Kallmus early on adopted the name Madame d’Ora. In front of her camera sat cultural personalities and transgressors such as Gustav Klimt, Pablo Picasso, Tamara de Lempicka, Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel and Anita Berber. D’Ora’s fashion photographs were published in the largest fashion magazine of the time. The models were wearing Wiener Werkstätte, Balenciaga, Hermès, Chanel and Madame Agnès.
When the Nazis took control of Paris in 1940, Kallmus, who came from a Jewish family, lost her studio and fled to the French countryside. Friends and family were persecuted. Her sister was deported and murdered. These horrors were after the war embodied by Kallmus in a series of photographs from Parisian slaughterhouses and refugee camps. The contrasts are amazing.
The exhibition is a collaboration with Photoinstitut Bonartes in Vienna, Ullstein Bild in Berlin and Preus museum in Norway.
