Lotte Meitner-Graf was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1899. She trained at the Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna, Warsaw and Munich and opened a portrait studio in Vienna in 1925, where she quickly gained a considerable reputation for her portraits of eminent European scientists, artists and musicians. In 1937, forced to flee the Nazi regime, she settled in London with her husband and son, and managed the Fayer Studio in Mayfair, later opening her own Bond Street studio in 1953.
Lotte Meitner-Graf was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1899. She trained at the Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna, Warsaw and Munich. In 1923 she married Walter Meitner and, two years later, opened her own portrait studio in Vienna, quickly gaining a considerable reputation. As a result of her frequent visits to Germany to visit her sister-in-law, celebrated nuclear physicist Lise Meitner, she gained introductions to many other eminent European scientists, whom she photographed in her own distinctive style, as well as other cultural figures including academics, artists and musicians.
In 1937, she fled the Nazi regime, settling in London with her husband and son and became manager of the Fayer Studio in Mayfair, where she signed the prints with her own name. In 1953 she opened her own studio at 23 Old Bond Street, where her assistants included Anthony Crickmay, who observed: 'She had a very, very intense approach to her work which rubbed off on me'. Over the course of her career Meitner-Graf photographed a huge range of continental European and British cultural figures from the political, musical, scientific and theatrical spheres including Arthur Ransome, Bertrand Russell, Marian Anderson, Benjamin Britten, Yehudi Menuhin, John Gielgud, Danny Kaye, Walter Gropius, Oskar Kokoschka, Pandit Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Max Planck and Alexander Fleming. In 1954 she exhibited her portraits of musicians alongside other photographers, such as Douglas Glass, at the Royal Festival Hall. As John March notes, 'the work and career Meitner-Graf stand as an example of the way in which her dedication to her photographic work served to illuminate one important strand of British life. Likewise, her work acted as a vehicle for her complete assimilation into British cultural life' (March, 2019).
Lotte Meitner-Graf died in London in 1973. In her obituary in The Times newspaper, Professor Otto Frisch observed that: 'There can be few educated people who have not seen one of Lotte Meitner-Graf's photographic portraits, either on a book jacket or on a record sleeve or concert programme'. In fact, beyond the 'educated people' referred to by Professor Frisch, the reach of Meitner-Graf's photographs was much wider. Her photographs of musicians were used by the Radio Times to trail concerts broadcast on the BBC and one of her portrait subjects, Otto Klemperer (1887–1973) was the subject of two BBC radio programmes aired in 1972 and 1976 to which Meitner-Graf also contributed her memories and opinions. For forty years after her death, the archives of negatives from over 3000 sessions, together with many display prints were preserved by her family in a Winchester farmhouse. In 2014, the family established The Lotte Meitner-Graf Archive to catalogue and preserve the negatives and prints in addition to creating new archival pigment prints for exhibitions. Her work can be found in UK collections including the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal College of Music and the University of Cambridge.