Lisel Haas Online Sharing
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On Tuesday 28 January 2025, Bertz Associates facilitated an online event to share the discoveries and results of the Lisel Haas scoping project and discuss possible future steps. This webpage documents that sharing.
The sharing was hosted by Iris Bertz, Director and Found of Bertz Associates, and Jen Wilbur, Projects Assistant.
How did this project come about?
Jen Wilbur first learnt about Lisel Haas during their final year of their History of Art BA at the University of Birmingham in 2020. Their dissertation supervisor, Dr Jutta Vinzent, assigned Jen to research and create a presentation about Lisel Haas's commercial portrait photography. From this, Jen was then invited to speak at the Four Corners 'Another Eye' conference.
Jen brought this story to Bertz Associates and Lisel's story was featured in the Words & Walks - Women Between the Lines project in 2021.
Who is Lisel Haas?
Lisel Haas (1898 - 1989) was a German-Jewish photographer whose professional career spanned nearly 70 decades.
She ran her own studio in her home town on Mönchengladbach, where she worked primarily as a magazine photographer, though also did portraiture. Lisel, her father Adolf, and possibly her partner Grete Bermbach, fled Germany in 1938 a few days after Kristallnacht, and settled in Moseley, Birmingham.
Lisel was granted an exemption from internment, the reason given was 'Nazi persecution'. She initially was unable to work due to her refugee status, but eventually was sponsored by producer George Owen at the Rep Theatre which enabled her to get a work permit as a theatre photographer.
Haas became a naturalised citizen in 1947. She was able to open up her own studio at her home in Moseley, where she worked in collaboration with her partner Grete. We believe that Lisel did the photographing and developing, while Grete did the retouching.
Lisel had a prolific career, photographing at numerous theatres across the West Midlands, obtaining public and private commissions, and running her own portraiture studio. Through her letters stored in the archive, it is clear that she took immense pride in her work. Her story of overcoming displacment is one that touches many today.
The Archive
The archive constists of 258 boxes. When Bertz Associates first started the project, we believed that there were around 70 boxes - a figure which turned out to be greatly incorrect!
What's in it?
The collection contains around 90 boxes of developed photographic prints, 93 folders of celluloid negatives, 45 boxes of glass negatives, and around 30 boxes of miscellaneous documents, including invoices, letters, business cards, lecture notes and more.
The boxes of developed prints contain both final prints and draft proofs. In many cases, there are notes written on the proofs, indicating the retouching that Lisel will do to the work. Most of them are labelled with the name of the person who commissioned it.
The celluloid negatives are kept in folders, and again are labelled with the name of the commissioner. We recognised a lot of the negatives as they correspond to the developed photographs in the collection. It seems as though Lisel kept the negative of nearly every photograph she took, as the folders contain both final images which we have seen developed, and also negatives which weren't used as people have eyes closed, or are mid-movement and so blurred.
We are less unsure of the providence of the glass negatives however. While we haven't looked through a lot of them due to their fragility, we haven't recognised any of the faces from the developed photographs, and they are largely unlabelled. We believe they may be from Germany, as they do not correspond to her German work, though cannot be sure of this at the moment.
There is also a huge amount of business records, including invoices and letters. Additionally, there are copies of lectures she gave at different societies and functions, which give us a real insight into her approach to photography. She saw photography as an artform, and described how anyone can learn how to take a technically good photograph through books, but the artistic skill comes from learning how to time your photograph to get the best result from your sitter.
Through the vast amount of material kept in the archive, it is evident that Haas meticulously kept a record of all her business dealings, including invoices and letters both to and from clients. The archive predominantly features objects dating from 1938, when Lisel emigrated to the UK. The materials show that Haas was an incredibly popular and well-respected photographer, with there being a multitude of letters from extremely-satisfied clients thanking her. She was always working, and there is evidence that she was in extremely high demand as there are letters from her declining commissions due to her lack of availability.
What's missing?
Due to how well documented her life and work after 1938 is in the archive, it quickly became apparent that her life in Germany is missing, as only a few magazines and a shoe-box of photographs remain. Through speaking with her neice, we learnt that when she had moved, one of the crates of her belongings went missing.
The archive as is currently is has no real narrative to it. A lot of the photographs and documents aren't ordered chronologically, and so going through the records her story came together in pieces.
Workshops
Jaskirt Dhaliwal-Boora, an award winning photographer and founder of Women in Photo Brum, ran the ‘Discover the Lisel Haas Archive’ workshop at the Library of Birmingham on Thursday 7 November 2024. The workshop was open to women with a migration background, and was primarily targeted to members of Women in Photo Brum. Participants learnt about Lisel Haas’s story, got to handle material from her archive, and considered what it means to be an emigré female photographer.
Yael Shavit, a Director and Dramaturg, held a workshop on Wednesday 15 January 2025 that was designed for undergraduate applied theatre students at Birmingham City University and supported by the faculty there. Using drama exercises, the students explored what photographs mean, what the role of the photographer is, how useful archives are in terms of social history, and how photography as a creative medium could inform their practice.
What next?
Further cataloguing of the archive is needed, along with digitisation to preserve the collection and make the archive more accessible. Additionally, more research into Lisel's life in Germany is needed, as a lot of her work from that time is missing.
We would love to be able to put on an exhibition of her work, to get it out of the archive and put in on display for people to see. Additionally, we are interested in publishing an accompanying catalogue, that will feature academic essays and art historical reviews of Lisel's life and work.
We are also interested in connecting with anyone who was photographed by Lisel Haas. Lots of Birmingham families commissed Lisel to take their portraits, meaning that a lot of people in the city today will have photographs of themselves as children, their parents, and their grandparents that were taken by Lisel, building their own family heritage.
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