Inge Ader (née Inge Nord) was born into a Jewish family in Schwerin, Germany in 1918 and completed a photographic apprenticeship in 1937, before fleeing to England in 1939. Three years later, with fellow German-Jewish émigrée Anneliese Bunyard, she opened the Bunyard Ader photographic studio, which closed in 1948–49.
Photographer Inge Ader (née Inge Nord) was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Schwerin, Germany in 1918. Following Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship in 1933, the family suffered increasing anti-Semitism, and she left school, at the age of 15, without taking her exams moving with her mother to Hamburg. Instead, she undertook a four-year photographic apprenticeship, which she completed in 1937, paving the way for her future career.
In 1939, Ader fled Germany, arriving alone in England on 4 April on a domestic service permit (the most common method for women to gain entry in this period). In 2003, when interviewed by Bea Lewkowicz for the Association of Jewish Refugees Refugee Voices Project, she recalled her early struggles: firstly, with British immigration authorities over importing her camera equipment; and secondly, her mistreatment at the hands of the wealthy Faust family, while working as a maid in Manchester.
Two months later, upon the arrival in England of her fiancé Max Ader, she resigned her post, and the couple moved to London, marrying later that year (they went on to have two children). Inge spent a formative year working as the sole assistant (apart from an older woman apprentice) to the Austrian-Jewish fashion photographer Karl Schenker (who had arrived in Britain the year before), based at his Lower Regent Street, and later, Dover Street studios, in the fashionable area of Mayfair. Through Schenker, Ader met Anneliese Bunyard, a fellow German-Jewish émigrée who had arrived in Britain in 1936. In spring 1942, they opened the Bunyard Ader photographic studio on the Finchley Road, north London, in the area nicknamed ‘Finchleystrasse’ owing to the large influx of German-speaking refugees. Their partnership has been described as an important example of ‘working contact between the group of women exile photographers’ then practising in Britain (John March, 2019). Bunyard specialised in portraiture and Ader in advertising and fashion photography but they signed all their work with the collective signature ‘Bunyard Ader’. Their subsequent commissions creating advertisements and photography spreads for Vogue, Tatler and Harper’s Bazaar are a testament to both their individual and collaborative photographic skills. Their studio also undertook family, society and professional portraits. They sought to employ fellow immigrants whenever they could and also photographed immigrant actors at the Austrian exile theatre Das Laterndl and at the Embassy Theatre (a repertory company in Swiss Cottage which gave work to immigrant actors). When the rent was raised substantially around 1948-49, however, the studio was forced to close. Ader later reflected on the considerable impact of immigrant women photographers on British photographic practice during this critical period:
‘Photography in England wasn’t quite so advanced. The good photographers were the society photographers who did very old-fashioned pictures, which none of them where I worked did. That was done in Germany twenty years earlier. And I worked here for one year at Karl Schenker, also a refugee, and he did mainly fashion. That was again very good training and very modern for the times. And I learned really something completely new. A first-class fashion photographer […] Bond Street style which was hazy, sepia, brown, unsharp, kind, but not what I would call good photographs […] The society photographers in Bond Street, though they were very well liked by English people, they were not our style’ (Cited March, 2019).
Little is known of the rest of Ader’s life, although she later moved with her family to Hampstead, where she continued to work from her home. She died in London on 3 April 2006. Several photographs by the Ader Bunyard Studio were featured in the 2020 exhibition Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933, with an accompanying catalogue by Carla Mitchell and John March. Ader’s work is not currently represented in any UK collections.