Trude Fleischmann

There are photographers who do not seize you through an entire body of work at first glance, but through a single image. With Trude Fleischmann, this was exactly the case for me. The first truly conscious moment in which her work struck me was a nude study of the dancer Claire Bauroff. That image captivated me immediately. It possesses a presence, a stillness, and at the same time a remarkable physical tension that has never quite left me. It is precisely in this conjunction of body, dance, and photographic light that, for me, its extraordinary force resides.

What fascinates me most about Fleischmann is her treatment of light. Unlike some other photographers of her period, who worked with harder contrasts or a more overtly graphic use of illumination, one encounters in her work a far softer light. It does not carve the body into fragments; it models it. It envelops. It allows form to emerge without brutally fixing it in place. This softness carries an immense elegance without ever becoming decorative or insignificant. Perhaps therein lies a crucial distinction between mere beauty and genuine photographic presence. The light flatters, yes — but it also sustains. It possesses an inner calm.

I have experimented extensively with her style and, over a long period of time, studied her lighting with great intensity. What particularly interested me was the situation of her studio and the question of how this light came into being at all. The natural light entering through overhead skylights creates a very particular quality — soft, expansive, yet precise enough to allow the body to emerge sculpturally. I have tried to recreate exactly this atmosphere in my own studio, working with natural light or shaping artificial sources in such a way that a similar sense of calm might arise.

For me, such art-historical experiments are never a matter of quotation alone. They are a form of learning. A way of thinking oneself into another artist’s visual language. A form of understanding through practice. And this is something I do not only with Fleischmann. I work quite consciously in this way with several major photographers of the twentieth century. I study their style, their lighting, their composition, their relationship to the body, and I attempt to reconstruct individual elements photographically — not in order to imitate them, but to truly understand them. For me, this is a form of technical and artistic study. Paradoxically, it is precisely by working through another artist’s style that one’s own style becomes sharper. One begins to recognise what truly belongs to oneself — and what does not. Very often, one discovers one’s own visual handwriting precisely when attempting to understand someone else’s.

It was therefore only logical for me to choose Trude Fleischmann as one of the three fictional photographers within my project Protrahere. It was no coincidence that I placed the fictional protagonist of this series in her hands. Alongside the other photographic positions structuring the project, Fleischmann was indispensable to me. She stands there not merely as a reference, but as a very specific photographic attitude: elegance, psychological depth, and a use of light that does not expose the human being, but makes them visible.

Another aspect that I find art-historically fascinating is the social reaction to her nude photography. What interests me especially is that the public condemnation — for instance the closing of her Berlin exhibition because of the nude works on display — ultimately granted her precisely the attention that carried her work beyond a narrow circle of insiders. It is almost paradoxical. Rejection itself became an amplifier.

At the same time, something emerges here that continues to occupy me to this day: anyone who engages seriously with Trude Fleischmann must find the idea foreign that she somehow sexualised her models. Her images contain great stillness, dignity, and photographic intelligence. The sexualisation appears to have arisen not through the photographer, but rather through those who pointed at the images and cried “smut!”

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Fleischmann interests me so deeply. She demonstrates that photographic work with the body always possesses a cultural and social dimension.

Perhaps a brief glance at the person behind the images is in order. Trude Fleischmann was born in Vienna in 1895 and, to my mind, remains one of the most significant photographers of the early twentieth century. She received her training at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna, worked in the orbit of Madame d’Ora, and by 1920, at only twenty-five years of age, had already opened her own studio near Vienna’s City Hall. There she portrayed numerous figures from art, theatre, music, and intellectual life. Her photographs vividly reflect the cultural density of interwar Vienna, something that naturally resonates strongly with me as a Viennese artist.

What I find particularly impressive is the way she asserted herself in a clearly male-dominated professional world while developing an unmistakably personal visual language. The photographs of Claire Bauroff, her portraits of artists and intellectuals, and later her work in exile in New York all reveal an extraordinary consistency. After the Anschluss in 1938, she was forced to leave Austria as a Jewish woman, eventually emigrating to the United States, where she built a second photographic life. This biographical rupture is, to me, inseparable from an understanding of her work.

A brief but important note in closing: I have deliberately chosen not to reproduce any of her photographs in this essay. The works of Trude Fleischmann are not yet in the public domain and, under current copyright law, will remain protected until the end of 2060. Precisely for that reason, it is important to me to work cleanly and respectfully here. For anyone wishing to form their own impression, I can highly recommend searching for “Trude Fleischmann Claire Bauroff nude study II circa 1925.” The image is very easy to find through a simple Google search and remains, for me, one of the most compelling photographic works of its time.