Ellen Auerbach, 98, Avant-Garde Photographer
Hyfler/Rosner
back and being surprised to learn that she was still alive
and living in my neighborhood in a 4th floor walkup.
http://www.robertmann.com/artists/auerbach/full_01.html
http://www.exibart.com/foto/33284.jpg
http://www.stylusart.com/noticias/ellenauerbach/obra3.htm
August 1, 2004
Ellen Auerbach, Avant-Garde Photographer, Dies at 98
By ANDY GRUNDBERG NY Times
Ellen Auerbach, a photographer best known for innovative
portraits and advertising images made during the Weimar
Republic in Germany in the early 1930's, died on Friday at
New York Weill Cornell Center , according to a friend, the
artist Christine Graf. She was 98 and lived in Manhattan.
While in her twenties, together with her colleague and
friend Grete Stern, the then Ellen Rosenberg formed a
commercial photography studio in Berlin named Ringl & Pit.
It was during the days of the liberal Weimar Republic, and
they were intent on cracking what had been the
male-dominated field of photography.
From 1929 to 1933 the two women collaboratively produced
advertising, still lifes and studio portraits that reflected
the energetic, experimental style of their mentor, Walter
Peterhans, a professional photographer who taught at the
legendary Bauhaus design school. Their pictures were part of
a wave of innovation in European design and photography that
today is referred to as the New Vision, and that temporarily
erased distinctions between commercial and artistic motives
in photography.
The partnership of Mrs. Auerbach and Ms. Stern produced
offbeat, often humorous photographs, frequently of women,
which were influenced by both Constructivism and Surrealism.
One of their best-known advertising pictures, for a hair
product called Pétrole Hahn, shows a lifelike female
mannequin holding a bottle of lotion; only on close
inspection is it clear that the hand in question belongs to
a real woman. In their portraiture, they sometimes depicted
their sitters with eyes closed or half shut, as if dreaming.
In addition, they experimented with mirrors and with unusual
camera angles in an attempt to disrupt familiar
perspectives.
Relatively little of Ringl & Pit's work has survived, but it
was reproduced and exhibited widely at the time it was made.
In 1933, Mrs. Auerbach and Ms. Stern received first prize at
an international exhibition in Brussels for "Komol," an
advertising still life constructed like a collage out of
layers of paper, wire screen and artificial curls of hair.
Despite their success, the photographers closed their studio
the same year, shortly after Hitler came to power. Weimar
was finished. Ms. Stern and Mrs. Auerbach, who were both
Jews, were among the fortunate few who realized what was
happening. ("In a country with concentration camps, you
cannot live," Mrs. Auerbach remembered, and they quickly
left Germany.)
Mrs. Auerbach emigrated to Tel Aviv, London and, in 1937,
the United States. Ms. Stern left for London and later
Argentina.
Mrs. Auerbach continued her career as a photographer through
the 1950's, although she gave up the rigors of the studio
for more anecdotal and lyrical forms of documentation. She
photographed the artists Fairfield Porter and Willem de
Kooning with a casual directness in 1944, and in the
mid-1950's accompanied Eliot Porter on a trip to photograph
Mexican churches. But her interests were increasingly
focused on children and the psychology of childhood
development. In 1965 she began working as an educational
therapist at the Educational Institute for Learning and
Research in New York, where for 19 years she taught children
with learning disabilities.
Ellen Auerbach was born Ellen Rosenberg in Karlsruhe,
Germany, on May 20, 1906. After high school she decided to
become an artist and studied sculpture for three years at an
art school in Karlsruhe and, in 1928, at the Academy of Art
in Stuttgart. While studying there her uncle gave her a
camera, and it led her to abandon sculpture for photography,
primarily because she thought she might earn a living. She
sought out Walter Peterhans in Berlin, where he maintained a
successful commercial studio, and asked to be his student.
He agreed, and for these lessons Mrs. Auerbach was joined by
another private student, Grete Stern.
The two young women quickly became fast friends. When Mr.
Peterhans decided to shut down his Berlin studio and move to
Dessau, they arranged to take over the premises and to
operate as Ringl & Pit. According to the photographers, the
studio name was simply a combination of their childhood
nicknames: Grete Stern was called Ringl and Ellen Rosenberg
was called Pit. But in addition, the name had the advantage
of being ambiguous in terms of gender and ethnicity.
When the rise of Hitler forced the women to dissolve their
partnership in 1933, Ms. Stern moved to London and opened a
studio there. Mrs. Auerbach and her future husband, Walter
Auerbach, a stage designer and photographer, moved to Tel
Aviv, then part of Palestine, and opened a studio
specializing in portraits of children. The Auerbachs were
divorced in 1945. Ms. Stern died in 1999, in Buenos Aires,
at age 94. Mrs. Auerbach has no immediate survivors.
Interest in her early work from the Ringl & Pit studio was
kindled in this country in the 1980's, when museum curators
and private collectors began to research European Modernism
of the 1920's and 1930's. The San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art added two Ringl & Pit prints to its collection in 1983
and in 1987 reproduced them in the book, "Photography: A
Facet of Modernism."