Genja Jonas. Her photography studio as a hub of Dresden’s cultural life
Lecture as part of the Year of Jewish Culture in Saxony
With this lecture on the photographic work of Genja Jonas (1895–1938), Genja Jonas’s biographer Alexander Atanassow is making his contribution to ensuring that this once so well-known and admired photographer is given her rightful place in Dresden.
As a representative of many other Jewish photographers, she is thus to be restored to the dignity that was taken from them – often at the height of their artistic careers – by the Nazis and the zeitgeist they so effectively propagated; through exclusion, the deprivation of their means of livelihood, and even physical extermination – which ultimately consigned them to oblivion.
Remembrance plays an important role. However, the focus of the lecture is on the connections between Genja Jonas and her studio within, and in relation to, the cultural landscape of the city of Dresden between 1918 and 1938. Added to this is the model of a woman’s life – that of an independent and well-connected artist in a male-dominated industry – which still appears modern today.
- With Alexander Atanassow (lecture)