Fashion Photography and Women's Modernity in Weimar Germany: The Case of Yva

Abstract

This paper examines the relevance of fashion photography as a source for the study of women's modernity in Germany between the wars as it focuses on the work of a fascinating and prolific professional photographer of the late 1920s and early 1930s—Else Neulander Simon—known by her artistic name Yva. Yva discovered her own unique visual language somewhere between the commercial cliches and the modernist idioms of her time. As a successful professional photographer, she continuously searched for an image of the woman in fashion and advertisement photography that was not reductive and degrading. In an era when images of the woman as a sexual symbol were dominating mass media and were proven to attract customers, Yva positioned her photographed female model in a way that did not diminish her to a mere eye-catcher for the male spectator.