Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1911 Darmstadt, Germany

Died: 2014 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1933

Other name/s: Elsbeth Goldstein, Jay

Biography

Photographer Elsbeth Juda (née Elsbeth Goldstein) was born into an intellectual Jewish family in Darmstadt, Germany on 2 May 1911. Her father, Julius Goldstein, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Darmstadt, was highly supportive of her education, sending her on holidays to England to improve her English. In 1931 she married her childhood sweetheart, the publisher and businessman Hans Juda and moved to Berlin. Two years later the couple immigrated to England, having been advised to leave Germany by a friend who worked at the Interior Ministry. Arriving with only a suitcase of clothes, another of books, and Hans’s beloved violin, they settled in London, where Hans began working for International Textiles: an Amsterdam-based, multi-lingual textile magazine established earlier that year by the advertising manager Ludwig Katz. Juda initially worked as Hans’ translator (he was unable to speak English), interviewing tailors and garment manufacturers for the magazine. Katz had already appointed Bauhaus photographer László Moholy-Nagy as the magazine’s art director and, in January 1935, shortly before he settled in London permanently he made a trip to the capital to produce a lavish twelve-page promotional feature for Viyella, 'the first branded fabric in the world'. The shoot took place at the Judas’ one-bedroom flat in Queen’s Gate, west London, with Juda stepping in as Moholy-Nagy’s assistant. Moholy-Nagy told Juda she had a ‘good eye’ and suggested she take photography lessons with his ex-wife and fellow Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy (Breward and Wilcox, 2012). These lessons required Juda to transform their kitchen into the developing room and their bathroom into the print washroom; as she later joked, ‘poor Hans didn’t know whether one day he would be drinking developer fluid, or if he might suddenly find himself bathing in a tub of stopper/fixer’ (Breward and Wilcox, 2012).

Juda went on to work as a ‘darkroom boy’ at Scaioni’s, a commercial photography studio in Dean Street, Soho, where she became known as ‘Jay’, as it was considered impolite to call a married woman by her first name (Stapleton, 2009). When her boss Captain Richard Everett was unexpectedly late returning from holiday, she was required to take over a shoot for the fur company Révillon Frères. The studio and the client were so impressed with her work that she permanently replaced Everett as ‘lead operator’ and photographed the company’s furs for the next 30 years (Breward and Wilcox, 2012). After Scaioni’s was bombed during the Blitz, Juda rented her own studio and became a freelance photographer, continuing to work under the name Jay. She also contributed to the war effort, working as a medical photographer at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, Surrey, under the direction of Archibald Moore (the pioneering surgeon in charge of the hospital’s Centre for Plastic and Jaw Surgery), photographing badly burned and injured RAF aircrew before and after surgery.

Constant air raids made it difficult and costly for Juda to maintain her studio, so she joined International Textiles as a photographer and associate editor, later becoming one of its directors. She proved herself to be extremely talented at lighting and arranging clothes and fabrics, highlighting their texture, weight, and movement – skills which also earned her important commissions from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. In 1946, the Judas successfully laid claim to the English edition of International Textiles, enabling them to rebrand the magazine as The Ambassador, a far more fitting title for a publication that would play such a key role in promoting British textile and clothing exports in the post-war years (Nyburg, 2019). Juda disregarded commercial photography’s formal conventions, instead using unusual, often incongruous, backdrops for her shoots, which featured some of the best known faces in British art and design, including Kenneth Armitage, Peter Blake William Scott, Joe Tilson and Henry Moore (whom she photographed at work on his King and Queen sculpture in 1953). In 1954 Juda documented Graham Sutherland's commission to paint Winston Churchill's portrait, later reportedly burned by his wife. Following Hans’ death in 1975, Juda gave up photography and became an artist, working primarily with still lifes and collages. In 2008 Juda was appointed senior fellow of the Royal College of Art, London, honouring her life long interest in art education. Elspeth Juda died in London in 2014 at the age of 103. Her work is held in UK public collections including the National Portrait Gallery, London and the archives of The Ambassador are held by the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. In 2009 L’Equipement des Arts, London held an exhibition of 140 of Juda's photographs dating from 1940 to 1965, many of which had never been seen before and, in 2017, her work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum, London.

Related books

Carla Mitchell and John March, Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933 (London: Four Corners Gallery, 2020)
Anna Nyburg, 'Textile in Exile: Refugee Textile Surface Designers in Britain', in Marian Malet, Rachel Dickson, Sarah MacDougall, Anna Nyburg eds., Applied Arts in British Exile from 1933: Changing Visual and Material Culture (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019), pp. 212-228
Christopher Breward and Claire Wilcox eds., The Ambassador Magazine: Promoting Post-war British Textiles and Fashion (London: V&A Publishing, 2012)
Annamarie Stapleton, 'The Ambassador Magazine: The Contribution of One Trade Journal to the British Fashion and Textile Industry', The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 – the Present, no. 33, 2009, pp. 90-105
Elsbeth Juda, exhib. cat. (London: England and Co, 1994)

Public collections

Related organisations

Royal College of Art, London (senior fellow, 2008)

Selected exhibitions

Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933, Four Corners Gallery, London (2020)
Elsbeth Juda: Grit and Glamour, Jewish Museum London (2017)
Island Stories, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2012)
Elsbeth Juda (Jay) Photographs 1940–1965, L'Equipement des Arts, London (2009)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Elsbeth Juda]