Kretschmer is best known for her depictions of women in Germany in the early 20th century and is credited with helping construct the 'Neue Frau' or New Woman image of modern femininity.
[2] Her sister Margot was born in 1905, but died as a young woman Kretschmer's brother, Wilhelm, was two years her senior.
"[5] She also cites the critic Franz Roh who stated in his trilingual 1929 book Foto-Auge/Oeil photo/Oeil en photo/Photo-Eye, that the exhibition was one of the "most important event in the visual field on the last few years.
"[5] Perhaps because of the exhibitions international sensibilities, with an international selection committee consisting of established artists of multiple backgrounds; from Germany were Moholy-Nagy and Jan Tschichold, El Lissitzky from the Soviet Union and Edward Steichen and Edward Weston from the United States, and Piet Zwart from Holland.
[5] The display of much of the photography rooms was through a "structuring logic of the printed page [which] placed a profusion of pictures directly before the visitor in pedagogical pairings or groupings, most of which sought to redefine the medium's aesthetic merit.
[5] The Munich version of Film and Foto was "Das Lichtbild" which would go on a singular regional tour throughout Essen, Dessau, and Breslau.
"[5] This new direction being formulated would come to be known as the 'New Vision' as Vanessa Rocco states, this New Vision "advocated the potential of the camera to create a new way of looking at the fast-moving, modern, urban world through the use of dynamic camera angles [and] inventive framing of subjects..."[5] As Kretschmer states her artistic goals in this emerging medium were that "with a good photo, the idea is elevated to reality and reality elevated to the idea.
[2] Due to her Jewish heritage, Kretschmer and her family considered fleeing Nazi Germany, but with three small children and an established business, the task was not so simple.
Three years later Sigmund Kretschmer died (1953), from this point on she managed her studio work with her youngest daughter Christiane von Konigslow.
[7] After the war, the passport clientele came from many kinds of people, and the familial portrait shots were usually commissioned by circles within business or industry.
[2] Kretschmer ran her portrait studio for a total of fifty years, and she photographed some of the same families through multiple generations.