Bernice Kolko

Kahlo by Kolko

Bernice Kolko, was born in Poland and emigrated to the United States with her family at the end of the first World War. In 1932 she began her photographic career during a trip to Vienna, Austria where she worked with the celebrated Rudolph Koppitz. In 1934, upon her return to the United States, she settled in New York and had an exhibition at the gallery of the RKO radio station at Rockefeller Center. She participated with the Works Project Administration Project, an undertaking that gave great impetus to the arts after the Great Depression.
At the beginning of the Second World War, Kolko enlisted in the American Army and worked as a photographer. At the end of the war, she traveled to Los Angeles and worked with Man Ray; her experimental projects of that period include superimposed and solarized images, as well as work with abstract shapes. When she arrived in Mexico City in 1951, she had already had her work shown at several exhibitions, and received immediate media attention.
During the first year of her stay, she began a friendship with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the Siqueiros and the Chavez Morado family; she began a photographic project that dealt with Mexican artists and intellectuals of the time. Diego Rivera wrote:
"Her photographs have seemed to me to possess the highest technical quality, sensibility, curiosity and excellent taste. She chooses what is essential and which best expresses the subjects she chooses; her works are truly notable. In my opinion hers is the work of a great artist" .
Kolko traveled throughout the country, creating a trove of thousands of images while always calibrating intellectual and artistic work. Out of those trips her project Mujeres de México—Women of Mexico—was born.
Sophia Vackimes, Curator

Frida Kahlo in her garden at Coyoacán, 1952

FRIDA KAHLO Traveling Exhibit
    

THE DIARY OF FRIDA KAHLO, AN INTIMATE SELF-PORTRAIT

1 January 1953
xxxx 1953, Winter
Bernice Kolko
I think she
is a great art-
ist. She photographs re-
ality admir-
ably. (she is not a
Communist) An
American
citizen - Hungarian Jew
She says she is for
peace, but ........?