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Kathe Buchler (1876-1930) was a pioneering woman photographer whose
exceptional photographs offer very personal insights into Germany
during World War One, with a particular focus on the home front and
the lives of women and children. Born Katharina von Rhamm in
Braunschweig, Germany, and from a wealthy and privileged
background, she was taught painting as a girl; many of her
photographs have a notably painterly quality. She went on to study
photography at Berlin's Lette Academy which, unusually for the
time, admitted women. Like many women of the upper middle class,
family life with her husband and children was Kathe Buchler's focus
and became the central theme of her photography in the years before
the First World War. During the war itself, in the most public
phase of her career, her leading role in local institutions,
including the Red Cross, gave her largely unrestricted access to
the city's war effort and she produced unexpectedly intimate
photographs of daily life in Braunschweig, in the city's military
hospitals, as well as in the revealing series `Women in Men's
Jobs'. As a result, she offers us a distinctive vision, raising the
intriguing possibility of presenting the conflict from the
perspective of women and children.Surprisingly, Buchler's work
remained unknown outside its immediate locality, but it was
exhibited in the United Kingdom for the first time between October
2017 and May 2018, allowing the process of placing it within its
proper international context to begin. This catalogue, marking the
exhibition Beyond the Battlefields, contains a wide selection of
Buchler's work, including some of her exquisite Autochromes (using
the world's first commercially available colour photographic
process). The accompanying essays introduce the artist and address,
amongst other things, the role of amateur photography in
documenting war. In depicting the minutiae of daily life against
the backdrop of war and its aftermath, Buchler's remarkable
photographs speak to us across the intervening century, disrupting
national stereotypes and opening up fresh perspectives on the Great
War.
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