Atelier d'Ora-Benda: The Vienna Studio That Photographed Emperors, Klimt and Weimar's Wildest Dancer
- Aug 12
- 8 min read
Before it had emperors, movie stars and one of Weimar Berlin's most scandalous dancers in front of its lens, the Atelier d'Ora was just one woman's stubborn bet on herself. Dora Kallmus opened it in Vienna in 1907, at a time when formal photography training simply wasn't available to women, and built it into the most fashionable portrait studio in the city with the help of a technician named Arthur Benda who eventually got his own name on the door. For twenty years the studio, known through its partnership era as Atelier d'Ora-Benda, photographed Austrian royalty, Gustav Klimt, Josephine Baker and the naked bodies of Weimar Berlin's most notorious dance duo. Then the partnership collapsed in a way the two of them never recovered from personally, and the studio's two halves went on to have two of the most different Nazi-era stories imaginable.
A Woman Who Wasn't Allowed to Learn the Trade She Was About to Master
Dora Philippine Kallmus was born in Vienna on March 20, 1881, to a wealthy Jewish family. Her father Philipp Kallmus was a well connected government lawyer, and that connection ended up mattering enormously for his daughter's career. Dora developed an early fascination with photography while working as an assistant to the son of the painter Hans Makart, and in 1905 she became the first woman admitted to the Association of Austrian Photographers. That same year she also became the first woman permitted to study photographic theory at Vienna's Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt, an institution that wouldn't let women take its hands-on technical courses for another three years. She'd bought her first camera, a simple Kodak box model, a few years earlier on a trip to the Côte d'Azur, and started out just photographing friends and family long before it became anything like a career.
By May 1906 she'd formally registered herself as a working photographer in Vienna, a full year before her studio even opened its doors. To get around the gap in her hands-on training, she left for Berlin in January 1907 and spent several months apprenticing under the portrait photographer Nicola Perscheid. It was there that she met a young lab assistant named Arthur Benda, born in Berlin on March 23, 1885, who had been working under Perscheid since he was a teenager and knew the technical side of the darkroom cold.
Two People, One Camera, One Name
Kallmus returned to Vienna in 1907 and opened her own studio on Wipplingerstrasse with financial backing from her family, an audacious move for a woman in that era with no formal technical training of her own. She solved that problem by bringing Benda on as her assistant. The arrangement that followed was a genuine division of labor: Benda ran the camera, the lighting and the darkroom, while Kallmus handled composition, client relationships, sales and the studio's public image, working under the French-inflected professional name Madame d'Ora, a nod to her fondness for French culture. Her father's connections opened the first door.
Gustav Klimt sat for her camera in 1908, becoming her first major client and giving the new studio instant credibility in a city that took its artists seriously. The sitting produced a series of ten photographs of the painter posed standing and seated in a suit, and Kallmus later said her method meant getting to know a sitter's particular qualities well enough to photograph them in a way that actually did them justice, rather than just pointing a camera and hoping for the best. Those prints still survive today in the Austrian National Library's picture archive.
An Emperor, and Everyone Who Wanted to Look Like One
The studio's client list grew from there through a network of personal connections almost as much as reputation. Kallmus's cousin, the actress Rosa Bertens, brought in stage performers including Fritzi Massary and Alexander Girardi. A connection to the young composer Erich Korngold brought in musical figures like soprano Maria Jeritza. Her father's standing in government and legal circles brought in bankers, officials and old Viennese money, including members of the Rothschild family.
The studio's reputation peaked in 1916 when it received the commission to photograph Emperor Karl I during his coronation as King of Hungary, a job that put the Atelier d'Ora's work directly in front of the imperial family and cemented it as the studio Vienna's elite actually used. The client list from those years reads like a guest book for the whole of Vienna's creative and intellectual scene, and beyond Klimt it eventually included the painters Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, Klimt's longtime companion Emilie Flöge, the writer Arthur Schnitzler, the critic Karl Kraus and the composer Alban Berg.
Weimar's Wildest Night, Captured on Glass Plates
Not everything the studio shot was quite so respectable, and some of its most striking surviving images have nothing to do with emperors at all. In 1922 the studio photographed Anita Berber and her partner Sebastian Droste performing their dance Märtyrer, a session that produced some of the most reproduced images of Weimar-era performance art still in circulation, several of which now live in the Albertina museum's collection in Vienna. Berber performed in little more than a loincloth, and the photographs capture exactly the kind of boundary-pushing, taboo-baiting spectacle that made her one of the most talked about, and most quickly self-destructive, performers of her generation. It's a useful reminder that a studio built on portraits of royalty was also perfectly willing to point its camera at the most scandalous act in Central Europe when the opportunity came along.
