PHOTO:Annemarie Heinrich

Annemarie Heinrich was a photographer or more accurately a portraiture artist. Specializing in glamorous portraits as well as magnificent chiaroscuro nudes, Heinrich’s approach to portraiture was so craftily lit that she became the photographer of choice for most mass-circulation entertainment magazines and the stars. She is known for having photographed various celebrities of Argentine cinema, as well as other personalities like Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Eva Perón.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Nailya Alexander Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Annemarie Heinrich: Glamour and Modernity in Buenos Aires”, brings to the wide audience the work of the daring Argentine photographer Annemarie Heinrich. Her experiments with photographing nudity in the early decades of the 20th Century would have been anathema to Argentine society, which even disapproved of her habit of wearing trousers to work. To complicate matters further, Heinrich lived at a time when photography itself was considered a lesser cultural form in Buenos Aires. She was born in 9/1/1912 in Darmstadt, Germany. Her father, a concert violinist and socialist who feared another war in Europe, moved the family to Argentina in 1926. Before settling on photography, Annemarie studied dance, music, and scenography, which had a great effect on the lighting and composition of her later work and served as an entrée into the worlds of art and entertainment. Annemarie Heinrich began her career as an apprentice to European émigré photographers. In 1930, at the age of 18, she set up her first studio in Buenos Aires. Surrounded by artists, celebrities, film and radio stars, opera singers, ballerinas, tango dancers, and writers, Heinrich was central to the development and popularization of a new kind of photograph, the celebrity portrait. For over forty years, she provided the cover photos for Radiolandia, Argentina’s most famous show business magazine, and worked regularly for almost every other major entertainment publication in the country. Her subjects included the 20year-old actress Eva Duarte, who went on to become First Lady of Argentina Eva Perón, American singer and civil rights activist Marian Anderson, writers Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges;,ballet dancers Anthony Tudor and Serge Lifar and prominent South American celebrities Tita Merello and Carmen Miranda. The artist’s studio was once raided by forces loyal to General Juan Domingo Peron, who seized power in the 1940s. Heinrich’s photographs of Peron’s iconic wife, Eva Peron (Evita) were confiscated, and presumably destroyed. But there is a twist. A few photos fell to the floor during the melee. Heinrich’s husband kicked the images beneath a desk under the nose of Peron’s forces. A surviving photo shows a young Evita, working as a film actress at the time, assumes a casual, coquettish pose. It may have been risqué for its time, but there is nothing shocking about this photo to contemporary eyes. Heinrich’s work as a celebrity portraitist and professional photographer is supplemented by an extraordinary series, Desnudos (Nudes), which she began as early as 1934. Heinrich’s nudes demonstrate not only her thoroughly modern understanding of the female form, but also her technical mastery and attention to light. Rarely exhibited during her lifetime, these photographs are all the more remarkable for having been produced in almost total isolation from emerging trends in nude photography in Europe. Many of the models were friends who volunteered to pose for Heinrich, and none of the nudes were displayed publicly in her lifetime. In their subtle engagement with the human body, they tell of a woman whose personal passions were far removed from her public persona. During the 1940s, she was active in the antiwar movement, and in the 1950s, she travelled to Europe, where her work was exhibited in Rome, Paris, Zurich and Cologne. Heinrich’s studio was the scene of more drama again in the 1980s, when it was shut down because a neighbour complained about an “obscene” photo in the window. In the end, Heinrich’s tenacity paid off, and her creative talent triumphed. In her life, as in her photographs, Heinrich broke the mould.

Info: Nailya Alexander Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 704, New York, Duration: 7/1-3/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, http://nailyaalexandergallery.com