Trude Fleischmann - Female Photography Pioneer

Trude Fleischmann was a notable society photographer in Vienna in the 1920s who was forced to leave her homeland in 1938 just before the Second World War broke out. In 1940 she re-established her business in New York and had great success. Her outstanding portraits of intellectuals and artists remain a highly important record of twentieth-century European culture. She was one of those self-confident young Jewish female photographers who read the signs of the times, and made their careers in a male-dominated sphere with works that were bolder and more modern than their forerunners’. Fleishman never married, preferring instead to develop close intimate relationships with her female friends and lovers. 

Trude Fleischmann was born in Vienna in December 1895. She was the second of three children in a wealthy Jewish family.  She developed her life-long passion for photography at the tender age of nine after receiving a camera as a much longed-for Christmas gift. Her father Wilhelm, was a salesman from Hungary and her mother was called Adele (neé Rosenberg). Both parents were a great source of financial and emotional support early on in Fleischmann's career. 

 Fleischmann attended the Lyceum School Association for the Daughters of Civil Servants. After matriculating from that school, she spent a semester studying art history in Paris followed by three years of photography study at the "Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie und Reproduktionsverfahren in Vienna, where women had only been allowed to train from 1908 onward.

Upon finishing her studies in July 1916 she worked for a very short period as an apprentice photo-finisher in the studio of the well-known portraitist Madame D’ora (Dora Kallmus), whose work she greatly admired. Because Madame D’ora complained about her slow pace, she left after only two weeks. Shortly thereafter, Fleischmann managed to secure a position with photographer Hermann Schieberth, whose clients from the Viennese cultural and intellectual scene greatly interested her.

In 1919, she became a fully paid up member of the Viennese Photographic Society. 

In the 1920s, when society was in a euphoric mood and open for aesthetic experimentalism, the “New Woman” arrived on the scene, striving for emancipation and independence.  Fleischmann epitomized this trend and embraced it fully. 

In 1922, at the age of 25 with the encouragement of her mother and the financial backing of her family, Fleischmann opened her own photography studio close to Vienna's city hall. Mainly photographing music and theatre celebrities, her freelance work was published in popular Austrian journals such as “Die Bühne”, “Moderne Welt”, 'Welt und Mode” and “Uhu”. 

Fleischmann was able to pursue a successful career during the economically unsound interwar years despite the fact that she did not photograph private events like weddings or baptisms, nor did she remain under contract with any magazines. The boom in photography during the interwar years, which also paralleled the growth of magazines, aided her career no end. 

Fleischmann also did much to encourage other women to become professional photographers. Fleischmann’s career in Vienna represented part of a trend in which a number of women - many of them Jewish- pursued careers in photography, which, as a relatively new commercial media, was comparatively easy to enter. Like some others, Fleischmann regarded photography as a skilled craft rather than a high art form, and this attitude also helped open the field to women, as it was far less elitist.

As her circle of friends in the art world grew, Fleischmann’s studio became a gathering place for Vienna’s cultural elite. Her lack of fixed assignments and her many creative bohemian clients allowed her much more freedom in subject matter and style, as can be seen from the expressive and often erotic manner in which she portrayed the faces and bodies of her subjects.  Her glass plates also benefited from her careful use of diffused artificial light.

In addition to her celebrity portraits, Fleischmann was among the first to photograph the new dance styles in Vienna. 

 In 1925 she took a nude series of the dancer Claire Bauroff which the police confiscated when the images were displayed at a Berlin theatre. These nude images bought her international fame. 

 In 1938, Fleischmann was forced to flee Austria during the “Anschluss” because of her Jewish background.  She had to leave behind or destroy most of her previous negatives.  Fleishmann moved first to Paris, then to London.  In April 1939 together with her former student and lover Helen Post, she finally settled in New York.

 

In 1940, she opened a studio on West 56th Street next to Carnegie Hall which she ran with Frank Elmer – a fellow photographer who had also emigrated from Vienna. Unlike Fleischman’s earlier work, many of these later photographs feature the New York cityscapes, as well as the fashion models that she often photographed for Vogue. 

During her time in New York, she also photographed celebrities and other notable immigrants and celebrities including Albert Einstein,  Eleanor Roosevelt, and Arturo Toscanini. She also took the first pictures of a new sixteen-year-old actress called Hedy Lamarr. The fact that she was able to continue her successful photography career after moving to the United States attests further to her great flexibility and talent. During this period of her life, she established a close friendship with the photographer Lisette Model.

On retirement in 1969, Fleischmann went to Lugano, Switzerland, claiming she did not want to return to Vienna because of the behaviour of the population during the war.

After a serious fall in 1987, which resulted in her breaking of both her legs she returned to the United States where she lived with her nephew, the pianist Stefan Carell, in Brewster. She died there in January 1990.