Yva (Elsie Simon)
(1900 - 1942)
Photographer Yva was born Else Ernestine Neulander-Simon in 1900. Yva came from a Jewish middle-class family. Her father died when she was only twelve years old and her mother supported the family as a milliner. In 1925, Yva opened her own studio in Berlin. Yva worked briefly with painter and photographer Heinz Hajek-Halker in 1926. In 1927, Yva worked for many of the illustrated
magazines and periodicals of the time such as Gebrauchsgraphik, Die Dame, Elegante Welt and Berliner Illustrierte and her work was also included in the Film und Foto exhibit in Stuttgart in 1929. Within a few years Yva had established her reputation as a highly successful photographer in Berlin. In 1930, Yva began conbributing photo-stories to the Ullstein magazine UHU, producing twenty-seven of those stories. Twenty of them were published in UHU until it was forced to close in 1933.
Towards the end of the 1920s, Yva began focusing on the commercial aspect of photography, specializing in advertising and photography. Yva's innovative, and experimental work with multiple exposures became a hallmark of her work. She perfected this technique in single shots, short and longer picture stories, often exposing one plate up to six or seven times. Yva subsequently excelled in this technique and continued to use it in her later work in commercial photography. Her photographic experiments with multiple exposures gained wide recognition in Berlin's photographic world. In 1927, Yva exhibited her work at the Neumann Nicrendorf Gallery and participated in international exhibitions in the following years.
During the 1930s, Yva expanded her studio, moved to a much larger establishment and got married. Her husband took over the management of the business. In 1936, Yva began to make plans to emigrate after her studio was "aryanised" by the Nazis. It is believed that like many other Jewish couples, the decision to remain in Germany was taken by the husband, who adopted a "wait and see" approach to the increasingly anti-Semitism of every-day life in Nazi Germany at that time. In 1938, Yva was banned from working as a photographer and forced to work as an X-ray technician in the Jewish hospital in Berlin, until her arrest in 1942.
All that was left of Yva's work was in a few boxes that were stored in Hamburg harbour; indicatives of Yva's plans to emigrate. The boxes were confiscated by the Nazis after her arrest and were destroyed by fire after a bombing raid on Hamburg in 1943. Apart from a few existing vintage prints, and some original photographs, very little of Yva's work from the early phase of her career exists. In contrast to the absence of so much of her experimental photography from the earlier work, most of her advertising and fashion photography still exists in the archives of the various publishing houses for which she worked.
Yva responded to new trends in advertising, such as manipulating the female body as a display medium. Women's legs, in particular had become an important marketing idea, indicating the beginning of a gender-specific body language in the illustrated press, in which the female body, or specific female body part, i.e. legs, arms, shoulders, etc. became a major signifier in a new sexualised commercial language. In her photograph titled Schmuck, Iva focuses on the hands and lower arms of her model. The position of the arms evoke the idea of an embrace, adding to the sensual atmosphere generated by the soft focus and the base arms, demonstrating how she managed to combine functionality with artistic creativity. Like so many of her photographs, this image does not just exhibit an object, it creates an atmosphere or "mood," a feature of fashion photography that was only imaginatively developed in advertising and fashion photography many decades later.
