Curiosity, Courage and Adventure

Women Photographers on the Move

May 4 to July 13, 2025
Kunstforum Ingelheim – Altes Rathaus

Registration required for events and public tours

From the 1920s onwards, numerous professionally trained, self-reliant and independent women photographers set off on journeys to sometimes little-explored countries and created impressive images of a wide range of destinations.

The more than 170 works on display by 21 women photographers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland were created over the past 100 years. The reasons that led these women to travel to unfamiliar destinations, sometimes under difficult conditions, are brought into focus in three exhibition sections:

For some women photographers, a journalistic assignment was the reason to set off for distant countries and cities. Commissioned by publishers, they travelled from continent to continent, supplied their clients with images of those remote places, and their photographs appeared in newspapers around the world. Their particular photographic interest was not only in cities and landscapes, but also in the everyday life of the local population, the coexistence of tradition and modernity, and physical labour in a wide variety of fields.

Other women photographers accompanied archaeological excavations and research expeditions with their cameras, or documented historic cultural sites abroad—some of them threatened with destruction by war or climate change. With a trained eye, they captured an irretrievable moment for future generations. With great sensitivity, these women photographers approached their sometimes austere-looking subjects in order to preserve their hidden beauty and deeper meaning—also for generations to come.

The third exhibition section presents works by women photographers who travelled to other continents to realise independent artistic projects. They pursued a specific idea, sometimes conceived as a series or realised over many years and across many countries. Their examples, too, confirm that curiosity, courage and a strong sense of adventure were—and still are—indispensable qualities for women photographers on the move.

The black-and-white and colour photographs on display, from the 1920s to the present day, reveal—beyond the impressions gained of distant countries and cities—how the women’s interest in certain motifs, events or even people’s activities runs through three generations.

They also show how fluid the boundary between commissioned photography, documentary photography and independent artistic work can be.

The women photographers and their destinations

Monika von Boch: Algeria • Julie Boehringer: Italy, Turkey • Marianne Breslauer: France • Gerti Deutsch: Japan • Lotte Errell: Egypt, China, Iran, Palestine • Barbara Klemm: Brazil, France, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, USA • Herlinde Koelbl: Turkmenistan • Lisette Model: Italy • Inge Morath: Iran, Italy, Tunisia • Elisabeth Neudörfl: Thailand, Hong Kong • Helga Paris: GDR • Evelyn Richter: USSR • Alice Schalek: India • Fee Schlapper: Egypt, India • Jordis Antonia Schlösser: Iran, Cuba, Poland • Anne Schönharting: Hong Kong, Kyrgyzstan • Ursula Schulz-Dornburg: Syria • Annemarie Schwarzenbach: Afghanistan (screen presentation) • Ré Soupault: Tunisia • Elfriede Stegemeyer: Spain • Franziska Stünkel: China, Denmark, Morocco, South Africa, Turkey, USA • unknown: GDR, Europe, Japan