Hilde Hubbuch

Hilde Hubbuch, née Isay, was born into a Jewish family in Trier on 17 January 1905. In 1925 she began studying at the Baden State School of Art in Karlsruhe. She received drawing instruction from Karl Hubbuch there and began to shoot photographs. In 1928 she married her teacher. Her early photographs document, among other things, their shared artistic life. In 1931 Hubbuch registered to audit the photo class at the Bauhaus Dessau. At that time, her photographic focus was on depicting the modern woman. After the Bauhaus was closed in Dessau in 1932, she moved to Vienna, where her mother lived, and worked as a photographer in Max Fau’s journalists’ cooperative. She divorced Karl Hubbuch. Fau sent her to Prague in 1936 to photograph Eastern European street scenes. Due to the growing strength of Nazism, Hubbuch fled to London following the death of her mother that same year and then to New York in 1939. There she specialised in photographing children. She worked as a society photographer in the years that followed. Her clients included Norman Mailer and William Shawn, editor of “The New Yorker”. Hilde Hubbuch died in New York on 24 October 1971.