Lotte Jacobi: Photographer in the USSR
(Website under Construction)
Ruth Jacobi, Lotte Jacobi, 1935
Moscow, Bukhara, and Samarkand!
Cathedrals, factories, and homes. Great Islamic monuments.
Politicians, scientists, and farmers. Women trading in the bazaar.
Lotte Jacobi’s photographs bear witness to both the dramatic and the everyday during a pivotal historical period in the USSR.
The German-American Lotte Jacobi (1896-1990) is one of the great portrait photographers of the twentieth century. Yet, less familiar are her photographs of the USSR. This website aims to introduce Jacobi's work from the USSR by making newly digitized photographs, as well as essays exploring their historical context, more readily available to scholars, students, and the general public.
Follow Lotte Jacobi’s trip in 1932-1933 through Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan on our map. Find out what her remarkable photographs can tell us about the cities, people, and places, as well as the economic and social transformations, in Russia and Central Asia under Joseph Stalin's brutal rule in the early 1930s.
Images used on this website are culled from almost 2400 USSR photographs by Jacobi located in the Lotte Jacobi Papers in the Milne Special Collections and Archives at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA.