Seeing Double

Madame d’Ora (the pseudonym for Dora Kallmus, translating roughly as ‘Madame of her time’ or ‘Madame now’) was born to a prominent Jewish family in Vienna in 1881. In 1905 she was the first woman accepted by the Association of Austrian photographers, and in 1907 she became the first woman to establish a photography studio, the Atelier d’Ora, in Vienna. When she took the portrait The Dolly sisters, c.1928 (Bowness Family Fund for Photography, 2022), Madame d’Ora was a famed photographer in her mid-forties heading her own commercial studio in Paris. At this point, Madame d’Ora’s early fame as a portrait photographer of Viennese society and aristocracy had expanded to include portraits of avant-garde artists, international performers and renowned fashion designers.

Contracted to famous fashion magazines – including Femina (from 1925 onwards), Officiel de la Couture et de la Mode de Paris (translating as The Official Publication of Paris Couture and Fashion, from 1927 onwards) and the pioneering pictorial magazine Vu (Seen, from 1928 onwards)– Madame d’Ora was an influential part of this cultural change across emerging cultural industries. Her framing of her subjects reflects this: natural poses replaced formal sittings, fashion photography replaced magazine drawings, and women were positioned as leaders across the early twentieth century creative industries.

Hungarian-born American vaudeville performers Jenny (Yansci) and Rosie (Roszika) Deutsch were known professionally as the Dolly sisters. Their fame was built around the fact that they were identical twins who performed in perfect synchronicity. In this context of performative female mirroring or ‘duplicity’ on stage, it is not surprising that the sisters first gained fame through the Ziegfeld Follies, a popular series of Broadway productions in the early teens in New York. Madame d’Ora’s portrait of the sisters was taken around 1927, when the twins were in their mid-thirties and at the apex of their acting and dancing careers. Glamorous modern women, they were known for their youthful energy, love of fashion, colourful range of wealthy romantic partners and predilection for gambling. Having appeared in early film (1915 and 1918), they were also familiar to Parisian audiences in the 1920s through their regular appearances in comedy and dance revues at the Casino de Paris, the Moulin Rouge and the Olympia Hall. The Dolly sisters promoted and marketed French fashion equally. As publicity for their shows in Paris in 1923 and 1927 announced, their furs both on and off-stage were created by the prestigious Parisian furrier Fourrures Weil, their hosiery, shoes and bags were designed by one of Europe’s leading footwear designers, André Perugia, and they were styled and dressed by the legendary Parisian fashion designer Jean Patou.¹See Bibliothèque nationale de France, ‘Recueil factice
de documents concernant les revues du Palace, 1923’,
http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark/12148/cb38729437q, and
‘Recueil factice de documents concernant la revue du
Casino de Paris, 1927’, http://catalogue.bnf.fr/
ark/12148/cb38729593g. .

In Madame d’Ora’s portrait of the twins, we see evidence of such fashionable modernity. Their smooth, dark hair is cut in a short and sporty bob that marked each as a ‘flapper’, and their stockinged legs are casually exposed beneath comfortable knee-length skirts. Across material and jewellery, we also see evidence of their wealth. A large, pristine white fur wraps loosely across their shoulders, they both wear long strands of pearls, and the diaphanous fold of their expensive dress is striped with thick sparkling, embroidery. The sisters also wear identical silver dancing shoes, which nod to an elegant reinterpretation of the ballet flat. Moreover, the simplicity of setting – the plain material they sit on, the empty white wall behind them, as well as the halo effect of the circular light surrounding their bodies – articulates their centrality as stars and icons of female achievement.

Madame d’Ora therefore asks not just that her own talent as a photographer be recognised in this image – she also has another intention. The photographer asks that fashion and style be interpreted through the female body, that the actress be recognised as a public figure driving social change, and that women be celebrated for their sisterhood.

‘Challenging the idea that twins (and sisters, of any sort) can be identical, Madame d’Ora presents the actresses dressed in different colours, seated in different poses, and frames their contrasting personalities through their different response to her camera’ Victoria Duckett

We know that 1928 was the last time that the sisters worked together, that 1929 brought the Wall Street crash, and that this glamorous moment passed. Even with this knowledge, we can still see that subjectivity was allowed for each sitter, and that each ‘Dolly’ was a remarkably articulate arbiter of her gender and ‘ora’ (time).

Victoria Duckett is Associate Dean, Partnerships and International – Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University and Associate Professor of Film

The NGV warmly acknowledges the Bowness Family Fund for Photography for the acquisition of The Dolly sisters, 1928.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine, Issue 57 | Mar–Apr 2026.

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