Urban Eyes

The Place to Be? With the camera in the exile metropolis of New York. With the rise of the National Socialists, New York established itself as a city of arrival for German-speaking photographers who managed to flee Europe. At that time, photography as a medium was undergoing a transformation, partly due to efforts to establish it as an art form. The exiles brought with them different backgrounds, types of cameras, and paths of emigration. Some had already been professionally active, while others had to abandon their learned professions and acquired photographic skills autodidactically. Thus, their artistic strategies in New York exile also varied. The camera served as a medium to engage with the metropolis, reflect on the experience of emigration, build networks, and simply survive economically. To comprehensively analyze the complex relationships between photography and exile in the context of the metropolis of New York, Helene Roth closely examines the creative achievements and heterogeneous perspectives, as well as the failures and setbacks of emigrated photographers. From a transnational perspective, she considers the sociocultural, political, and artistic developments during the 1930s and 1940s.