KRETSCHMER, Annelise

About the German photographer, Annelise KRETSCHMER (born as Annelise Silberbach, 1903-1987)

Before assisting in the studio of Leon v. KAENEL in Essen, Annelise Silberbach studied bookbinding & drawing at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich. As a master student of Franz FIEDLER, she moved to Dresden in 1924, where she married the sculptor Sigmund Kretschmer in 1928. In 1929 the family moved to Dortmund, where the photographer opened her own studio, which she ran with her daughter Christiane until 1978. Annelise KRETSCHMER was thus one of the first female photographers with her own studio in Germany. She devoted herself mainly to portrait photography of children and cultural figures in the city, but also published regularly in magazines such as 'Das Atelier'. In 1929 she participated in the legendary traveling exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund 'Film und Foto' and in 1930 in the exhibition 'Das Lichtbild' in Munich. She also traveled frequently to Paris, where she met Florence HENRI and Ilse BING. At this time her work can be classified as New Objectivity - she experimented a lot with cropping and angles. As a successful portrait photographer and mother of several, she was largely spared further persecution by the Nazi regime. After World War II, she reopened her destroyed studio in 1950. In the 1950s and 1960s she photographed many personalities from art and culture, including portraits of Albert RENGER-PATZSCH. The estate of Annelise KRETSCHMER, consisting of 2600 photographs as original enlargements and 13,000 b/w  negatives, was purchased by the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Münster in 2020.

Photo books on the work of Annelise KRETSCHMER (1903-1987)

'Fotografin' (1982); 'Visions of the 'Neue Frau': Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany' (1995 von Meskimmon/West); 'Fotografien 1927–1937' (2003, von Ute Eskildsen); 'Photographien 1922–1975' (2016)