Toni von Haken-Schrammen

Toni von Haken-Schrammen was born as Toni Anna von Haken-Nelissen in Riga on 11 February 1897, and grew up near Dresden. In 1918 she began studying painting at the School for Fine Arts in Weimar. In 1919 she became one of the Bauhaus’s first students. She attended Walther Klemm’s painting class and briefly switched to the ceramic workshop. She met the artist Eberhard Schrammen at the Bauhaus. They married in 1920, and their child was born one year later. At her husband’s request, she abandoned her studies to take care of their home and family. In 1925 the couple moved to the Gildenhall housing estate for craftspeople near Neuruppin, and Schrammen ran a turner’s workshop there. The workshop went bankrupt in 1929. Because the couple needed new ways to earn money, they began taking photographs, jointly developed the technique of the foto-grafik (photo-graphic), produced photo-series with text and built up an extensive archive of negatives. In 1933 the couple moved to Lübeck, where they continued to take photographs. Between 1931 and 1937, the Mauritius Verlag marketed their images; after that, they had to seek out commissions for themselves again. Eberhard Schrammen died in 1947. Von Haken-Schrammen continued to work as a photographer. She began providing images for the Bavaria-Verlag in 1951. She gave up photography in 1963 due to declining sales. Toni von Haken-Schrammen died in Lübeck on 11 August 1981.