PlayLust

STIL IN BERLIN

She portrays her cosmopolitan and very stylish Berlin friends and artist acquaintances. If you like Mary and her blog Stil in Berlin, you’ll love the photography of Berlin-based Marianne Breslauer who captured everyday life and style – in the 1930’s. Born into a high-bourgeois family, Marianne was a pioneer in the at that time still young medium of photography. The mise-en-scene of decadent Berlin life was not her thing. What caught Breslauer’s eyes, and what made her innovative, was her interest in the everyday, and often overlooked things. As a photo-journalist for German magazines, she caught people at art auctions, circus artistes in Paris or portrayed working girls at home and at leisure. Her mix of reportage, portraiture, and fashion make her a kind of proto-blogger – roughly 80 years ahead of time.

She travelled to Palestine and Spain, but was eventually forced to emigrate to Amsterdam because of the Nazis. By 1938, Breslauer was finished with photography. “If I had continued to work in that field”, she later explained “I would have turned to film. For me, 10 years were certainly enough.” Marianne Breslauer brought up two sons and, following her husband’s death, took over the management of the Feilchenfeldt art dealing company. She died in Zurich in 2001.

There’s such a stylish timelessness and almost eerie nowness about her portraits. I really can’t take my eyes off them. They say cool without trying. What with the overload of streetstyle images picturing the same fashionweekistas over and over again, I find myself increasingly asking: what’s the point? What’s the point of freezing outside a Paris fashion show trying hard not get another style snapper in the picture? What’s the point of hunting for style when style has become a kind of uniform? And more importantly, what will remain? Will people still bother to look at what we wore in 80 years’ time? Marianne Breslauer’s oeuvre says yes. Good style never dates. There will always be a demand for pioneering style worn by free-spirited individuals, caught by a fresh and innovative eye. That’s the point.

Marianne Breslauer – Photographs
Exhibition at Swiss Foundation of Photography, Winterthur
Feb 26 through to May 30, 2010

Models at Joe Strasser, Berlin 1932

[View with PicLens]

 

comments (0)

Comments are closed.