Woman with a Camera

The exhibition and catalogue were made possible by the German Friends of the Israel Museum. Liselotte Grschebina's photographs were gifted to the Israel Museum by her son, Beni Gjebin, and his wife Rina, Shoham, Israel, with the assistance of Rachel and Dov Gottesman, Tel Aviv and London. German-born Liselotte Grschebina was an avant-garde photographer in Karlsruhe whose work exemplified the energizing spirit of cultural innovation at the time of the Weimar Republic. Immigrating to Palestine in 1934, Grschebina opened a studio in Tel Aviv where she established a reputation for this new genre of photography. A modest photographer, her talent developed without major recognition until after her death, when a collection of her works was discovered in a hidden storage niche in her son's apartment. In 2000, he gifted the entire archive - including some 1,800 gelatin prints - to the Museum's Department of Photography. The exhibition showcased Grschebina's distinctive and impressive body of work, also shedding light on the phenomenon of émigré avant-garde artists who arrived in Palestine following the rise of Nazism in Germany. This was the first time that a retrospective of any kind had been assembled of Grschebina's impressive oeuvre, and the exhibition included some one hundred of her photographs, taken in Germany and in Palestine and dating from 1929 to the 1960s, notable for their synthesis of Weimar aesthetic with the oriental subject matter that Grschebina found upon her arrival in the Middle East.