Bettina Oppenheimer

Bettina Oppenheimer (1919–1972) was born in Stuttgart, Germany, into an art-loving family. In her youth, she was active in Zionist organizations and underwent agricultural training in England in preparation for pioneering settlement. In 1939, with the outbreak of World War II, she immigrated to Palestine and settled in Jerusalem. She married a gynecologist and managed his clinic, and in 1948, enlisted in the army.
In 1950, she began working in photography. Largely self-taught, she further trained in the studio of the photographers Hannah Degani and Ephraim Degani in Jerusalem. She worked as an independent photographer throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and was known בעיקר within Jerusalem, particularly among artists of German origin.
Oppenheimer developed a distinctive style influenced by the New Photography—a movement active in Germany in the 1930s, known for its experimental photographic and printing techniques such as photograms. She employed chemical and optical processes, creating photomontages, photograms, and photographic works in the darkroom.
Alongside her artistic practice, she was active in commercial photography, producing portraits, fashion, still life, and architectural photography, where her unconventional approach to representation was also evident. She also photographed for the ophthalmology department at Hadassah Medical Center, using images of eyes as raw material in her work.
Oppenheimer illustrated books by Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, and others—usually using photomontage—but these were never published. She exhibited her work, and her photographs were published during the 1960s in photography yearbooks edited by Peter Merom.