Mathilde Schönberg cooking

This photograph is one of the few pictures that can be clearly assigned to Arnold Schönberg as a photographer on the basis of his own signature. He used a simple Kodak box camera; thus its technical limitations were pronounced – many of the photos were out of focus or wrongly exposed. Schönberg must have used a support very carefully for the portraits of his wife Mathilde inside the apartment (Berlin Zehlendorf, Machnower Chaussee & Dietloffstraße, Villa Lepcke) to attain their comparatively sharp focus.