Elsa Haertter Biography
Else Auguste Haertter was born in Rottweil, Germany, in 1908. When she was only four years old her family moved to Stuttgart to follow her father's work, a notary. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, attended graphics courses with the German painter Willy Baumeister, a follower of the Bauhaus movement and specialized in fashion design.
At just eighteen he designed, almost for fun, swimsuits in line with the Bauhaus style which he sent to the American company Jantzen. Two years later he moved to Paris where he lived by sending fashionable sketches and drawings to German magazines until he became a correspondent for «Die Elegante Welt».
In 1940, with the start of the Second World War, he moved to Italy, it was in this period that he began working for the weekly «Grazia» signing his articles with the pseudonym Erti. At the end of the conflict, she remained in Italy where she decided to simplify her name simply to Elsa.
In the immediate post-war period, his collaborations with the magazine «Grazia» became increasingly dense: in fact, he quickly took on a key role in the editorial team where he not only directed the fashion reports, but also took the photographs himself. In fact, his shots were published in both Italian and German fashion magazines, such as «Linea Italiana», «Bellezza», «Epoca». Between the 1950s and 1960s she created advertising catalogs for the fashion houses Luisa Spagnoli, Roberta di Camerino, Triumph and Rhodiatoce, with which she already collaborated as a free-lance photographer. The peculiar element of Haertter's photographs, beyond their setting, was their aim, namely "to make the dress read". Elsa Haertter was in fact the first fashion photographer to set her photo shoots in exotic and particular places. Between 1959 and 1968 what was defined as the "most interesting leap" of his career took place: he began to realize his photographic adventures for «I Viaggi di Grazia», i.e. special issues of the magazine dedicated to unusual places and distant countries such as Brazil, Indochina and the Arctic Circle. The initiative, promoted by the then director of «Grazia» Renato Olivieri, had a dual purpose: to provide a contribution to understanding the host country and to make it known about fashion. Towards the end of the 1960s Elsa Haertter was increasingly attracted to Eastern religions and philosophies. Starting from 1969 he began to spend several months of the year in India, in Pondicherry at the community of the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo. Upon returning from India, Haertter progressively reduced her work commitments in the fields of photography and fashion until her death in Milan in 1995.
