A true pioneer of street photography, Hilde Lotz-Bauer (1907-1999) photographed Italy in the 1930s. She developed a personal and original artistic gaze during her first stay in Italy between 1934 and 1943. The photographs come from the Hilde Lotz-Bauer archive in London, the two Max Planck Institutes for the History of Art – the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence – and from the collection of the photographer Franz Schlechter in Heidelberg. Trained as a photographer at the Munich school after having already obtained a Doctorate in Art History, she arrived in Rome at the end of 1934 thanks to a travel grant from the Bibliotheca Hertziana, leaving her homeland just as National Socialism took power.

Her career began photographing drawings for her first husband Bernhard Degenhart, a famous Italian drawing scholar. Subsequently, her images accompanied the research of numerous art historians. Hilde Lotz-Bauer was the only professional photographer working at the Historical Institutes of Rome and Florence, producing impeccable images of sculpture, drawing, architecture and urban planning. At the same time, both for commissioned projects and for the pure pleasure of discovery, the photographer traveled almost all of Italy, from north to south, moving among people with her small portable Leica, capturing cities as well as the more isolated rural areas, with their inhabitants during the fascism, transforming the reports into a unique artistic work, full of personal and documentary ideas also on a critical and social level.