At the time Lucia Moholy photographed her, the American-born, Paris-based painter Florence Henri (1893–1982) had recently arrived at the Bauhaus, the influential art school in Dessau, Germany. There, she enrolled in the “preliminary course” taught by Lucia’s husband, László Moholy-Nagy, and lived in the couple’s home. With Lucia’s and László’s instruction and encouragement, Henri soon turned exclusively to photography, opening a portrait studio in Paris just two years later.

Lucia Moholy’s startlingly close-up portraits were far from the norm. “To the general public in Western Europe this style appears strange and exotic,” she wrote. “They find it interesting and worth discussing, but few of them wish to have their portraits taken in the same way.”