Clemens Kalischer, Refugee Photographer of Humanity, Dies at 97

Clemens Kalischer, who fled Germany in 1933 as the Nazis clinched power, survived imprisonment in France and escaped to the United States, where his haunting dockside images of other displaced persons arriving from Europe propelled his career as a noted photojournalist, died June 9 at his home in Lenox, Massachusetts. He was 97.

His death was confirmed by his daughter Tanya Kalischer.

In 1947 and 1948, still in his 20s, Kalischer managed to embed himself with refugees uprooted by World War II as they arrived in New York by ship from Bremerhaven. He was able to do so because he had been one of them only six years before.

Camera in hand, he would later prowl the streets of Harlem and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the coal mines of western Pennsylvania, the Alpine villages of northern Italy and finally the Berkshires in Massachusetts, where he eventually settled, all in his quest not for “the moment that stands apart from the ordinary,” as the critic Miles J. Unger put it, but for “the moment that reveals it with crystalline clarity.”

Kalischer’s photographs were included in Edward Steichen’s celebrated exhibit “The Family of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955 and in a book by the same name; appeared in The New York Times, Life, Time and Newsweek; and made their way into the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the International Center of Photography, the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, Israel, and the Bayerisches Museum in Munich.

While he had always been predisposed to art and photography, his career began by accident.

Still acclimating himself to New York, having arrived speaking only French and German, Kalischer had taken a job as a copy boy at the New York bureau of Agence France-Presse, where his daily agenda consisted of getting coffee and figuring out the word counts of articles.

Then one day in 1946 the news agency’s chief photographer was unavailable for an assignment, and an editor recruited Kalischer as a replacement. With a borrowed Rolleiflex, he set out to record the arrival, at 4 a.m., of the former French luxury liner Normandie, which was being towed to a scrap yard. (It had capsized in 1942 in a fire that began as it was being converted into a troop ship during World War II.)

His editors in Paris were impressed with his photographs.

“That’s when it first dawned on me, perhaps you’re now a photographer,” he told Norbert Bunge, a German filmmaker, in the book “Clemens Kalischer” (2002).

Twice, serendipitous encounters in department stores steered him toward what would become his life’s work: immortalizing sharply observed moments through a nonjudgmental, unsentimental humanist lens.

As a young German refugee in Paris buying oil paints in a department store, he stumbled upon a book by Andre Kertesz, a Hungarian-born photographer, that became his bible.

In New York after the war, working as a laborer at Macy’s and “totally depressed and without any hope” as he described himself, a fellow worker recommended that he go to a photo exhibit. It proved so compelling to Kalischer that he enrolled in classes at the Photo League cooperative.

What distinguished Kalischer’s photographs, Unger wrote, was “his open-armed embrace of the varied human condition.” Kalischer’s mantra for beginning photographers was, “Stay as invisible as possible.”

Invisibility in Kalischer’s case, Unger wrote, involved “a recognition that photography of the kind he practices demands that the photographer remains invisible so that the subject can be revealed with maximum clarity.”

“In losing himself,” Unger added, “Kalischer gains the world.”

Clemens David Kalischer was born on March 30, 1921, in Lindau, a town in Bavaria. He grew up in Nordhausen, southwest of Berlin, and in Berlin itself. His mother, Ella (Norden) Kalischer, was a physiotherapist. His father, Hans, was a psychoanalyst whose experience with disturbed and delinquent children had given him an early insight into the discontent of Germany’s lower middle class.

“Unlike a lot of German Jews,” Clemens Kalischer once said, “my father knew disaster was coming, and he insisted that we leave Germany as soon as possible.”

As the Nazis took power, his father immigrated to France through Switzerland. But in 1939, while bike-riding from Paris to Brittany, young Clemens saw posters warning non-French residents to register with the local authorities.

Still a German citizen, he was arrested, labeled an enemy alien and sent to toil for three years in sardine and weapons plants, a quarry, kitchens and an infirmary. Then he was shipped to a camp under the control of the collaborationist French Vichy government. There, by chance, he was reunited with his father, and both were ominously identified as Jews.

In 1942, after the father and son discovered that Clemens’ mother and sister were confined at a farm nearby, all four managed to escape with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a private U.S. relief organization, and two family friends: Anna Freud, a daughter of Sigmund Freud, and Princess Maria Bonaparte, a great-grandniece of Napoleon.

The Kalischers took a French freighter from Marseille to Casablanca, Morocco, where they boarded another ship bound for Bermuda and Baltimore. When they arrived in New York, Kalischer, at 21, weighed a skeletal 88 pounds.

Besides taking classes at the Photo League and using its darkroom, he also studied art at Cooper Union and photography at the New School.

He eventually took his candid photographs of New Yorkers to The Times, hoping for freelance assignments, and was introduced to Grace Glueck, a Times arts editor and critic. So began a 35-year relationship with the newspaper.

In 1948, Kalischer’s work was included in “In and Out of Focus,” a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

He is survived by his wife, Angele (Wottitz) Kalischer; their daughters, Cornelia and Tanya Kalischer; and two grandsons. In 1965, after moving to the Berkshires, Kalischer opened a gallery in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, near where he had photographed the Tanglewood music festival and the Jacob’s Pillow dance festival.

He took photographs of subjects that Norman Rockwell used as the basis for his illustrations, taught at nearby colleges and supplied publications from his archive of some 500,000 photographs, including architectural images.

Until a few years ago, Kalischer would go on drives with his assistant to wherever his curiosity took him, stopping to take photographs with a small digital camera just for fun.

“Without expectations,” Kalischer said, “you are open.”