MAK Vienna Unveils Barbara Pflaum's Street Photography

The Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna is hosting a retrospective of Barbara Pflaum (1912–2002), a pioneering female photojournalist who worked for illustrated magazines in the 1950s. Pflaum studied photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in her forties, after a divorce and with three children. In 1954 she published her first reports on Venice and an experimental school in Sweden in the Wiener Illustrierte, and later worked for over twenty years as a photographer for the weekly Wochenpresse. She was a regular presence at theater premieres, opera openings, and political events in Vienna, often using her Rolleiflex medium-format camera. Her portraits of heads of state, party leaders, and famous artists frequently appeared on magazine covers. While she exhibited these images during her lifetime, the MAK show reveals a lesser-known facet of her work: candid street photographs taken for herself, not on assignment. These images, capturing everyday life, street protests, ruined neighborhoods, and Christmas markets, demonstrate her observational skills, humor, formal talent, and social sensitivity. Some were included in a 1961 book on Vienna, but many are shown for the first time.