Solarizations · Jeanne Mandello

»Destiny Emigration« reconstructs the stories of two Jewish photographers, Gerti Deutsch and Jeanne Mandello. Each left her country when the Nazis took power.

Jeanne Mandello (Frankfurt/Main 1907 – 2001 Barcelona) fled Frankfurt in 1934, heading first for Paris and then for Montevideo in Uruguay.

She had not yet turned 19 when she left home for Berlin in 1926 to train for two years at the Photographische Lehranstalt/Lette-Verein. She obtained her Chamber of Trade certificate with a mark of “very good”. Work experience with Dr Paul Wolff, the Leica pioneer, brought a practical initiation into photojournalism. In 1929 she opened her first studio in Frankfurt, acquired portrait commissions, took pictures for the press, and met the young Arno Grünebaum, who had taken an interest in photography. They married, but aware of the threat posed by Nazi attacks on Jewish institutions, they fled to Paris in January 1934. Here Mandello enjoyed a career she could scarcely have imagined as a fashion photographer, with commissions from companies like Balanciaga, Mainbocher, Maggy Rouff and Chanel, to name but a few.

Her career ended overnight when the Nazis invaded France. Like all German women, she was temporarily interned at the camp in Gurs after the National Socialists occupied Paris in 1940, after which she and her husband managed to escape via Spain and emigrate to Uruguay. Yet again she found the energy for a new beginning: she borrowed a Rolleiflex, and was soon successful with her portraits of artists and pictures for tourist guides. In 1953 Jeanne Mandello separated from Arno Grünebaum, settling in Barcelona in 1959.

The lives of both women photographers were coloured by their fate as refugees and emigrées, while Jeanne Mandello suffered the additional blow of losing almost all her work.

source of text and picture on bottom : Das Verborgene Museum

Sunny Lorinczi was born in Uruguay in 1930 to a family of Hungarian origin. A ballet dancer from her early teenage years, she goes on to interpret the starring roles of classical ballet’s repertoire, such as “Giselle”, throughout South America. She becomes the Montevideo’s Sodre’s prima ballerina in 1951, under the direction of Vaclav Veltchek. In 1961, she moves to France with her French husband and son and sets up her own ballet school. | src Jeanne Mandello