MANCHESTER, NH.- The Currier Museum of Art presents today "Focus on the Soul: The Photographs of Lotte Jacobi," on view through January 4, 2004. Focus on the Soul: The Photographs of Lotte Jacobi is among the first to feature the artist’s important contribution to the history of photography. It explores her considerable accomplishments, particularly in the fields of portraiture, abstraction, and documentary photography. Born in August 1896 in the small West Prussian town of Thorn (now part of Poland), Jacobi was raised in a family of photographers. In fact, her great-grandfather purchased a license to practice photography from the French inventor himself, Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre. Photography was the family business for the next four generations. From the 1840s through the mid-1930s the Atelier Jacobi was among the most renowned in Germany and Poland, and Lotte Jacobi was its most accomplished member.

Lotte Jacobi began studying photography as a child in the family studio and received formal training in Berlin and Munich in the 1920s. Best known for portraits of Germany’s leading theater actors, artists, writers, and political figures, she also photographed the local landscape and architecture and produced stunning documentary images of cities and people in Germany and the Soviet Union. In response to the encroaching danger of the Nazi regime, Jacobi left Germany for New York in September 1935. Within weeks she was again photographing the world’s leading artists, dancers, and writers. Among her most significant works from the 1940s and 1950s were her abstract, cameraless images known as “photogenics.”

In 1955 Jacobi left New York for rural New Hampshire. She had grown uneasy in the city following the death in 1951 of her second husband Erich Reiss and she was eager to pursue some of her environmental interests in the woods of New England. In Deering, New Hampshire, Jacobi continued to develop as a fine art photographer. In 1963 she opened a gallery to exhibit the work of local and international artists. In the last decades of her life, Jacobi received numerous international, national, and state honors for her artistic achievements. Lotte Jacobi died in 1990 in Concord, New Hampshire.