Lotte Jacobi (August 17, 1896 – May 6, 1990) was a leading American portrait photographer and photojournalist, known for her high-contrast black-and-white portrait photography, characterized by intimate, sometimes dramatic, sometimes idiosyncratic and often definitive humanist depictions of both ordinary people in the United States and Europe and some of the most important artists, thinkers and activists of the 20th century.

Jacobi's photographic style stressed informality, and sought to delve deeper into the traits of her subjects than traditional portraiture.

"[2] Jacobi is perhaps best known for her "portrait of Albert Einstein (Princeton, 1938), whom she photographed candidly, seated at his desk, dishevelled and dressed in a leather jacket, a work that was refused by Life magazine for its simplicity.

"[1] Other celebrated subjects included poets W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, and May Sarton; philosopher Martin Buber; writer J.D.

Du Bois; scientist Max Planck; artist Käthe Kollwitz; the actress and singer Lotte Lenya; the singer and activist Paul Robeson; the actor Peter Lorre; dancer Pauline Koner; fellow photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott and Edward Steichen; and political figures such as the first president of Israel Chaim Weizmann.

'”[6] After training at the Bavarian State Academy of Photography and the University of Munich, Jacobi married in 1916 and, in 1917, gave birth to her only child.

As persecution against Jews rose, the left-wing and Jewish-born Jacobi found her work praised by German officials for its "good examples of Aryan photography".

[4] "In the 1940s, she approached experimental photography with her Photogenics series, images playing with textures and light, realised without a camera.

In her New York studio as well as in her New Hampshire gallery that she opened in Deering in 1963, she exhibited photographers that she loved, such as Minor White, as well as other female artists.

[19] The eldest of three children, born to parents Maria and Sigismund, Jacobi and her sister Ruth were fourth-generation photographers.

[5] In 1940, she married Erich Reiss, a distinguished German book publisher and writer, a marriage that lasted until his death in 1951.