Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Betti Mautner photographer

Betti Mautner was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1892. She became a proficient amateur photographer, exhibiting her works both nationally and in the USA and Canada, prior to her immigration to England in 1938. Afterwards, she exhibited with the Camera Club London, became an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, and lectured in pictorial photography under the London County Council's Adult Education Scheme.

Born: 1892 Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria)

Died: 1989 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1938


Biography

Photographer Betti Mautner was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1892. After discovering her uncle's discarded 9 x 12 inch camera, she became a proficient amateur photographer and exhibited internationally throughout the 1920s and 1930s. She also worked as a private tutor in English and Stenography and was a member of the Vienna Photoclub. Her subjects included landscapes and portraiture, among the latter a photograph of the village wheelwright (now V&A), shown at the Canadian National Exhibition, Toronto Camera Club in 1924, and Son and Heir (V&A), a photograph of a baby reclining on a lace cushion, which was exhibited widely in the USA: at the Gallery of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia (1932 December), the Kodak Camera Club of Rochester (1932–33), Chicago Camera Club (1933), Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science (April 1933), and the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum (July 1933); her photographs were also included in the 1933 Austrian photography yearbook, published by the Association of Austrian Amateur Photographers. Two years later, in 1935, two of her Austrian landscape photographs, A View-point at Graz, Styria and Returning from Church in the Austrian Tyrol, were published in the 'Sent by a Reader' section of the Manchester Guardian newspaper, suggesting she had contacts in England. Her c. 1936 photograph, The Rolleiflexer (V&A), showing her subject dramatically posed with the camera held at waist-height, further suggests that Mautner also owned a rolleiflex herself; she exhibited further works in Los Angeles (1937) and the Vienna IVth Internationaler Salon (1937).


Following the Anschluss (Nazi annexation of Austria), Mautner immigrated to Britain in 1938; her photographs record addresses in the Rusholme district of Manchester and also in north west London (NW6 and NW11). She is listed as an exhibitor with the Austrian Centre - a politically inspired wartime organisation founded in London to represent Austrian anti-Nazi refugees between 1939 and 1947 (Vinzent, 2006) - and she also showed at the Camera Club London (from c. 1948). She became an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society in 1949 (recorded in The Photographic Journal, July 1950), as well as lecturing in pictorial photography under the London County Council (LCC)'s Adult Education Scheme. In 1952 her photographic manual, All About Making Contact Prints from your Negatives, was published by Focal Press, the publishing house established by Hungarian refugee Andor Kraszna-Krausz.


Betti Mautner died in England in December 1989 (Registration of death, courtesy of Katy Ferguson, Hundred Heroines website). 34 of Mautner's pre-exile photographs, dated between 1920 and 1936 (including one for the Vienna photoclub), can be found in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (together with one later work of Tewkesbury from 1943). Mautner is cited in the 2013 Jewish Museum in Vienna exhibition catalogue, Shooting Girls, showcasing Viennese Jewish émigrée photographers largely forgotten in their native land; her work was included in the 2020 exhibition Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933 at the Four Corners Gallery, London with an accompanying catalogue by Carla Mitchell and John March, and she is also the subject of a profile on the Hundred Heroines website.

Related books

  • Carla Mitchell and John March, Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933 (London: Four Corners Gallery, 2020)
  • Michael Berkowitz, Emigre Photographers in ed., Monica Bohm-Duchen, Insider/Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Visual Culture (London: Lund Humphries, 2018), p. 242, fn. 17
  • Iris Meder and Andrea Winkelbauer, Shooting Girls: Jüdische Fotografinnen aus Wien (Vienna: Jüdisches Museum/Metroverlag, 2012)
  • Betti Mautner, All About Making Contact Prints from your Negatives (London: Focal Press, 1952)
  • The Photographic Journal, July 1950

Public collections

Related organisations

  • Royal Photographic Society (Associate)
  • London County Council's Adult Education Scheme (lecturer)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933, Four Corners Gallery, London (2020)
  Betti Mautner
   
Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Betti Mautner]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Betti Mautner] in the Ben Uri Library