Charlotte Grunert

Charlotte Grunert was born in Meissen on 6 September 1896. Her brother ran a photo studio in Dresden, and she began assisting him in 1930. In the winter semester of 1931, she audited classes in the photography course at the Bauhaus Dessau. She left the school in 1932 and moved to Paris for a while. One year later, she founded her own photo studio in the German town of Jestetten, near the Swiss border. She specialised in portrait and landscape photography as well as the still-new field of colour photography. Her motifs from in and around Jestetten were often printed as postcards. In the summer of 1941, she accompanied the photographer Hermann Harz on a trip to Vienna in order to take colour photographs there. In addition to her work in her own studio in Jestetten, she was also employed as a colour photographer in his studio in Frankfurt until the end of 1942. Images showing prominent Nazi figures, such as Hermann Göring, may be from this period. Grunert had been a member of the women’s league of the Nazi party since 1936. She later claimed she had joined due to pressure from the local head of the organisation, so that she could continue practicing the profession of photography. Charlotte Grunert ran her studio in Jestetten until shortly before her death on 13 August 1979.