Lilly Joss (born Lilly Joseph) and her mother Ida Joseph arrived in New York in 1941, having passed an unscheduled month in Casablanca (Morocco), rather than in their planned destination of England. In the late 1930s, there were a lot of displaced European refugees in Casablanca and Lilly Joseph tried to earn a living by teaching German. She also captured life on the streets with her Rolleiflex camera, vividly depicting through her photographs of locals and emigrants the peculiar situation in Casablanca. Some of these remarkable everyday street scenes are in the photo collection at the Wien Museum, Austria. On 20 November 1941, the two women left Casablanca and, with the help of Lilly Joseph uncle, obtained affidavits for the United States. A letter of recommendation from French Vogue magazine to the Black Star photo agency made it possible for Lilly Joseph to start a new career in New York. As her last name was considered “too German” she Americanised it to Joss and, after marrying Richard Reich in 1958, called herself Lilly Joss Reich. Several commissions for Black Star helped her on her way and were published in such magazines as, Life, Ladies' Home Journal, Popular Photography and The Camera, as well as in newspapers.

Born in 1911 in Vienna, after finishing school, Lilly Joseph started an apprenticeship at the portrait and theatre studio of Mira Schmiegelski in Berlin and finished in 1933. As Lilly Joseph was interested in photo-chemical processes she took parallel courses at the Technical University in Berlin. She also made several trips to Paris, where her sister lived and which at the time was an artistic and cultural hub. In 1936/37 she opened her own apartment-studio in Paris on the Rue Erlanger. She quickly gained recognition as a portrait photographer and won several commissions, including from Albert Einstein and Baron de Rothschild. She also worked for the Austrian pavilion for the 1937 World Exhibition. In 1939, before Lilly Joseph and her mother left Paris, she hid all her photo equipment and glass negatives in a basement. However, they were discovered by the Nazis and confiscated. Only a collection of recipes for pastries, which her mother had compiled according to a centuries-old family tradition, survived the war. In 1970, she published this collection of recipes with the title Viennese Pastries Cookbook, which won her great recognition.
Throughout her life in New York, Lilly Joss lived in an apartment at 875 West End Avenue, which also served as her studio. It was near Riverside Drive and the Hudson River. During the 1940s several of her photographs were represented by the Black Star agency and reproduced for Life with “Lilly Joss from b.s.” (Life, 23 October 1944, p. 60). Life reportages with printed photographs by Lilly Joss were for example for “St. Francis of Assisi reportage. The Story of Christ’s Great Imitator Is Brought to the US by Polish Refugees” (Anonymous 1944a), with four photographs to the “Spring 1944” reportage (Anonymous 1944b), along with other émigrés photographs including one of Walter Sanders, for “War Wife. She and her baby son are waiting” (Anonymous 1944c) and the advertisement shot of a woman driving a car for the brand Pennsylvania Tires (Life, 28 August 1944, p. 108).

Her photograph for the “Salon Section” of Popular Photography magazine in March 1945 was described thus: “Lilly Joss of New York caught the tension of these two little boys in a Chinese kindergarten. Tension, being suspended motion, creates a mental picture of potential action which is emphasized by strong shadows and the tilted camera.” (Anonymous 1945, 46) In March 1948, an article on her and her images appeared in The Camera magazine (Green 1948). Examples of her images which were published alongside newspaper articles include: “Dolls get treatment for fashion show.” (The Star Weekly, 21 July 1945) and “The Kids spoke up.” (The Los Angeles Times, 4 February 1945, p. 79), which was an article on playgrounds in Brooklyn.

Analysing Lilly Joss's photographs, we see children and women as recurring motifs in her work. In her photographs, Lilly Joss tried to make the scenes and protagonists appear natural and unposed and reveal the human quality and everyday life, using both the narrative and technical means of photography. It was particularly important to her as a photographer to put herself in the position and role of those depicted in certain topics for requested reports, and at the same time to question what the readership would expect as visual image material on this topic as she for example tried in her spring series for Life (Anonymous 1944b): “‘One was photographing the spring. What would you say the spring meant to you? To me, its windows open, curtains blowing and a pot of flowers on the window sill; houses being cleaned or painted; the planting of gardens, children rolling hoops–but all this I could not have. I had to photograph the spring in Central Park (on a none-too–spring-like day). Making people feel the spring in a different sort of pictures was quite hard. But I haunted for spring and found glimpses of it in a top-coated elderly man with a dog at his feet, soaking up the first weak sunshine–in a pattern shot of a row of the spring crop of babies–in grandpa sailing his grandson’s new boat–in the first game of checkers, with a foraging pigeon under-foot–in young love hand–in–hand and children pedaling and skating. The air was cold, but it was spring–and Life liked all my pictures'.” (Green 1948, 46) For avoiding to photograph the faces of children and respecting the image right of them she for example captured them during a play and worked with unusual camera perspectives. Especially in reportages during the 1940s the context of World War II in the everyday life of children and women were thematised by Lilly Joss – of course to take this political and social was often required by the press and magazines and directed the daily life. This is addressed directly in series like “War Wife. She and her baby son are waiting” (Anonymous 1944c). Despite or because of the war context, these photos highlight the rights and value of children and women as individuals, at a time when most of the male population was engaged in the war and many women and children remained behind in New York. Another photo series where the female role in the society was reflect was how women dress at work.

Topics as expatriation and the lives of émigrés in New York also played a role in her photo series. One series was made on refugee and second-generation émigrés children in Chinese schools and kindergartens in Chinatown. Another series were French emigrant painter Férnand Leger in 1944/45, whom she portrayed in his studio on 77 Lexington Avenue. (2 images are also printed in the MoMa exhibition catalogue on Fernand Léger 1998). One image shows him together with his wife (?) Jaqueline Lignont-Roux. Fernand Léger, living as emigrant in New York in the 1940s, was also portrayed by other émigré photographers like Hermann Landshoff and Thomas Bouchard, who, in 1943, also made a film about the painter. This collaboration illustrates the networks that existed among émigré photographers, cinematographers, painters and architects, as well as dancers, in New York. Other examples of networks were those between Ellen Auerbach, Rudy Burckhardt and the émigré painter Willem de Kooning, and between Gerda Peterich, Lotte Jacobi and Thomas Bouchard and the modern and émigré dance scene in New York. Besides photographing portraits in her clients' apartments, Joss also produced portraits – mostly of children and women – in her studio. Today, several of Lilly Joss's photographs are stored at the Kunstmuseum Wien, as well as in the collection of the Ryerson Image Center.