Berlin/London: The Lost Photographs of Gerty Simon
Gem of an exhibition at the Wiener Library looking at the life and work of the photographer Gerty Simon. Simon was a German Jewish photographer who photographed many important figures in Weimar Germany then as a refugee in Britain, set up a studio in London and photographed figures from 1930s London society. Her archive and a large collection of prints have been given to the library by her son. The show told the story of her life clearly using the archive material then had a display of about 20 of her pictures with Berlin on one wall and London on the opposite one. You felt every photograph had a story behind it that you wanted to know more about. It was touching in the Berlin section to see a picture of the six year old Anna Judith Kerr who went on to write “The Tiger Who Came to Tea” when she moved to London and who died recently. I rather liked Alexander Iolas shown in the top left hand corner of the attached picture. I looked him us and he was a dancer and later become...