Nora Dumas

Nora Dumas (b. Budapest, 1890, d. Thonon, 1979), was Hungarian photographer who worked mainly in Paris.

Nora Dumas was born Kelenföldi Telkes Nóra, in 1890, in Budapest, which she left for Paris, France, in 1913. Spending the years 1914–1917 in an internment camp, she then went to the United States, where she met the Swiss architect, Adrien-Émile Dumas, whom she married.

Returning to France, the couple settled in Moisson. Nora’s photographs produced there and amongst other villages of the Seine depict rural life as endangered, as a result of the wartime decimation of the male population and poverty.Ergy Landau took her on as an assistant in her studio in Paris in 1929, where they worked together for nearly ten years, sharing the celebrated Ukrainian model, Assia Granatouroff for studio photographs of the nude. Both also produced portraits of adults and children and fashion photographs. Her photo of a draught horse straining at the yoke brought her attention and inclusion in an exhibition, with Ergy Landau and André Kertész, Das Lichtbild in Munich in 1931, and at other exhibitions in Paris and Brussels. In 1937 Beaumont and Nancy Newhall visited Paris on their honeymoon combined with visits to collectors of photography and photographers for the exhibition Photography 1839-1937 that Beaumont, MoMA librarian, had been commissioned to curate for the Museum of Modern Art. He purchased works by Dumas, Brassai and others during this visit.

She joined the agency Rapho which was set up by Charles Rado to represent fellow Hungarian friends and refugee photographers including Brassaï, Ergy Landau and Ylla, and her work was taken up by a number of magazines including Vu,Bifur,Photographie,Paris magazine (a celebrity gossip magazine) and Follies (a popular French pin-up magazine). In 1955 Edward Steichen included her low-angle, frame-filling photograph of a jovial French farmer (credited to her and the Rapho Agency) in MoMA's world-touring The Family of Man which was seen by 9 million people.

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