Born in Poland in 1896, Lotte Jacobi arrived in New York from London via Southampton after a three-week stay in the UK capital during which she captured her first exile station in several images. As she arrived in New York with only a visitor visa, she required the assistance of her sister, the photographer Ruth Jacobi, who was already settled in New York, in order to open her own studio. From 30 October, 1935 until October, 1936, the two sisters ran a photo studio on 1393 Sixt Avenue at 57th Street. This area, close to Central Park, between 6th and Park Avenues, stretching from West 59th Street to West 54th Street, hosted a number of galleries, including the Norlyst Gallery, Julien Levy Gallery, Art of This Century, St. Etienne Gallery and Gallery Matisse, as well photo agencies such as Camera Features. During her years in New York, Lotte Jacobi moved around the city, but never quite made it to Midtown Manhattan. Other emigrated photographers such as Ylla, Gerda Peterich, Lotte's sister Ruth Jacobi as well as Trude Fleischmann, Josef Breitenbach and Erwin Blumenfeld all had studio-apartments in Midtown Manhattan.

When Lotte Jacobi arrived in New York in 1935, she had a selection of her best portrait and dance photographs of artists and intellectuals in Berlin in her luggage. These reflected her interest in photographic experiments and her adoption of the artistic and modern photographic language of the “New Vision”, none of which was yet in demand in New York. Nevertheless, she was committed to building a photographic business in New York and to finding an outlet for her personal photographic language and understanding in the realms of portrait and dance photography. Jacobi had developed her technical skills and knowledge during her studies in Berlin and at the “Höhere Fachschule für Phototechnik in München“ as well as in her parents' photo studio in Berlin, which at the time was a well-established address for portraits and enhanced her reputation as a photographer. On 29 December, 1935, eight portraits of Berlin celebrities, artistes and intellectuals were published in a one-pager in the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. All photos were credited to Studio Jacobi, so perhaps some were by her sister Ruth. Before the expiration of her visitor visa, Lotte Jacobi procured an affidavit from her uncle who had a clothing store on Broadway. This allowed her to re-enter the U.S. via the Canadian border in January, 1936. Her mother Mia Jacobi (1872–1950) and her son Joachim Jacobi (1917–1985; who Americanised his name into John Hunter) also arrived in New York the same year. As Lotte Jacobi was divorced since 1921 from Siegbert Fritz Honig, her mother and son came without him. In September, 1936, she finally opened her own studio at 24 West 59th Street, Central Park South.

The huge collection of portrait photographs in the archive shows how well she managed to establish herself in the photo business in New York. She was also able to meet up with other emigrated photographers whom she had known as a student in Munich (Bayerische Lehranstalt für Lichtbildwesen) and Berlin. Among these was Ernst Fuhrmann, whose portrait she took in 1942. She also made contact with Albert Einstein and his wife Elise, whom she had known in Europe. More than 50 portraits of Einstein and his family exist, taken by Jacobi in Caputh (1928) and later in Huntington (1937) and Princeton (1938). In the constant private correspondence during these years between Lotte Jacobi and Elsa Einstein, is one of the first letters exchanged by the two women after their arrival in the U.S. In it, Elsa Einstein writes about how much she appreciates the images taken in Caputh and Berlin, referring to interior portraits and photos of her children. She suggests that Jacobi come to her new residence in Princeton to take some photographs of the relocated furniture that appeared in the Berlin images: “… und dann sollen Sie wieder hübsche Aufnahmen machen, vielleicht auch Innen-Aufnahmen. Ganz dieselben Möbel und viele der lieben Dinge, die dort waren und die Sie in einem Berliner Mietshaus aufgenommen haben. Jetzt haben sie ein ganz anderes Gesicht bekommen und stehen in einem anderen amerikanischen Hause im Colonial Stil, in winzigen niedrigen Zimmerchen und sie nehmen sich sehr sonderbar darin aus.” (Elsa Einstein to Lotte Jacobi, 23.10.1935, Lotte Jacobi Papers 6:25) A portrait of Albert Einstein in the Princeton living room in 1938 probably shows the relocated furniture.
Besides Einstein, Lotte Jacobi made portraits of many emigrated artists and intellectuals, such as Ernst Bloch, Marc Chagall and daughter Ida, Oskar Maria Graf and Leo Katz, as well as members of America’s high society like Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. As she had during her travels in South Asia and Uzbekistan during the 1930s, Lotte Jacobi discovered the pleasure of the outdoors in her urban life. Her images of Central Park and her overviews of New York reveal her interest in the artistic aesthetics and forms of the city, photographing in different lights and time conditions and focusing on cut-offs, unusual perspectives and shadow plays. Besides architecture and street scenes, animals were also a motif in her pictures, as they had been in Berlin. She was also able to gain entry to the New York Stock Exchange and produced a series of photographs of this normally hidden workplace. Her picture of a deserted stock exchange littered with paper was printed in the New York Herald Tribune.  

