We would like to draw your attention to some significant additions to our collections.

Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer): "Amor Shin," 1925-1930, vintage print, silver gelatine print, 27.7 cm x 22 cm

The photographic collection of the Jewish Museum Berlin has acquired a new exhibit of considerable significance: The vintage print "Amor Shin" by the photographer Yva (1900-1942).
In the 1920s and 30s, the advertising and fashion photographer Yva (Else Ernestine Neuländer) ran a flourishing atelier in Berlin with several trainee employees, among them Helmut Newton. Her photographs were published in various well-known magazines and are still considered to have been an impulse for the German avant-garde.

As the only known work of Yva’s with a reference to Judaism, "Amor Shin" is of particular interest to the Jewish Museum Berlin. The composition alludes to the form of the Hebrew letter Shin, which stands among other things for love in Jewish mysticism. The multiple exposure technique employed for "Amor Shin" shaped the surreal photography of the 1920s. Yva was so skilled at this technique that she was able to expose her photographic plates up to seven times. In this way she was able to create unreal and dream-like images. In this piece, the letter Shin emerges from a magical lamp as a three-fold feminine spirit, thus evocative of the three forms of love which underlie the cabbalistic interpretation of the letter. Yva, who grew up in an assimilated Jewish family, was forced to close her atelier in 1938 due to the work prohibition imposed by the Nazis. She then worked as an X-ray assistant in the Jewish hospital before she and her husband were arrested, deported, and murdered in 1942.