Margaret Michaelis

Margaret Michaelis, photographer, was born Margarethe Gross, of Polish Jewish parents at Dzieditz, near Bielsko. She moved to Vienna to study for three years at the Institute of Graphic Arts, and soon after graduation gained a job at a portrait photography business, where she remained for five years. Having worked in Prague and Berlin, in 1929 she settled in Berlin, where she worked intermittently in a number of studios. In the early 1930s she married and she and her husband had to flee to Spain; they divorced, but she remained in Barcelona, where she established her own business, Foto-Elis, and proceeded to take some key representations of the city’s architecture. She was able to gain a German passport in Poland in 1938; by way of London, she arrived in Sydney in September 1939. In 1940, she opened a studio in Castlereagh Street, specialising in portraits, especially of Jewish people, dancers and artists. Notwithstanding that she spent the war under observation, she continued to work, and in 1945 she became an Australian citizen. In 1952, her failing eyesight caused her to close her business. In 1960 she moved to Melbourne to marry a glass merchant named Sachs; she assisted him in his framing enterprise during the course of her twenty-five years’ residence in the city. The National Gallery has a large collection of Michaelis’s works, as does the historical archive of the College of Architects in Barcelona. Solo retrospective exhibitions were held by the National Gallery of Australia in 1987 and 2005 and in Valencia in 1998. Helen Ennis’s book Margaret Michaelis love, loss and photography was published in 2005.