. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jan/09/hannah-hoch-art-punk-whitechapel
She was courageous, non-conformist, flexibly switching allegiances between male partners (she and Raoul Haussmann were a couple for years) and female lovers (she lived with Dutch writer Til Krugman.) She was political – her art declared degenerate by the Nazis, and risk-taking – she stuck the war out in semi-hiding outside of Berlin hiding her work and that of Dadaist exiles. She was a feminist and she never lost faith in her own ability to create true art – even though she had to contend with the saddening fact that not just the bourgeoisie denounced her, but her comrades from the Dadaist movement never took her seriously or jealously guarded their own turfs. (Below is a review of the Dada movement that is just turning 100 years old.)
Höch was born in Gotha, a town very close to Weimar where the photographs were taken.
She could teach me some real-life photo cutting skills with the scalpel, I would introduce her to photoshop, windows into each other’s worlds – I am absolutely certain we would have a blast with each other.
The collage below I found In Bushwhick, NY.
Martha Ullman West
Fascinating, Friderike, and I love your speculation of what you and Hoch might teach each other, also the photo collage/montage you posted. And yes, I will go find Whitney Otto’s book at the library in due course, although due course takes some time these days.