A FATEFUL TRIP TO EINSTEIN'S PHOTOGRAPHER
In 1983 I took a driving trip with my girlfriend at the time, Nina, to visit her cousin, whom she’d never met, the photographer, Lotte Jacobi. And why the memory comes up at this time, why any memory comes up at any given time is a source of wonder. We drove from Chicago in Nina’s dark green, manual transmission, old Econoline van, the van as her as her clothes, stuffed with everything she could think of that we needed. Arriving in Deering, New Hampshire at Lotte Jacobi’s house, we were greeted without much fanfare, yet cordially.
She was German, an artist, famous; so took herself seriously and had better things to do than host a distant relative and boyfriend. Yet we talked for while, I don’t remember much of it, over lunch. Something about her friend, May Sarton, who didn’t live far away. Something about Einstein, I mean how can you avoid talking about Einstein to someone who knew him and took some of the most famous photographs of him at his desk, on his sailboat, smoking a pipe, etc.?
She showed us some of her other photos, I don’t remember precisely which but learned later she had taken portraits of Berthold Brecht and Fritz Lang, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Kurt Weill, Peter Lorre, Emil Jannings, George Grosz, Lotte Lenya. Thomas Mann, Marc Chagall, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Robeson, Berenice Abbott, Edward Steichen. W. H. Auden, Martin Buber, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Frost, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Planck, Eleanor Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, and J.D. Salinger.
Of course, then to be with her was to be one body away from them all. So awed by her having tapped in and still in touch with all that history, my speaking with her was awkward, accentuated by the sense of being a next to nobody, though I had studied years before with Herbert Brün, whose wife Manni was the daughter of Brecht’s major male lead actor, Fritz Kortner, so I had at least one life-line to European radical genius. Lotte however, had it intravenously though, like royal blood.
Soon she said we had to go to an important favorite place of hers and navigated us in the van to this secret destination, “The Mack Truck Museum.” Here, next to a big garage, in a large open field were about 50 trucks of all eras: old wooden fire trucks, delivery vans, big giants with ferocious grates, trailer trucks; all colors, there were red ones, green, blue, white, turquoise, brown, all silent, unmoving, yet still with enormous power and metallic grace. Dwarfing us, then we walked through the field with mouths open. Being in this field, it wasn’t like they were crops or flowers, but the feeling was they were all almost sentinels here, having ridden on the roads everywhere, now resting, no doubt loved by someone who’d placed them 10 feet apart, each with a dignity they deserved. Lotte Jacobi loved these trucks, she with a similar dignity, a gravity, born of traveling through time and space just to be here with us now.
Then she took us by the studio of a potter friend with beautiful work. Again we were impacted by the beauty of things made from materials common as mud and metal, tapping again into the vein of creation. The front cover of his brochure had a photo, perhaps done by Lotte, of his hand just resting on top of a big, unformed oblong of clay. Later that year searching for an image that would convey the spirit of my new massage therapy practice, I thought about that potter and his brochure and pictured similarly someone’s hand resting on the small of someone’s back, I drew it then; now it accompanies me every day as the logo of our school.
Just like we placed ourselves into the orbit of Jacobi’s legendary historical presence, many hands now reach down and rest on so many backs. Each have borne their history and need the care of someone who takes the trouble to get to know them, almost like a portrait painter or photographer like Jacobi willing to see and feel what it’s like to be alive, to be that person in body, mind and spirit,, to be recognized and loved for who they most truly are. “She liked to wait until the models were most at ease before taking a photograph.” So also in our creative art and science of massage, we try to find that greatest sense, that deep ease of being, before we say goodbye.
photo by Lotte Jacobi