Photogenic

Jacobi was born to a long line of photographers; her great-grandfather studied with Louis Daguerre, who established the daguerreotype in 1939, one of the first widely used photographic processes. Jacobi took her first photograph at the age of 12 with a pinhole camera and managed her father’s studio in Berlin from 1927 until 1935. In Berlin, she was a celebrated portraitist of artists and celebrities.

Due to her leftist politics and Jewish heritage, she fled Nazi Germany and established a studio in New York City, where she was active from 1935 until 1955. This work comes from a body of abstract photography begun in the 1950s, which Jacobi referred to as “photogenics.” She produced these cameraless photographs by arranging glass, cellophane, and other transparent materials over a sheet of photographic paper while shining a flashlight at it.