Photographer Lore Krüger (née Heinemann) was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Magdeburg, Germany in 1914. Following the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933, she immigrated to England, settling near London where she worked as an au pair and studied photography. In London she learnt how to expose, develop and print her own photographs but was forced to leave the following year, her residence permit renewal request having been denied. Living in exile in the USA and Europe she became a successful documentary and portrait photographer as well as prolific translator.
Photographer Lore Krüger (née Heinemann) was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Magdeburg, Germany on 11 March 1914. She worked as a typist at the Magdeburg savings bank until the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 forced her to abandon her position. She moved to England with the help of a rabbi friend, initially working as an au pair for a family in south London where she also conducted her first experiments in photography. She recalled in her memoirs how she ‘wandered along the Thames with my beloved little box camera at dusk and attempted to capture on film the silhouettes of the buildings on the other side of the river and the lights of the city’ (Hoffmann, 2015). She also enrolled on a photography course run by the London City Council and learned how to expose, develop and print her own photographs; in the evenings, she set up a dark room in her host family’s kitchen (Hoffmann, 2015).
In 1934 after the renewal of her residence permit was denied Krüger left London, joining her parents and her younger sister Gisela in Palma de Mallorca in Spain before moving to Barcelona to pursue an apprenticeship with Austrian photographer Adolf Zerkowitz. In 1935 she moved on to Paris to study photography with renowned photographer Florence Henri, who had studied at the Bauhaus with László Moholy-Nagy. Under Henri’s tutelage Krüger began to develop a free, experimental approach also conducting darkroom experiments using montage, photogram, and multiple exposure techniques. Unlike her teacher she began work outside the studio documenting Parisian street scenes, French provincial life, the bourgeoise and the lives of the ‘Gitanes’, members of the Sinti and Roma communities in the south of France. When visiting her family in Mallorca in August 1936, she also photographed the corpses of Republican troops and civilians killed during the Battle of Mallorca. Shortly afterwards she returned to Paris, living with her sister in a small apartment at Rue Dombasle 10 in the 15th arrondissement, where her neighbours included the philosopher Walter Benjamin and the writer Arthur Koestler amongst other émigrés. There she set up her own portrait photography studio under the name Loré, photographing notable sitters including the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and the writer Charles Sirato.
Following Germany’s invasion of France in May 1940, Krüger and her sister were interned at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris before being sent to the Gurs camp in the Basses-Pyrénées along with other ‘hostile foreigners’. When they were released a few months later, they were joined by Ernst, Lore's husband (a trade union leader and veteran of the International Brigades in Spain), who had also been interned. Together they reached Marseille and in May 1941 were granted a collective visa enabling them to travel to Mexico via the USA on board a cargo ship. Before reaching their destination, however, the Dutch army seized the ship and placed all of its passengers in a British internment camp on the island of Trinidad. Afterwards, Krüger settled in New York, opened a portrait photography studio and co-founded anti-fascist organisation, the German American Emergency Conference, and its affiliated magazine, The German American. Her portraits included prominent German exiles, among them the author and publisher Alfred Kantorowicz and Kurt Rosenfeld, a socialist politician and former Prussian justice minister who had been the defence attorney of Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg.
In December 1946, Lore and Ernst Krüger returned to Germany and settled in east Berlin. Following the birth of her second child in early 1947, Krüger fell ill with diptheria. Not well enough to continue her photographic practice she began working for the publishing house Aufbau Verlag, translating more than thirty works by English and American authors including Daniel Defoe, Mark Twain and Henry James. Lore Krüger died in Berlin on 3 March 2009. Since her death she has been the subject of major retrospectives at the C/O Berlin Foundation and the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaisme in Paris. Her year in England, although formative, was a very brief part of her photographic career.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Lore Krüger]
Publications related to [Lore Krüger] in the Ben Uri Library