Margaret Michaelis

Margaret Gross was born in 1902 in Dzieditz, Austria. Her father was a dentist and she was encouraged by her parents to develop and pursue her interests. As a teenager she moved to Vienna to undertake a course in graphic arts at the Graphik Institut (Institute of Graphic Arts and Research). Upon completing her studies she worked in photographic studios in Vienna and Berlin, initially as a retoucher.

In 1933, following Hitler's rise to power, Margaret and her husband Rudolf Michaelis, an archaeological restorer, were briefly imprisoned in separate incidents. As Jews with left-wing sympathies, they realized it was untenable to remain in Berlin and surreptitiously left for Barcelona. Michaelis later recalled: 'Two days after my husband's release from prison, we arrived in Barcelona. We didn't know a word of Spanish, had little money but could live with our friends'.

Margaret Michaelis continued her photographic activities, working mainly with a group of architects associated with Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. She embarked on a major project, extensively photographing people and their living conditions as documentation for a slum redevelopment scheme.

Some of the artist's most successful work came out of this project. The photographs taken in bars and shops are candid and casual — the people being photographed go about their business unselfconsciously, apparently undisturbed by the photographer's presence. The keenly observed images are reminiscent of French photographer Brassai's unposed photographs, published in the book Paris de nuit, 1933.

When working in the streets, in natural light, Michaelis used the more adventurous vantage-points of what is now termed the New Photography, which flourished during the 1920s and 1930s. She photographed from above, looking down into the streets, or from a low vantage-point looking up to the buildings. Her images are tightly and rigorously composed, giving the viewer a new, disorienting look at the narrow streets, the decaying buildings and the cramped living spaces. Michaelis also photographed a number of interiors, showing the spare surroundings of the impoverished slum-dwellers.

The redevelopment scheme did not come to fruition, however, due to Spain's escalating political crisis and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Rudolf Michaelis volunteered to fight in defence of the Republic, but by late 1937 Franco's victory was a foregone conclusion. Margaret 'decided to leave and ... managed to get a permit to take all my photographic work and equipment'.

She lived briefly in Paris where she worked as a newspaper photographer. On a brave visit to her parents in 1938 she produced a moving group of photographs taken in a market-place in the Jewish ghetto in Cracow. These images, like the photographs of Roman Vishniac, have gained an added potency in the light of our knowledge of the atrocities the Jewish people suffered under the Nazis.

In December 1938 Margaret Michaelis was granted a visa by the British Vice-Consulate in Poland to take up employment in the United Kingdom. She worked in domestic service in London and in July 1939 obtained a visa to travel to Australia under the assisted passage scheme. She arrived in Sydney on 2 September 1939, the day World War ll was declared.

After working for a year as a domestic in Sydney, Michaelis opened a studio on the seventh floor, 114 Castlereagh Street. She was not the only European émigré to establish a photographic practice in Australia during this time. Wolfgang Sievers, Henry Talbot and, for a brief period, Helmut Newton, also set up successful businesses.

Michaelis had a low profile: 'l worked and worked to make a living. I saw no-one, only my clients'. Her position as a German-speaking emigrant would not have been enviable in Sydney in the early 1940s. However, it seems that she did attract a European, and often a Jewish, clientele — people who may have felt more comfortable with her than with Australian photographers. Her subjects also included men and women involved in the arts, among them the painter Weaver Hawkins, the sculptor Lyndon Dadswell and the writer Cynthia Reed. In addition, she took numerous photographs of modern dancers, including those involved with the Bodenwieser Modern Dance Company.

The photographic work Michaelis produced in Australia differs significantly from her European work. In Barcelona her subject matter was diverse and she worked mainly outdoors. The resultant photographs have a spontaneity and casualness not realized in Australia where — in order to make a living — she concentrated on formal studio portraiture. She employed the standard studio conventions of the day; the dramatic lighting, spare surroundings and studied poses serve to direct one's attention to the faces of her sitters.

Photographs by Michaelis were not frequently exhibited during her lifetime, and her European work was virtually unknown in Australia. However, she was awarded a Bronze Medal for six photographs which were included in the exhibition and publication Australian Photography, 1947. She was also a member of the Institute of Photographic Illustrators.

Eye trouble eventually forced Michaelis to close her studio. In 1960 she married Albert Sachs (who died in 1965) and in the following years, resident in Melbourne, she concentrated on drawing and painting. She was an early member of the Women's Art Register and was included in a Melbourne exhibition of works by women artists. She also maintained her wide-ranging interests in Jungian psychology and Buddhism.

Margaret Michaelis-Sachs died in October 1985 aged eighty-three. Her photographic archive, comprising hundreds of works, was donated to the Australian National Gallery in early 1986. Only now is the importance of her involvement in photography and the significance of her contribution to Australian cultural life becoming clear.

Helen Ennis
Curator of Photography

All quotations in this essay are from 'Margaret's Camera Charisma', Montefiore Homes for the Aged Newsletter, c.1986.