The photograph depicts a young woman working at a radio station in Cologne in 1931, during the last years of the Weimar Republic.
The woman is quietly seated in a chair, while she looks confindently at the viewer, holding a cigarette near her mouth with her right hand, which she appears to be smoking.
She wears a fashionable silk flowery dress and has a very short hairstyle, typical of the "new woman" of the Weimar Republic, which adds to her androgynous look.
[2] The picture has similarities with the Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1928), by the painter Otto Dix, which might have served as an inspiration.
[3] There are prints of this photograph at the August Sander Archive, in Cologne, the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa.