This article analyses how photographers who were born in cities of present-day Ukraine created urban visions and established their own businesses in exile in New York.
The art historian Rosa Schapire (1874–1954) and the actress Elisabeth Bergner (1897–1986) were connected by a shared history: they or their families originally came from the Eastern European region of Galicia. At the turn of the twentieth century, the kingdom belonged to Austria-Hungary; today, the historic landscape lies in Poland and Ukraine, with its former capital, Lviv (Lemberg), now a Ukrainian city near the Polish border. Schapire grew up in Brody, Bergner was born in Drohobycz.
The first half of the 20th century was marked by world wars and shifting borders. Nation states dissolved and led to territorial shifts. At the same time, imperial, totalitarian and colonial claims to power opposed efforts to establish independent nation states. In a short series, METROMOD follows the traces of those who experienced the changing political, religious, economic and cultural conditions of their country of birth herefore they had to seek for new places to live and work and emigrated to one or several of the six METROMOD cities.