Gerti Deutsch was born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1908. Following her diagnosis with neuritis, she had to abandon her career as a concert pianist, retraining in photography at the Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt, Vienna. Fleeing from Nazi persecution in 1936, she Immigrated to London, where she worked as a portrait photographer and became well-known for her photographic contributions to the pioneering news magazine Picture Post between 1938 and 1950, among other publications.
Photographer Gerti Deutsch was born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) on 19 December 1908. Initially home-educated, she was then sent to school in Vienna, and to an English boarding school aged 16, before entering the Wiener Musikakademie. Unable to become a concert pianist after contracting neuritis, she re-trained as a photographer, attending the Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt from 1933–34, studying portraiture and observational photography. After time in Paris and London, where she thought she would be taken more seriously as a professional woman, Deutsch returned to Vienna during her father’s final illness.
Fearing Nazi persecution, in 1936 Deutsch escaped to London, also hopeful of more professional opportunities. She shared a portrait studio off Bond Street with modernist photographer and society figure, Barbara Ker-Seymer, and freelanced for magazines including The Sphere, The Bystander and Weekly Illustrated, producing photographic features which allowed her to obtain a work permit and the right to reside in Britain. In 1936 she had her first exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Association in London, the forerunner of the present-day Austrian Cultural Forum and in 1938 she began to work as a freelance photojournalist (and the first female photographer) for the new weekly picture magazine Picture Post, founded by the editor, Hungarian émigré, Stefan Lorant. His assistant editor was Tom Hopkinson (later editor between 1941–50), whom she married the same year. Temporarily abandoning portraiture and street scenes, her first story for the magazine, Their First Day in England, documented the arrival of Jewish refugee children on the Kindertransport from Nazi Germany. Deutsch subsequently produced over 60 photo essays covering music, the arts and social issues in Britain and abroad. Fellow Viennese émigré photographer, Wolf Suschitzky said of her, 'If the name Gerti Deutsch is not known to you, it is because you're too young to have read Picture Post' (thejc.com, 25 May 2010). Immediately after the War, she contributed photo reportage from her native Vienna including Home from Russia (1948) documenting a city divided by occupying powers, into whose eastern zone former prisoners of war were still being returned. The harrowing scenes she witnessed in compiling this and A Foreign Correspondent's Life (with Anthony Terry) may well have affected her decision not to return to live in Vienna once her two daughters had grown up. She used her connections to shoot stories that combined the political with the cultural, such as the acting company composed entirely of exiled Austrians, performing The Good Soldier Schweik in German at the Lantern Theatre in Kilburn. She also photographed children gathered at the Hampstead home of émigré architect Ernő Goldfinger to create an exhibition of drawings of the War. Like most of the women photographers on the staff of Picture Post, Deutsch also shot several so-called 'soft' stories. From the 1940s to 1960s, she took 'story portraits' of writers and artists, from author John Cowper Powys in Wales to the sculptor Lynn Chadwick at his Gloucestershire studio, to authors and actors in London, including Julian Huxley, J.B. Priestley, W. H. Auden and the Redgraves. Although she did not exhibit directly with Ben Uri, in April 1959 Deutsch's portrait of the émigré medical doctor and painter, Phoebus Tuttnauer, accompanied a review of his show at the gallery in The Tatler. She also photographed distinguished musicians, including Arthur Schnabel, Arturo Toscanini, Pablo Casals, Benjamin Britten and Yehudi Menuhin.
Postwar, Deutsch returned to photograph a very different Austria, away from the cities, often focussing on folklore. From the mid-1950s she worked for various publications, including Tatler, Harper's Bazaar, the new outlets Nova and Holiday, the Swiss magazine Atlantis and the French magazine L'ŒIL producing an increasing number of travel features. She frequently collaborated with photographer Inge Morath, who had also migrated from Austria and worked with the renowned Magnum Agency (founded in 1948, specialising in what became known as humanitarian photography). Among Deutsch's surviving works are photographs captioned and signed by both women, mostly taken in Austria; to date, there are no records documenting the precise extent of their collaboration. In summer 1960, Deutsch spent six weeks in Japan, exhibiting the resulting photographs in an exhibition at Olympia, London in 1962. After a stay in Italy in the late 1960s, she spent several years in Austria. Following a sudden and severe illness, Deutsch returned to England where her daughter Amanda was able to care for her, before her death in Leamington Spa in December 1979. Posthumously, Deutsch has featured in Women Photographers in Great Britain 1900–1950, The Photographers' Gallery, London (1987) and in Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933, Four Corners Gallery, London (2020). Her daughters curated a small solo exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum (2010) and in Berlin (2011); a more extensive show was presented by the Fotohof Gallery in Salzburg (2011).
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Gerti Deutsch]
Publications related to [Gerti Deutsch] in the Ben Uri Library