Eight Girls Taking Pictures (34 page)

“Perhaps
dislike
is the wrong word, since it indicates a reaction, when, in fact, his books leave me indifferent.”

The girls were talking about a recent literary reading given by an internationally known Berlin writer at one of the big department stores. Giselle Weiss, with her aspirations to be a film editor, loved books. Her parents, like Ines’s, lived in Heidelberg, where her mother was a poet and professor, and her father a psychiatrist, which, claimed Giselle, doesn’t exactly make for the most involved parents. “It was like growing up with housemates,” said Giselle. “Very loving housemates.”

Talk then turned to movies and the recent protest against the showing of
All Quiet on the Western Front,
which Carl von Ossietzky, pacifist and editor in chief of the cultural magazine
Die Weltbühne,
called Fascism’s “first victory. Today it was a film, tomorrow it will be something else.” This brought the conversation back to the Great War and its casualties, which had Hanna talking again about the internationally known writer.

They talked about photography, the New Objectivism and Expressionism and how its time was now officially over, as far as Charlotte was concerned. They talked about Surrealism and collage and Hannah Höch with her photomontages of women and politics, and someone said something about John Heartfield’s photomontages as well. They talked about various magazines, politics; Grete and Giselle were Communists, while Charlotte and Ines demurred and said they chose art instead, prompting Maria and Neile to say that you can’t parse one from the other.

Then it was time for bed and all the girls piled into the tents, where everyone fell immediately and blissfully asleep.

Rainier Ermler had moved his class to the Bauhaus in Dessau, where Charlotte and Ines would travel twice a week. He taught them how to
judge a picture from a negative and how important it was to “be the eye of the camera,” a statement so simple that it was radical.

Ines made a picture of Charlotte that prompted Rainier to grunt and say, “Who knows what you’ll do with your life, but you should never give up photography.”

“I was actually terrified when he said that,” Ines told Charlotte, “because it suddenly seemed something too enormous in my life. What if I’m good only with this one picture?”

“Then you’ll be one of those people who does one thing really well,” said Charlotte, tucking a curl behind Ines’s ear.

“We could open a studio where I sell only that one portrait of you.”

“I could take one of you. You know, just to show our range,” said Charlotte.

“Is that like ‘less is more’?”

“It’s more like ‘less is less.’ ”

“I love you,” said Ines.

“You’re a great photographer. And I’m not just saying that because I love you too.” Charlotte said, “Or because I’m copying Rainier.”

In 1930, when Charlotte and Ines were twenty-six and twenty-seven, respectively, Rainier Ermler made a permanent move to Dessau, and Charlotte came into a small inheritance, giving her the means to move out of her parents’ house, now solely occupied by Trilby, since their parents were in the Netherlands while her father collaborated on a Dutch project with another architect.

She purchased a large studio with living quarters upstairs, close off of Friedrichstrasse, with its array of city lights. Downstairs was outfitted with the photographic equipment she purchased from Rainier Ermler.

“I want us to be partners,” said Charlotte to Ines one morning over coffee.

“Is this about the minimalist, less-is-less studio?”

For the past year, the girls had been studying with Rainier Ermler, and refining their ideas about photography, not to mention falling in
love in a way that made Charlotte question the difference between having a best friend and having a girlfriend, only to tell herself that all love is mutable, only the love itself the stable element. They both believed that there was no more thrilling place to be than Berlin if you were young and eager for a world that made no distinction between art and commerce.

Advertising was their passion.

“We can open a photography studio specializing in advertising and, when we need to, portraits. Functional art,” said Charlotte. “We can do this.”

kitten + kohl was the name of their studio because it was young (they were young), the profession of advertising photography was young (nearly unheard of), because
kitten
was playful (they were playful) and
kohl
sexually suggestive (in the first flush of first love it was nearly impossible not to see the world in erotic terms).

In the window, and on their business cards, they used a double self-portrait: Charlotte—dressed in a sleeveless striped shirt, wide-legged white trousers, tucked into black leather boots—reclined nearly horizontal on a very small, wooden folding stool, her hair hidden under a scarf, with a long, fake black beard, and wearing black gloves that ended above her wrists. Ines, her curls held back by a gauzy bow, wore capris and an identical striped shirt, only with a pair of pale net angel wings affixed to her shoulders; she balanced on the stool, her foot planted between Charlotte’s thighs, with her other leg angled behind her in an arabesque. Charlotte’s gloved hands held Ines’s bare fingers while both girls looked at the lens of the camera.

