Madame d’Ora brings together the work of Dora Kallmus (1881–1963), the Austrian fashion and portrait photographer who fashioned her professional identity under that name. Published by Prestel in 2020 as an exhibition catalogue, the book considers a career shaped by the social brilliance and political upheaval of twentieth-century Europe. Its subject is not simply a celebrated portrait studio, but the changing world that passed before Kallmus’s camera.

The catalogue is organized around successive periods of her life and practice. It begins with her upbringing in an intellectual Jewish family and her emergence as a prominent portraitist in Vienna at the end of the Austro-Hungarian era. After moving to Paris in the 1920s, she established an Art Deco studio and photographed figures including Pablo Picasso, Josephine Baker, and Colette. Fashion, celebrity, and cultivated self-presentation form an important part of this history, yet the book extends beyond society portraiture to address Kallmus’s experience of persecution and survival during the Holocaust.

That biographical structure gives the photographs an unusually consequential setting. Images of elegance and public persona are viewed against displacement, violence, and the collapse of the milieu in which Kallmus first achieved professional distinction. The result is a study of portraiture as both an artistic practice and a historical record: faces, poses, and fashions register individual presence while also carrying the pressures of their time.

At 220 pages, the hardcover volume offers collectors a substantial account of a woman photographer working across Vienna and Paris during decisive decades in European culture. Its importance rests less on any single famous sitter than on the breadth of the career assembled here. As the catalogue accompanying the largest United States exhibition devoted to Madame d’Ora at the time of publication, it provides a focused framework for understanding how fashion photography, studio portraiture, Jewish European history, and female professional authorship intersect in her work.