MANCHESTER, NH. – A fourth-generation photographer, Lotte Jacobi grew up in Germany, traveled widely, and lived and worked for 20 years in New York City. In 1955 she moved to Deering, New Hampshire, where she ran a gallery and continued her photography. Although her sitters included Albert Einstein, J.D. Salinger, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Frost and Marc Chagall,  her talent was not limited to portraiture – Jacobi’s insatiable curiosity led her to photograph everything that interested her. Perhaps her most innovative contribution was the creation of abstract, cameraless images, which she called “photogenics.” Throughout her life, Lotte Jacobi fought vigorously to promote photography as a fine art on equal footing with painting and sculpture. By the time of her death in 1990, she had become an internationally admired photographer.

The Currier Museum of Art opened the most comprehensive exhibition of photographs by Jacobi to date. Focus on the Soul: The Photographs of Lotte Jacobi includes 83 photographs and features her lesser-known documentary travel photographs from Central Asia, the portraits from Berlin and New York City for which she is best known today, and a selection of cityscapes, landscapes and abstract images.

“Jacobi’s photographs are a significant contribution to the history of photography and stand today as an important historical document of pre-World War II Germany and postwar America,” says Dr. Kurt Sundstrom, Associate Curator at the Currier and organizer of the exhibition. After opening in Manchester, New Hampshire on October 10, Focus on the Soul will travel to The Jewish Museum, New York City (February 6 – April 11, 2004) and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (June 18 – September 5, 2004). Focus on the Soul is sponsored by Bank of New Hampshire, a division of Banknorth, N.A.; Ernst & Young; and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. The media sponsor is WFEA AM 1370.

Family business - Lotte Jacobi was born in Thorn, West Prussia. Her great-grandfather was said to have purchased a license to practice photography in Paris from Louis Daguerre, the inventor of photography. Jacobi’s grandfather and father built a national reputation for their photography studio, where Lotte Jacobi began to learn about her art. In her youth, Jacobi lived and studied in Berlin and Munich, moving within the elite circles of the art communities in those cities. There, she explored her love for theater and dance, befriending and photographing actors and dancers. In the early 1930s, Lotte Jacobi traveled to the developing Central Asian republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, documenting a foreign culture in the midst of political and economic change. In response to the encroaching danger of the Nazi regime, she left Germany for New York in the fall of 1935, where she promptly opened a photography studio.

Despite some initial struggles in New York, Jacobi continued to work, and again she found friends among the world’s leaders in the arts, science and politics. After the death of her husband, she moved to rural Deering, New Hampshire. In 1963, she opened a gallery there, so that she and other local and international artists might display their work. Lotte Jacobi died in 1990 in Concord, New Hampshire. Her work is now in the permanent collection of such museums as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum.
Lotte Jacobi’s presence in New Hampshire had a profound impact on many local artists.  A companion exhibition entitled Lotte’s Legacy: Five New Hampshire Photographers will feature works by New Hampshire residents Gary Samson, Hope Zanes, David MacEachran, Bill Finney and Doug Prince, accompanied by accounts and memories of the times they spent with her.

Video, Lectures, and Tours - In conjunction with the exhibition Focus on the Soul, the Currier Museum of Art has produced a 15-minute video exploring Jacobi’s art and life, in association with Atlantic Media of Portsmouth and Gary Samson, noted New Hampshire photographer and Chair of the Photography Department at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. Narrated by New Hampshire Poet Laureate Marie Harris, the video includes archival footage of Jacobi discussing her artistic philosophy as well as interviews with Samson; Dr. Kurt Sundstrom; Christopher Cook, former director of the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy Andover; and photography historian Dr. Naomi Rosenblum.