╳ Madame D'Ora

╳ Dora Kallmus was an Austrian-Jewish fashion and portrait photographer who adopted the dramatic moniker ‘Madame D'Ora’.  Born in Vienna in 1881, she came from a respected family of lawyers and although her mother, Malvine died when she was young, her family remained an important source of emotional and financial support in her career which she became interested in while assisting painter Hans Makart.  Makart was an Austrian academic history painter, designer, and decorator; most well known for his influence on Gustav Klimt and other Austrian artists; but in his own era also considered to be an important artist and was in fact a celebrity figure in the high culture of Vienna at that time.

╳ In 1905 Madame D'Ora achieved many firsts including being the first woman to be admitted to theory courses at the Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute) as well as being accepted the first female member of the Vienna Photographic Society.  She continued her training at Nicola Perscheid's studio in Berlin, where she became friends with his assistant Arthur Benda, and in 1907 she and Benda opened a photography studio in Vienna and named it the ‘Benda-D'Ora Studio’.

╳ The studio’s name was based on the pseudonym ‘Madame D'Ora’, which she used professionally throughout the rest of her life.  So popular was the studio among the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy that they opened another studio in Paris in 1924 and three years later she left Vienna for Paris and worked there for many years.  D’Ora was one of the first photographers to focus on the emerging areas of modern, expressive dance and fashion, particularly after 1920, when fashion photographs started to replace drawings in magazines. While her photographic technique was not radical, her avant-garde subject matter was a risky choice for a commercial studio. D’Ora’s photographs, which captured her clients’ individuality with new, natural positions in contrast to stiff, old-fashioned poses were successful and she became internationally known for her society and fashion photography during the 1930s and 1940s with subjects including Josephine Baker, Tamara de Lempicka, Maurice Chevalier and Colette as well as other dancers, actors, painters and writers.

╳ D’Ora sold her Paris studio soon after the invasion of the Germans in 1940.  Despite her conversion to Roman Catholicism, she remained in danger because of her Jewish background.  During the war she hid in a cloister in La Lanvese, in the southern province of Ardèche, and later on a farm.  Many of her family were killed in the Holocaust, including her sister Anna.

╳ Both the subject and style of D’Ora’s photographs changed radically after the war. Already in 1945 she documented the plight of refugees at a camp in Austria and in 1956, at the age of seventy-five, completed a series vividly depicting the brutality of Paris slaughterhouses.  After she was hit by a motorcycle in 1959, she lost much of her memory and was unable to work and she spent her remaining years in Austria, in the family house that had been forcibly sold under the Nazis but later returned to her. Madame D'Ora died on October 28, 1963.

 ╳ Images (top to bottom)

Anonymous photograph of a dancer, Vienna, 1923

Rhythmic Pose, circa 1930 

Anna May Wong
Cream-toned postcard print, circa 1929

Poses from The Demon machine, 1936

Madame d’Ora and Benda

Mary Wigman, Dancer

 

Josephine Baker