Ré Soupault

Ré Soupault was born as Meta Erna Niemeyer in Bobolice (then German Pomerania, now Poland) on 29 October 1901. In 1921 she began studying at the Bauhaus in Weimar. She attended the preliminary course and then studied in the weaving workshop. At the Bauhaus, she also began to experiment with photography. In 1923 she met the avant-garde filmmaker Viking Eggeling and played a substantial role in the creation of his film “Diagonal Symphony”. After her brief marriage to the Dadaist Hans Richter in 1926, she worked as a fashion journalist for the magazine “Sport im Bild” in Berlin. Her work led her to Paris in 1929. There, she once again situated herself at the center of the artistic avant-garde and founded her fashion studio “Ré Sport” in 1931. In 1933 she met the author and journalist Philippe Soupault. While accompanying him on his journalistic tours, she began documenting them in photographs. The couple married in 1937. In 1938 they went to Tunis, where Ré Soupault continued with her social-documentary photography. Because of Philippe Soupault’s openly antifascist position, the couple had to flee, only narrowly evading German troops by escaping to Algeria. It was not until after the war that Ré Soupault learned parts of her photographic work had survived in Tunis. They travelled to New York in 1943 and separated in 1945. In 1948 Ré Soupault returned to Europe and lived in Basel, where she worked as a translator and radio commentator. She created her final photojournalistic work in the mid-1950s: photographs of German refugees from the former eastern territories. In 1958 she moved back to Paris and concentrated on her literary work. Ré Soupault died in Versailles on 12 March 1996.