"Camera As A Passport: Ship of Photographers" Becomes a Traveling Exhibition

About "Camera as a Passport: Ship of Photographers"

On May 6, 1941, the S.S. Winnipeg, a converted freighter, pulled out of the harbor of Marseille, France, heading for the French Caribbean Island of Martinique. It was a fraught moment. Nazi Germany had conquered Poland in 1939, and then invaded Western Europe in the spring of 1940, marching triumphally into Paris in June of that year. Germany was poised to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. The United States was not yet in the war.

Much of what we know about this trip across the Atlantic Ocean comes from an article published in Modern Photography in July 1951 to mark the tenth anniversary of the Winnipeg’s perilous journey. In “The Saga of the SS Winnipeg,” Fritz Neugass, a German-Jewish refugee photographer, dubbed the voyage “The Ship of Photographers” because there were eight photographers aboard the freighter. They came from Belgium,
France, Germany, and Hungary: Ilse Bing, Josef Breitenbach, Boris Lipnitsky, Charles Leirens, Yolla Niclas, Fred Stein, Monie Tannen, and Ylla (Camilla Henriette Koffler). During lifeboat drills, they discovered each other.

Among the 750 passengers aboard the Winnipeg were approximately 75 French military and 120 French nationals, many of whom were suspected of being Nazi collaborators on a mission to infiltrate Martinique.  Just two hours away from its destination, armed soldiers from a free Dutch ship boarded the Winnipeg, arrested the Vichy soldiers, and rerouted the ship to Port of Spain in Trinidad.  Six of the photographers managed to continue their journeys to the United States finding a safe harbor in New York by
mid-June 1941; two of them only arrived later.

The American journalist Varian Fry and the New York-based Emergency Rescue Committee that helped
so many Jewish and anti-Fascist artists get out of Europe in the nick of time also assisted many of these photographers.

“Camera as Passport: The Ship of Photographers,” presents the work of seven of the eight photographers (Monie Tannen is missing). It introduces this intrepid group as exemplary case studies of the wide range of European photographers who used their cameras as passports to other worlds. Taking photographs presented a sufficiently malleable opportunity in the 1930s that not only allowed these women and men to leave Europe but also to have the means to sustain themselves in foreign countries where they did not necessarily speak the language. They did, however, mobilize the visual language of photography.

This exhibition of thirty-six photographs allows one to grasp the power of the camera as passport and shows the diversity of these photographers work prior to World War II, ranging from portraiture to street photography to commercial photojournalism. The exhibit focuses first on their European experiences pre-emigration before turning to their escape from Europe on the S. S. Winnipeg. Only three of the eight photographers brought their cameras on board—Bing, Breitenbach, and Niclas—and documented the trip. The exhibit includes examples of their photographs of the ship and sea, conveying the sense both of
possibilities yet to come and the immediate experience of overcrowding. The exhibit concludes with examples of some of their initial photographic reactions to the new world, seeing it through European eyes.