Leonore Kosswig was one of the pioneering women researchers travelling alone in the 1950s and exploring customs and ways of life in rural Turkey and Iraq with her camera. She studied biology and was self-taught in photography. Together with her husband, the zoologist Curt Kosswig, she lived in exile in Istanbul from 1937.
The zoologist Curt Kosswig, a professor at the TH Braunschweig, though not a member of  a racially or politically persecuted group, increasingly came into conflict with Nazi authorities. Through the mediation of botanist Alfred Heilbronn, founder of the Botanical Garden in Istanbul, he was offered the chair of zoology at the University of Istanbul in 1937. His biologist wife Leonore and their three sons followed him to the city on the Bosporus four months later. Leonore Kosswig accompanied her husband in his many academic activities and on his scientific research trips through Turkey, without initially pursuing her own professional path. Like many emigrant wives in Turkey, her role was more focused on the household and family.

The Kosswig family’s life was centred around their home, a historic wooden villa in the Bebek district, on the European side of Istanbul. Bebek was a former fishing village, just a few kilometres from the historic centre of Istanbul. The “Haus am Berg” [House on the Hillside], as the Kosswigs called it, was a meeting place for emigrants where plays and music were performed. The Kosswigs were part of a group of scientists – a kind of “private academy” – headed by the economist Alexander Rüstow and the lawyer Andreas Schwarz. Its members, among whom was financial economist Fritz Neumark, represented various different disciplines and gave lectures on their respective fields of expertise (Widmann 1973, 180; Neumark 1980, 190). The Kosswigs' residence in Bebek therefore played an important social function in networking and community building within the German-speaking émigré community. The House on the Hillside formed its own island in exile and was thus an expression for strategies of community building. A peripheral neighbourhood like Bebek, at a distance from the sites where history, culture and migration agglomerated, offered the opportunity to build a social place where life could unfold at its own rhythm and pace, while at the same time providing an opportunity for emigrants' cultural and political self-organisation (Hirsch 2008, 47). The socialising that took place in the German-speaking emigrant community was facilitated by the fact that several professors and their families lived close to one another.

Photographs of the exterior and interior of the Haus am Berg, taken by the Kosswigs, give an impression of how the family appropriated their immediate environment. Here one finds the practice of photographing empty rooms, making the furniture and the placement of things one’s own and, like in a memory bank, conserving it all, as though what was not photographically captured might soon be forgotten. Due to the way the photographs were stored, organised and collected—in albums, for example— series of events are condensed and narratives abbreviated within a picture.

It was only in 1955, when Leonore Kosswig received a Leica M3 as a gift from her husband, that she took up photography. In the following years, she went on regular photographic walks through the city of Istanbul, which led her to the historic city wall and the Grand Bazaar. She aimed her camera at buildings and streets, photographed shops and historical buildings, crowded markets and rundown buildings. She had a particular feel for everyday situations: in her photographs, she captured groups of people, conversations and sales negotiations. Though she roamed the neighbourhoods as a German immigrant, she was often able to act as an unobserved flaneur. Kosswig’s photographic expeditions in Istanbul took her beyond the tourist areas recommended by guidebooks since the turn of the century. In this, her interest coincided with that of other Istanbul photographers of the 1950s, such as Ara Güler or Selahattin Giz, who, as flaneuring and observing photographers, captured the city on the Bosporus from within and, in doing so, rendered the insignificant and unspectacular visible.

At the time when Leonore Kosswig took up photography, her husband had been offered, and had accepted, a position at the University of Hamburg, but both continued to feel an attachment to Turkey. Leonore Kosswig stayed for longer periods in Istanbul; the surviving photographs of Leonore Kosswig were predominantly taken in Turkey and Iraq. This was partly made possible by the fact that, having lived in the country for 20 years, she knew some areas of the city well, spoke fluent Turkish and often dressed in a traditional şalvar and loose blouse.
She was one of the few women of her day to visit rural and desert regions by herself and study people, traditions and artisanal techniques. Along with a few black and white photographs, the majority of the pictures have survived in the form of small-format slides (Dogramaci 2013, 153–167). On her travels to Konya, Çardak, Malatya and Mosul in Iraq, Leonore Kosswig researched Anatolian wedding customs (Kosswig 1961), Circassian property signs (Kosswig 1974) and above all the board weaving performed by nomadic tribes in eastern Turkey (Kosswig 1967). Leonore Kosswig illustrated her essays with her own photographs.

She had a special interest in board weaving, having collected board weavings at markets in Anatolia since the late 1930s, and, perceiving it to be a dying craft, saw her research as an important contribution to its documentation and preservation. Her photographs show the production and uses of the woven ribbons that were produced and these; in addition, Kosswig had already acquired board weavings at markets in Anatolia since the late 1930s. Object photographs were integrated into her essays. A large bundle of ribbons from her collection was donated to the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg after her death in 1973.
Leonore and Curt Kosswig’s attachment to Istanbul and its history is reflected in the fact that, after their death, both were buried in the Istanbul graveyard of Rumeli Hısarı (where Cem Mehmet Cemil’s grave is located) – even though Curt Kosswig had been teaching at Hamburg University since 1955.