Like many women who entered the profession in the interwar years, Else Thalemann got her professional start by working for a prominent photo agency, producing reportage and advertisements for a burgeoning field of illustrated magazines. With its veering angles and radical cropping, this view of an industrial structure reveals Thalemann’s familiarity with modernist ideals in photography that prized the camera’s mechanical, abstracting tendencies. Unfortunately, the full range of Thalemann’s achievement is not well known because her Berlin studio was hit by Allied bombs during World War II, destroying almost all her negatives.