Lotte Jacobi (1896 – 1990) was a leading American portrait photographer and photojournalist. She studied film at the University of Munich while also attending the Bavarian State Academy of Photography. After completing her formal studies, Jacobi entered the family photography business in 1927.
Lotte left Germany with her son, arriving in New York City in September 1935 where she opened a studio in Manhattan. From 1935 to 1955, she continued portrait photography at her studio, while also embarking upon an experimental type of abstract photographic work called “photogenics”.
In 1955, Jacobi moved to Deering, New Hampshire and opened a new studio, where she continued her own work and displayed works by other artists. She died in 1990 at the age of 93.
Jacobi is best known for her photographic portraits. The list of her subjects reads like a who’s who of the 20th century: W.H. Auden, Martin Buber, Marc Chagall, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Käthe Kollwitz, Lotte Lenya, Peter Lorre, Thomas Mann, Max Planck, Eleanor Roosevelt, J.D. Salinger, Alfred Stieglitz, and Chaim Weizmann, among others. During her lifetime she received numerous honors and has repeatedly been referred to as the “greatest woman photographer of the twentieth century”.