MARIA AUSTRIA (1915-1975)

An Amsterdam photographer of neorealism

Maria Austria

The life of the photographer Maria Austria is marked by the persecution she endured as a Jew and by escape, war, and resistance. And yet during the post-war years, she also focused on the new life emerging in the cities. In place of the experimental visual worlds of New Vision, a vision of reality with human subjects came to fore. The term “humanist photography” is often applied to Maria Austria’s neorealist street views of children and adults in humorous and surprising moments, a term we know from her colleague Eva Besnyö, from the work of Cartier-Bresson from France, and especially from Edward Steichen’s legendary exhibition “Family of Man” of 1955. Additionally, Austria’s recently published photo-documentation on the so-called “Achterhuis,” the building where Anne Frank and her family hid, is on view for the first time outside the Netherlands: the architectural situation in the old, narrow Amsterdam house is conveyed three-dimensionally using detail shots of the hideout, including the photo bulletin board in Anne Frank’s room.