All of this was set before a white wall with a small rectangular black backdrop, so there was no mistaking the location as a photography studio.

The Strongman and the Flying Something
was the title of the whimsical picture that said nearly everything there was to say about the girls and their work.

The Monkey Bar was Neile’s suggestion.

The same group from that first camping trip to the Wannsee (Grete and Giselle, Maria, Neile, Ines and Charlotte) had gathered to celebrate three years of kitten + kohl and the fact that the studio had just won its first prize at the Deuxième Exposition Internationale de la Photographie et du Cinéma in Brussels for one of their advertising posters. The partners had been mentioned in various graphic arts magazines for their style of clean lines and collage, along with their images of women that often conveyed what seemed at first a slightly exaggerated female depiction in the service of self-mockery, except that the astute observer couldn’t miss the political commentary beneath the joke. Sometimes their models were mannequins made to look like real women and, just as often, real women were made up to resemble mannequins. It was this duality, of the image seeming to be one thing when it was also another, that drew clients to their work.

The barrage of ads—on windows, walls, posts—thrilled Charlotte. Twenty-nine years old and she had her own studio, clients, a business partner and lover who shared her vision. Or maybe Charlotte shared Ines’s vision. Advertising was still so new that kitten + kohl had the opportunity not only to be a part of it but to influence it as well. The newness of the profession allowed for a lot of creative space, colliding with the embrace of the modern. kitten + kohl moved past the “monumentalizing” of the thing being sold and went quietly ironic.

They posed female mannequins tending real children, offering them cough syrup and comfort.

A model faced away from the camera, her beautiful face and figure out of view, wearing a white evening gown that pooled around the legs of the tiny table she sat upon. Her skin was white, her short hair black, matching the one arm, encased in a black opera-length glove, that held on to the seat of the chair, while she faced the wall, gazing at her own shadow. Her shadow, more compelling than facing the camera.

Long legs dominated the frame in an ad for floor tile, while miniaturized businessmen looked on in anxiety and wonder.

A white cardboard cutout of a woman (a reverse of the shadow woman) enjoyed an evening out with friends, her inanimate figure placed among the laughing, live couples as they all drank a popular wine.

kitten + kohl’s work appeared to exalt the dominant view of femininity while subtly undermining it with mannequins and collages.

New
was the only way for Charlotte and Ines to get in;
established
would have locked them out. This was reason enough to believe in the possibilities offered by Berlin.

 • • • 

With her parents, Charlotte had spent months, sometimes years in other cities—primarily London—and each place had its own delights, but no place was like Berlin, with its slippery social groups, the enormity of its postwar problems, the consistently contentious politics, and a kind of sexual infinity. She loved the way the city turned on at night, a switch flipped that illuminated another Berlin entirely. A midnight place where nothing was fixed or forbidden, so everything was permitted. And the way the rain in the streets doubled the images of the city due to the effect of the lights illustrated the reality of two Berlins. No place she had ever been seemed to thrive so well on risk.

 • • • 

In Charlotte and Ines’s prize-winning ad, a full, red-lipsticked, disembodied mouth drew on a sleek German pipe, the smoke an ethereal cloud against a pale blue background. The lipstick clued the mouth as belonging to a woman; the pipe suggested a man. In the lower section of the picture what appeared to be a pane of glass rested at an angle, as if it were leaning against the blue background. And written on the glass, in the typography of a typewriter, were the words “This is not a pipe.”

On the way to the celebration at the Monkey Bar Charlotte and Ines couldn’t stop talking about how much this prize would do for their studio, how they could cut back on portraits and maybe lessen the impact of the recent economic depression. The Great Depression in Germany
had actually accelerated the advertising business, along with the use of photography.

Grete Grun was already seated when Charlotte and Ines arrived, soon to be followed by Maria, Neile, Giselle Weiss, and her new boyfriend. Giselle was the only girl in their group who wasn’t lesbian or bisexual (“But we love you anyway,” Grete Grun said). Grete Grun jumped up from her chair when Giselle came in with her boyfriend, greeting him as if he were hers and not Giselle’s.

“Well,” said Giselle, laughing, “are you just happy to see us or are you trying to pass?”