Biography

"Self Portrait of the Photographer"

“Self Portrait of the Photographer”

Else Neuländer-Simon, also known as Yva, was born in Berlin in 1900. She was the youngest of nine in a middle-class, Jewish family. Else’s father died when she was only twelve years old and her mother supported the family as a milliner. Yva graduated from Berlin’s famous arts and crafts school for women, Lette School, according to a fellow photographer of the time. Else also had a short internship at a Berlin movie studio, where she learned lighting. She started her photography business when she was twenty-five years old with only basic photography skills.

Studio Yva was opened in 1925 in her brother’s old Kreuzberg apartment, Bleibtreu Strasse 17 (on the corner of Mommsen Strasse). Her specialty was fashion and avant-garde photography. After an experimental period with another photographer in the mid 1920s, Yva decidedly focused on more commercial photography there after. A motif found in her work is femininity and how that is defined. This is explored in her classic, glamorous photographs that contain varying perspectives. From the 1930s onward, high-end magazines featured her work. Studio Yva grew exponentially during this time. She had ten assistants and various apprentices, notably Helmut Newton, studying under her. Observing how quickly she went from only knowing basic skills to having her first solo exhibition, it is clear she was someone of great charisma with great business sense.

Since Else was known as Yva by the majority, her work was not majorly affected by the Nazi regime until her name was listed on a publication of Jewish photographers and journalists. Due to the fact that she was a Jew, she was forced to relinquish ownership of her studio to her Aryan friend, Charlotte Weidler, in 1933. Eventually, Yva was forced to close her studio in 1938. Her and her husband Alfred were no longer able to practice their professions at this time. Alfred became a road sweeper and she became an X-ray technician in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin. In 1942 they were both deported to Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. It is assumed they died there a few months later since no record exists of their death or liberation.

 

Yva (on left)

Yva (on left)

http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/20704/1/yva-shattered-vision

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