Elisabeth Chat was born in Graz, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1914. At nineteen she enrolled at Vienna University to study Maths, but faced with blatant anti-Semitism, left to study photography at the Graphische Lehr und Versuchanstalt. In 1938 Chat immigrated to England and after a period of internment on the Isle of Man, she established her studio in Cricklewood, north London, working for the West Middlesex Hospital and the pioneering illustrated news magazine <em>Picture Post</em>, before specialising in children's portraiture.
Photographer Elisabeth Chat was born to a Jewish family in Graz, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1914, moving to Vienna at the age of twelve. At nineteen she entered Vienna University to study Maths, but faced with blatant anti-Semitism, left to study photography at the Graphische Lehr und Versuchanstalt. She was apprenticed in a portrait studio run by a Jewish woman.
In 1938 Chat left for England, landing at Harwich on 7th November where she was granted leave to remain for one year. Her parents and younger sister later perished in the Holocaust. Chat was interned at Rushen Camp for women on the Isle of Man between 1940 and 1941 before joining the Land Army. In 1942 she worked as a darkroom assistant in a studio in Hendon, north London, then at the West Middlesex Hospital taking pictures of skin diseases, and ran her own studio in Cricklewood. After the war, she met Simon Guttmann of the photographic Report Agency, who gave her many commissions for Picture Post, the pioneering illustrated new magazine, including the beginnings of Peterlee New Town on the Durham coalfields. These disparate picture narratives were particularly significant, in that they presented, to a war-weary and austerity-burdened British public, the promise of a more active welfare state, one which might embody more humane care for the vulnerable and better housing in the future. In the 1950s she had two children with German refugee photographer Peter Heinersdorff. Later Chat specialised in children's portraiture and taught photography at a comprehensive school in North London. Elisabeth Chat died in 2009 in North Wales. Most recently her photographs were featured in Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933, an exhibition organised by the Four Corners Gallery, London in 2020.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Elisabeth Chat]
Publications related to [Elisabeth Chat] in the Ben Uri Library