Her masterful photographic technique and the way she played with light and shadow can also be seen in the portraits she made of émigré artist Hanya Holm during a dance practice with other dancers. Photographing from different angles, Jacobi went with the flow of the dancers while capturing their gaze and movements. To emphasise the dancers' expressive movements, she cleverly played with light and shadow. Holm was a former student of Mary Wigman and one of the founders of the German Ausdruckstanz. From 1931, Holm directed the Mary Wigram dance school in New York (later renamed the Hanya Holm dance school). Lotte Jacobi had already established her revolutionary portraits of dancers in motion in Berlin in the 1920s, for example with her portrait of Claire Bauroff and Harald Kreutzberg and her pictures of the expressionistic-grotesque performances of Valeska Gert (she also emigrated to New York and opened a cabaret and bar Beggar Bar). The new network of the New York modern dance scene was also reflected in the portraits of Pauline Koner. The close relationships and networks shared by émigré photographers and dancers in New York and the importance of photography in exile can also be seen in the images of the emigrated photographer Gerda Peterich.

No evidence exists that Lotte Jacobi worked for photo agencies as Black Star, PIX or Rapho Guillumete. But letters reveal that she and her husband Erich Riess were friends of Kurt Safranzki, one of the founders of Black Star and that she had commission work for the publication house Schocken Book Inc.. Lotte Jacobi was well networked in the New York photographic scene as the many correspondence to photographers as Barbara Morgan, Tim Gidal, Ernst Fuhrmann or also Stefan Lorant show. In 1938 she gave a lecture on Berenice Abbot at the Photo League and her 1936 portrait of Alfred Stieglitz at An American Place shows that she was in contact with American colleagues. From the 1940s, there are also portraits of the émigré photographers Ruth Bernhard and Werner Wolff.

From the late 1930s, Lotte Jacobi was able to share her photographs with the public through small one-woman shows held in her own studio and at the Norlyst Gallery, as well as through participation in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1937, Lotte Jacobi held her first exhibition, Landscapes, Portraits and Studies, in her studio and showed five portraits from her Berlin days at the Brooklyn Museum's The Art of the Dance in Photography exhibition. In 1942, she was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 20th Century Portraits exhibition, which featured both photographic and painted portraits. Jacobi’s portrait of Albert Einstein was one of those shown. Her émigré colleague Hermann Landshoff also showed two portraits (Max Ernst, 1942 / Leonora Carrington, 1942)
Participation in exhibitions at the MoMa followed in the 1940s and 1950s: Portraits (1943), In and Out of Focus: A Survey of Today’s Photography (1948), Photographs by 51 Photographers (1950), Abstraction in Photography (1951), Christmas Photographs (1951), Then and Now (1952), as well as Photographs from the Museum Collection (1959).

Jacobi's 1948 exhibition at the Norlyst Gallery (October, 3 until October, 10 1948) was reviewed in Aufbau magazine: “Die in der Norlyst Gallery leider nur wenige Tage sichtbar gewesene Vorführung photographischer Arbeiten von Lotte Jacobi wäre es wert, ins Museum of Modern Art zu übersiedeln. Nicht zuletzt als Porträtistin u.a. von Weizmann, Helene Thimig, Barbusse, Dreiser erweist sie einen Sonderrang. Naturstudien bestätigen ihn, die etwa das verhaltene Zittern dunkler Flut geben, aus der ein geheimnissreicher Reflex aufglüht oder die geäderte Transparents von Blattpflanzen und die Melodie der spülende Welle einfangen. Doch Frau Jacobi (die Gattin des Verlegers Erich Reiss) ist darüber hinausgelangt zu ganz un-imitativen, frei erformten Gebilden aus fliessenden Glanz und gebrochenem Widerschein, von äusserst feiner Zeichnung und Skandierung.” (Wolfradt 1948, 19) The article also referred to her Photogenics, her abstract photographic work without a camera that she began in the 1940s. Her friend, the émigré artist, photographer and sculptor Leo Katz wrote an article on her experimental photographic work. During the 1940s and 1950s several small exhibitions in her studio at 46 West 52nd Street followed. After closing her studio in 1955/56, Jacobi moved to Deering, New Hampshire, where she maintained a studio and gallery from 1963 until 1970.