on being a fake yva girl

well technically, a fake yva woman

Thomas Quine via Wikimedia Commons

There’s this photographer whose work I really love. Her actual name was Else Ernestine Neuländer-Simon, but she worked under the moniker “Yva.” Still, even though I consider myself a fan, I’ve never really seen her work outside of some images you can find online and I have to assume that these reproductions are just okay. There’s a book of her photographs, but it’s out of print and I never see it going for under $200, which is a little much to spend on something that I cannot, however I try, justify to myself¹ as “research.” Even if it were in print, it would still be expensive, as books with high-quality art reproductions are expensive to make.

If you haven’t heard of Yva, it’s probably partly because she died in the Holocaust and (per Wikipedia) her legacy was left in the hands of the notorious Charlotte Weidler, an art dealer who stole art that had been entrusted to her by Jewish friends during the Nazi regime.² Yva’s clearly retained enough of a foot…