Jacobi, best known for her portraiture, was born into a long line of photographers; her great-grand father visited Paris between 1839 and 1842, where he obtained a camera, a license, and some instruction from Daguerre himself [1]. In 1935, with the Nazi rise to power, Jacobi, an already established photographer of major cultural figures, and of dance and theatre in Weimar Berlin, was forced to flee Germany, settling in New York. As her surroundings changed, so did her work. In the mid 1940s she began to make abstract images, taking the quality of light and movement perfected in her portraiture and applying it directly to the paper. Called ‘photogenics,’ Jacobi produced the images through exposing photosensitive paper to light, utilizing pieces of glass or twisted cellophane to interrupt the beans from a small flashlight positioned above photographic paper, creating the dark shapes seen on Bryn Mawr’s Photogenic. The images that appear are the result of gestures, as the traces of objects without a physical presence.*

*Much in the way that our interaction with these objects is made without a physical connection, only through images and virtual spaces.

A direct contact with the photosensitive paper is preserved.

“If I could, I would do nothing but these photogenics from now on. I can do what I want in them. I wanted to make a bird form and I know that I can.” [2] 
Lotte Jacobi

These are deeply experimental works of non-objective photography. Leo Katz, who first applied the term ‘photogenics’ to Jacobi’s work, wrote of non-objective photography: “instead of a brush one handles a light source, and instead of the canvas one uses a photosensitive surface. Thus the procedure [of photography] is no longer selective but inventive.” [3] This practice is an intervention of the very act of photography. It can be spoken of along the lines of a Dadaist commentary on art and art making practices. It can at the same time be viewed in opposition to the classical understanding of Duchamp’s Dada , in which artistic control was in part surrendered, with the selection of an object taking precedence. Where Duchamp used selection as a rejection of painterly creation, so did Jacobi use creation as a rejection of photographic selection, thus functioning in the same vein of subversion of process and medium.

What does it mean for a

photograph to be made without a camera?

Is it a daughter born without a mother?[4] Katz further contextualizes this practice within the context of modern art. “Today, Modern Art presents new worlds of vision, new concepts of form, space and dimensional dynamics. The optical forces of a point, a

line

, a

plane

and other dimensional elements are

no longer static affairs

to us.”[5] Photography in part was the impetus of modernism—particularly abstraction**

**My thesis, which I was writing in conjunction with project, centers on the beginning of pure abstraction in art, and what propelled artists toward it. Part of that was an examination of the role of photography in this moment, at the beginning of the 20th century. The role of technology in the pursuit of art is an interesting one, which is strengthened by a study of Jacobi’s Photogenics.

—in art, due to artists’ discomfort with its ability to capture the world with exactitude and opening up new ways of seeing and creating;

what does it then mean when photography is itself abstracted?