Lotte Meitner-Graf

Graf established her Vienna studio in 1926 and it was soon successful. She employed three trainees (Hermi Friedmann, Elizabeth Back and Olga Seybert). Her studio shared an address with the pottery studio of Lucie Rie. Graf married industrial chemist Walter Meitner in 1926 and became Meitner-Graf. She got her Masters degree in 1930 and was chosen to be portraitist of Alexander Fleming. Meitner-Graf left her studio and moved to England in 1938 in the context of the Anschluss. She worked in the studio of Georg Fayer, in Mayfair, bringing a network of cultural figures to the client list. One of her colleagues there was Ursula Pariser. Meitner-Graf opened her own studio at 23 Old Bond Street in London in 1953, next to the studio of Dorothy Wilding. Many of the people she had photographed in Vienna visited her studio in London to have photographs taken having established prominent careers. The studio was on the fifth floor and six people were needed to manoeuvre a baby grand piano across a rooftop so that Meitner-Graf could photograph pianists. She hired Anthony Crickmay as an office assistant and gave him some photographic training. Even after many photographers were working in colour, Meitner-Graf preferred black-and-white. She declined to put her signature on portraits taken by her assistants and ensured copyright remained with her rather than with customers. Meitner-Graf is best known for her photographs of notable people including: polymath Albert Schweitzer, musicians Marion Anderson, Otto Klemperer and Yehudi Menuhin; actors John Gielgud and Danny Kaye; scientists Irène Joliot-Curie, Lord Blackett, Lawrence Bragg, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Max Perutz; leaders such as Sālote Tupou III, Jan Smuts, and Mahatma Gandhi; and author Arthur Ransome (whose photograph is in the collection held by the Lakeland Arts Trust). Meitner-Graf's photograph of her sister-in-law, Lise Meitner, was the image used when Meitner became the first woman to appear on a national postage stamp in 1978. Her portraits were widely used in record sleeves, book jackets and magazines. Meitner-Graf also specialised in photographing artworks for organisations including the British Museum and National Gallery. Her work featured in a Warburg Institute exhibition panel curated by Kenneth Clark, entitled Portrait and Character. The programme for the Festival of the City of London in 1964 featured many of Meitner-Graf's images.