Bernice Kolko

Frida Kahlo. The Faces of Mexico.

Bernice Kolko

Frida Kahlo was one of the first artists that Bernice Kolko photographed for her long-term project Women of Mexico. Kolko, two years older than Frieda Kahlo, was born in Poland in 1905. Following her father’s death in 1920, she and her mother emigrated to the US. In 1932 and 1933, Kolko studied photography with Rudolf Koppitz in Vienna, after which she returned to New York City to work as a freelance photographer.

In the fall of 1951, Kolko traveled to Mexico for the first time and began making portraits of women. A close friendship with Frida Kahlo ensued. The photographs made in the years from 1951 to 1954 are among the most intimate taken of the artist and show her in her everyday surroundings, laughing and joking around with friends or household help or tired and ill in bed. Following Frida Kahlo’s death, Bernice Kolko documented the people and faces of Mexico in many thousands of photographs. She traveled through South America and Asia, the Middle East, and the South Seas.