Any day, every day is of course relevant to celebrate the achievements of women, but as we approach International Women’s Day, I’m thinking again of photographs of and by the writer, traveller and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, the subject of my biographical novel, The Buoyancy of the Craft.
Two years ago, still involved in research and writing the book, I posted photographs (from the Swiss National archive) of some of her women friends.
And last year I posted about other women photographers Dora Maar and Gerda Taro.
The photographer Marianne Breslauer said that ‘Annemarie was the most beautiful living being I have ever encountered’.
Annemarie Schwarzenbach courtesy of Swiss National Archives 
Courtesy of Swiss National Archives
Excerpt from The Photographer’s Muse, The Buoyancy of the Craft.
There are many photographs of Annemarie. In her childhood her mother liberally documented the family. She was accustomed to being photographed. All these poses, as if to adopt or even to create, a self. So many ‘this is who I am’ - none of which of course are ‘who she was’. As a child, she is told how to stand, turn, look, dress, arrange limbs and features.
….
As an adult, Annemarie takes control of the image, claims possession of materials – place, time, dress, stance, mood – with which to create a self. To reclaim the self from the childhood one that her mother possessed. Or – to create a new one – her self, made out of her chosen materials. Hence – the unsmiling look – almost defiant. This is who I am, she says, not the one my mother made, but this one, that I am making.
For sure, the modern obligatory happy face is a recent phenomenon. Old photos show severity, the serious miens of our default expressions, not sad, not even possibly, thoughtful, but distant. Sometimes even absent, as if these people, the subjects of the photograph, have checked out, gone off to explore the fringes of dream. But in Annemarie’s time and situation – she isn’t absent, she’s deliberately present, defying the moment and the photographer to represent her as anything other than what she chooses to present to the world. She is not a passive subject, she is engaged in the process, she is making something – a statement? A clay pot? She’s making her own history. Making herself.
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