Partners in Name Only
Benda's role kept growing alongside the studio's reputation, and in 1921 he was formally made a business partner, at which point the operation started trading under the joint name Atelier d'Ora-Benda. From 1921 to 1926 the pair ran a summer branch in the spa town of Karlsbad, chasing the wealthy international clientele who wintered across Europe and summered by the healing waters, and in 1925 they opened a second, permanent studio in Paris to chase that same clientele year round.
The partnership didn't survive the expansion. In 1927, while Kallmus was building out the Paris side of the business, Benda took over the Vienna studio outright and began running it under the name d'Ora-Benda-Wien alongside his wife, Hanny Mittler. By most accounts of what happened, the two former partners never spoke to each other again.
Paris, and a New Life Entirely
Kallmus threw herself into her independent Paris career, and it's arguably where her most interesting work happened. She landed a long running arrangement with the German magazine Die Dame, corresponding directly with its editor in chief Kurt Korff, who encouraged her to start writing her own editorial text alongside her photographs rather than simply supplying images for someone else's captions. She also worked regularly for L'Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode, putting her at the center of Paris fashion journalism just as photographs were replacing hand drawn illustrations in the pages of major magazines. Her Paris subject list reads like a cross section of the era's cultural life: Coco Chanel, Josephine Baker, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, the writer Colette, the painter Tamara de Lempicka and Marc Chagall all sat for her camera. She once described Paris itself as belonging like a heart and lungs in my book and in my life. Asked in 1930 to name the most beautiful woman she had ever photographed, she skipped past every famous name on her client list and picked an anonymous fashion mannequin instead, using the moment to criticize the industry she worked in as a modern slave market, and observing that young models had a hollow, over-trained kind of perfection where nothing enters the scene that could disturb the well trained beauty.
What Happened to Benda's Half
Back in Vienna, Benda's studio kept running under his own steam, eventually operating simply under his own name again, and it did well enough that in 1937 King Zog I of Albania hired him for three weeks of official portrait work in Tirana, a commission that reportedly left him financially comfortable for years afterward. In 1938, the same year Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, he opened a new studio location on the Kärntnerring in central Vienna. He wasn't Jewish, so unlike his former partner, his business and his life weren't upended by the Anschluss the way hers was about to be. Benda kept working as a photographer in Vienna for decades after the split, and he died there of a stroke on September 7, 1969, having spent more than forty years running a studio that still carried, in one form or another, the name of a woman he never spoke to again.
Hiding From the People Who Wanted Her Erased
Kallmus's story took a much darker turn. She had converted to Roman Catholicism back in 1919, but that offered no protection once Germany occupied France. She sold her Paris studio in the fall of 1940 as the occupation closed in, and spent the following years in hiding, first in a cloister and later on a farm near Lalouvesc in the Ardèche region, an area that became known for sheltering refugees and Jewish families through the war. She survived. Much of her family didn't. Her sister Anna, three years her senior, was deported to the Lodz ghetto in Poland in 1941 and murdered there, one of several relatives the family lost to the Holocaust.
The Slaughterhouse Photographs
The work Kallmus made after the war looked almost nothing like the elegant portraits that had built her reputation. Around 1948, the United Nations commissioned her to photograph displaced persons in camps across Europe, turning her camera toward the kind of raw, undecorated human suffering she'd spent decades photographing around rather than directly. That same year she became one of only a handful of Austrian victims of Nazi persecution to successfully reclaim property the Nazis had seized from her and her sister, a family house in Frohnleiten called Haus Doranna, a small hard fought victory in the middle of everything else she'd lost. In 1956 she photographed Pablo Picasso, a sitting that bookended her career neatly against that first Klimt session almost fifty years earlier and turned out to be her last major portrait.
At seventy five she then produced a visceral, unflinching series photographing a Paris slaughterhouse, images that read less like fashion photography and more like a woman working through what she'd witnessed a decade earlier. Her final solo exhibition opened at the Galerie Montaigne in Paris in 1958, with more than a hundred photographs on display and an opening hosted by Jean Cocteau. A motorcycle accident in 1959 left her with significant memory loss and effectively ended her working life. She spent her final years back in that recovered house in Frohnleiten, Austria, and died there on October 28, 1963, having produced something like 200,000 images across more than fifty years photographing a Europe that kept remaking itself, and her along with it, whether she wanted it to or not.
