Marianne Gast (10 December 1910 – 1958) was a German photographer. She specialised in photographing architecture and works of art. For many years she was the primary photographer of works by the German-born artist

Mathias Goeritz Werner Mathias Goeritz Brunner (4 April 1915, Danzig, German Empire – 4 August 1990, Mexico City) was a Mexican painter and sculptor of German people, German origin. After spending much of the 1940s in North Africa and Spain, he and his wife, ...

, her husband from 1942 to 1958. The majority of her archive is now held by the

National Institute of Fine Arts The Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura (INBAL, ), located in the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, is the Mexican institution in charge of coordinating artistic and cultural activities (both at the political and the educati ...

in Mexico; other documents are held by the Lafuente Archive. In 2018 the first solo exhibition of Gast's work was displayed at the Centro de Documentación de la Imagen in

Santander, Spain Santander ( , ; ) is the capital of the Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Cantabria, Spain. It has a population of 172,000 (2017). It is a port city located in the northern coast of the Iberian Peninsula, facing the Cantab ...

. Gast was born in

Schierke Schierke is a village and a former municipality in the Harz district, in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Since 1 July 2009, it is part of the town Wernigerode. Situated within the Harz mountain range in the valley of the river Bode, at the rim ...

, Germany, and educated in England and France. During this period she began to practice photography. In 1942 she met the German-born painter and sculptor Mathias Goeritz in Tangier, when both were working at the

Deutsche Akademie The Academy for the Scholarly Research and Fostering of Germandom (''die Akademie zur Wissenschaftlichen Erforschung und Pflege des Deutschtums''), or German Academy (''die Deutsche Akademie'', ), was a German cultural institute founded in 1925 at ...

. They married the same year, and settled in Spain after the Second World War, living first in Granada, then Madrid. In 1948, the couple moved to

Santillana del Mar Santillana del Mar () is a historic town situated in Cantabria, Spain. Its many historic buildings attract thousands of visitors every year. There is an old saying that Santillana del Mar is ''The Town of Three Lies'', since it is neither a Saint ...

because Gast had been commissioned to take photographs for a planned book on the town. In 1949, Gast and Goeritz moved to Mexico, as Goeritz had been invited to teach at the new school of architecture in Guadalajara. In 1951, Gast became the head of the new José Maria Zepeda Estrada gallery in Guadalajara. Gast and Goeritz separated; in 1958 she visited

Easter Island Easter Island (, ; , ) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. The island is renowned for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, ...

without him to photograph the ''

moai Moai or moʻai ( ; ; ) are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500. Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but h ...

'' there. Later that year she returned to Germany, divorced Goeritz, and died of a brain tumour. At the end of her life she married her second husband, Carl von Campe.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:gast, marianne German women photographers 1910 births 1958 deaths 20th-century German photographers People from Harz (district)