Madame d'Ora

D'Ora, Madame (Dora Kallmus; 1881-1963), Austrian portrait photographer. Kallmus studied photography at Vienna's Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt, but only men were admitted to the laboratories. To obtain practical training and a trade licence, her father funded an apprenticeship at the Berlin portrait studio of Nicola Perscheid, and in 1907 Kallmus set up her own Vienna studio with Perscheid's assistant Arthur Benda. Benda took the photographs in a manner influenced by Perscheid's pictorialism; Kallmus was the stylist and manager, bringing in sitters through her family's upper-middle-class Jewish connections. Clients included the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, dancers, actors, and members of the Wiener Werkstätte, whose clothing designs were shot as early fashion photographs. In 1925, Kallmus opened a studio in Paris, publishing celebrity and fashion images in magazines such as Femina and Die Dame. The German occupation forced her to abandon her studio and retreat to the French provinces. She returned to Paris after the war, but photographed sporadically, largely forsaking glamour for photographs of refugees, her ageing contemporaries, and a surreal series on abattoirs. After a 1958 Paris retrospective and a serious street accident, she spent her last years at the Austrian country house she had reclaimed from the Nazis.

— Hope Kingsley

Bibliography

• Faber, M., Madame d'Ora: Porträts aus Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1907-1957 (1981)