Two girls. Portrait by the photographers Minya and Rudolf Dührkoop 1916.
Minya Diéz-Dührkoop born as Julie Wilhelmine Dührkoop as the second daughter of the renowned German portrait photographer Rudolf Dührkoop.
In 1887, at the age of fourteen, Minya Dührkoop began working as an assistant in his studio. Her career was closely linked to that of her father. In his studio she was trained to become an independent employee. The Rudolf Dührkoop studio lived mainly from portraits, but was also known for reportage photography.
Dührkoop’s working methods were decisively influenced by Alfred Lichtwark, then director of the Kunsthalle Hamburg and the most important player during the aesthetic reform in Germany. As a promoter of art photography, he also appealed to professional photographers. His lectures introduced Dührkoop to the new aesthetics.
In 1899, Rudolf Dührkoop became known to a wider public for his “unusual” portraits through his participation in an international exhibition of photography in Hamburg. He took portraits outside a studio, dispensed with any retouching, chose unusual views and called it “artistic camera portraits”.
