Irene

Irene is Roswitha Hecke's portrait of a Zurich sex worker known as Lady Shiva, made over three weeks in the late 1970s and first published in 1978 as Liebes Leben.

Hecke met Irene through the director Werner Schroeter and photographed her daily routine in Zurich before accompanying her to Rome, where Irene celebrated her birthday each year. The resulting black-and-white images, a mix of staged and documentary frames, follow Irene through apartments, streets, and hotel rooms with a directness that made the original book both a cult object and, on reissue, an international success. This Edition Patrick Frey edition, first released in 2011 and revised again in 2021, reprints 107 images including a number never published in the earlier editions, alongside texts by Hecke, Irene, and Baudelaire.

Hecke (b. 1944) trained as a photographer before working as the house photographer for the theater director Peter Zadek. Her other books include Menschen-Orte-Fäuste, made while traveling the United States with the writer Wolf Wondratschek, and Pigalle, on the transvestite scene in Paris. Irene remains her best known work, republished repeatedly since 1978 for a portrait that treats its subject with unusual directness for its time.