Architecture, Photography and (Gendered) Modernities in 1930s Barcelona

Abstract

Margaret Michaelis was a Jewish, Austrian, anarchist photographer working in Barcelona from 1933 to 1937. Her photographs of modern architecture are considered icons in the history of Spanish culture, yet her authorship of these images and the details of her biography were unknown until recently. By giving up authorship (most of her work was published anonymously) and engaging in a stridently heterogeneous photographic practice (studio, commercial, documentary, etc.), Michaelis entered the history of European modernism through one of its "peripheral" or "multiple" modernities, that of the Catalan avant-garde.