The life of Gerti Deutsch is a typical emigrant fate of the past century: born into a middle-class Jewish home in Vienna, she worked in exile in London during World War II as one of the few women for the leading picture magazine of the time, “Picture Post“, for which she then also photographed reportages in her former hometown of Vienna immediately after the war. At the end of the 1960s, after a stay in Italy, she returned to Austria for a longer period and lived near Salzburg.
For the first time, the FOTOHOF is showing a large overview of her photographic oeuvre. Works from the period 1935 to 1965 will be shown in the exhibition and in the illustrated book. For Austria, this work is a new discovery, as some of her images have previously only been shown in exhibitions at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London. Lenders for the exhibition are the two daughters of Gerti Deutsch, who have discovered further, previously unknown pictures, as well as “Getty Images London“, which owns the archive of “Picture Post“ and has made valuable photographs and magazines available for the exhibition. A special feature of this exhibition is the diversity of the exhibited works. It starts with bromine oil reprints and platinum prints as well as classical large-format portraits that Gerti Deutsch made at the beginning of her career. Her press photographs are complemented by the original issues of the magazines in which they appeared. Documents, such as an exchange of letters with Oskar Kokoschka about a photograph of him, complete the picture of the photographer. Numerous photos show the early days of the Salzburg Festival and its proponents, such as Arturo Toscanini, Max Reinhardt and Yehudi Menuhin. Of particular interest for the photographic culture of the time are book maquettes of planned illustrated books from the 1950s about Austria and Japan. And a small sensation are picture reports from 1951, drawn by Inge Morath and Gerti Deutsch, which prove a very early collaboration of these two Austrian-born photographers.