A Working Woman’s Eye

Abstract

In 1937, just as South Africa was closing its borders to German-Jewish refugees, Anne Fischer (1914-1986) arrived on Cape Town’s docks with little more to her name than her camera. Having escaped a fascist political system in which similar issues of violence and state-enforced segregation were in play, Fischer was uniquely poised to document the fundamental changes that would come to define South Africa in the decade leading up to the advent of apartheid. In addition to exploring how her gendered experiences of exile informed, and in many ways dictated, the possibilities of her photographic practice in her new colonial context, this chapter begins to chronicle the itinerant photographic careers of her similarly exiled and equally obscured Weimar women colleagues in Cape Town - namely, those of Else Hausmann (n.d.-1971) and Etel Mittag-Fodor (1905-2005). Despite sharing somewhat similar backgrounds, each of these women’s oeuvres is as distinct as their dispositions. Examining their lives and archives in relation to one another affords an opportunity to take into account their divergent relationships with their shared medium and, in so doing, challenges essentialisms that continue to pervade discussions of women’s photographic work. Ultimately, this chapter works to shed light on three of South Africa’s underexposed female photographers and begins to situate Fischer’s early documentary work within the social, historical and political context in which it was produced - one marked by rising white supremacism, heightened antisemitism and the increased realisation of the boundaries that circumscribed the New Woman.