Elsa Thiemann

Elsa Thiemann, née Franke, was born in Toruń, then West Prussia, on 7 February 1910. In 1927 she began studying applied art at Berlin-Charlottenburg’s United State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts. In 1929 she transferred to the Bauhaus in Dessau. After her preliminary training, she studied in Joost Schmidt’s advertising workshop and, from the summer of 1930, in Walter Peterhans’s photography class. In 1931 she completed her studies with a Bauhaus diploma. From then on, Thiemann worked in Berlin as a freelance photojournalist and captured life in the city. In 1944 she accepted a position as a secretary in the Berlin editorial office of the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house. After the war she resumed her work as an independent photojournalist. She used her photographs to document the transformation of the German capital: from the ruins of a devastated Berlin after 1945 to the renewed flourishing of urban life in the West Berlin of the 1950s. She also created numerous portraits of artists. In 1947 she married the painter Hans Thiemann, whom she knew from their time at the Bauhaus. When the couple moved to Hamburg in 1960, Elsa Thiemann stopped working as a professional photographer and began documenting the work of her husband. After his death in 1977, she managed his estate while also tending to her own photo archive. Elsa Thiemann died in Hamburg on 15 November 1981.