The Great Rupture

Under the name of Madame d’Ora, Doras Kallmus was a successful portrait photographer of the rich, the beautiful and the famous for more than 30 years. In 1907, she opened a photo studio in Vienna as one of the first women to do this, and one in Paris in the mid-nineteen twenties. The rise of the National Socialists abruptly ended her brilliant career as a studio photographer. She lost her job, her property and her family, and was hiding for years. After 1945, Madame d’Ora renounced glitz and glamour and turned her attention to uprooted war refugees in Austria, who must have appeared to her like fellow sufferers. She took her most extraordinary photographs in Parisian slaughterhouses, a shocking confrontation with defencelessness and death—themes that also characterize her portrait photographs from this period.

A cooperation with Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna.