Archival Images and Digital Futures: Revisiting Elli Marcus’s Fashion and Theater Photography

At the centre of the interdisciplinary research project is the wide-ranging production of German-Jewish-American photographer Elli Marcus (1899–1977) during all three periods of her career (Berlin,1919-33; Paris, 1933-40, and New York, 1941-77). The goals of the project include the restoration of Marcus’s deserved place as a female master of photography whose legacy is situated on the intersection of commercial work, experimentation, and the visual documentation of a rich cultural era. Her studio and character portraits, and published fashion photographs form a rich panorama of bygone times, an almost “Who is who?” on the cultural scene in Berlin, Paris, and New York City in the first half of the 20th century. Her images expose, as one American critic put it, “the shining surface of a troubled era,” and it is our task to rediscover the deep undercurrents and complex interconnections surrounding Marcus’s photography.

Drawing on the artist’s personal archive – several scrapbooks, correspondence, unpublished autobiographical fragments, old prints, and other documents – and reviewing hundreds of her theatre and fashion photographs, this project aims at mounting a digital exhibition of her photographic work, conducting a two-day workshop at TU Dortmund University as well as publishing a peer-reviewed article in German Studies Review – the latter two projects in collaboration with Prof. Dr Gudrun König. This project uses the rediscovery of Marcus’s rich photographic archive as a starting point for addressing several questions with wider theoretical and methodological implications:

1. How does the photography archive relate to theatre and fashion history, with both fashion and theatre being extremely ephemeral media, existing in the present moment?
2. What happens to the photography archive in the course of exile, which involves multiple displacements across multiple spatial and temporal borders? How are the photographic genres (theatre, fashion, portrait, studio photography) affected by the processes of recognition and fame (1920s-1930s), displacement (1940s), adaptation, oblivion, and rediscovery?
3. How is the photographic archive (of fashion, portrait, and theatre photography featuring celebrities of the 1920-1940s) made relevant for contemporary and future audiences that have no nostalgic connections to the past? What is the heuristic value of the archive within today’s digital media?
4. What happens to historical photographic images in the process of digitalization and/or preparation for exhibition on a digital platform or social media? What are the specifics of curatorial work involved in mounting a virtual exhibition?