Austrian-Jewish fashion and portrait photographer of international fame. Her artistic name from 1907 was Madame d'Ora.

Summary Career

Subjects of Kallmus's portraiture included Pablo Casals, Marie Gutheil-Schoder, Lotte Lehmann, Alma Mahler, Arnold Rosé and the Rosé Quartet, Moritz Rosenthal, Franz Schreker, Richard Strauss, Felix Weingartner, and Paul Wittgenstein in the world of music, and others such as dancers Anita Berber and Anna Pawlowa, painter Gustav Klimt, authors Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Werfel, and Berta Zuckerkandl-Szeps (a cousin by marriage of Viktor Zuckerkandl). She also photographed the coronation of the new Emperor Karl I in 1916 and made a series of photographs of the imperial family. She had close contacts with the fashion department of the Wiener Werkstätte.

Kallmus moved to Paris in 1927, where she worked with major fashion houses and magazines, and continued her portraiture. In hiding in the south of France during World War II, she returned to Austria in 1946, where she photographed refugee camps as well as continuing to make portraits of famous personalities.

90,000 photographs by Kallmus are preserved in the Picture Archive and Theater Collection of the Austrian National Library and the Museum of Art and Trade in Hamburg. The Albertina in Vienna has a collection of her photographs in its online picture databank. There is a substantial secondary literature of writings on her work.

Kallmus and Schenker

Jeanette Schenker was photographed on October 7, 1925 at the Atelier d'Ora. Heinrich seems not to have been photographed by her.

Reference:

Austrian National Library Picture Archive: http://www.bildarchivaustria.at/Pages/Praesentation.aspx?p_iAusstellungID=1206966&p_iPage=67&p_ItemID=

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