Born: May 9, 1904, Elberfeld, Wuppertal, Germany
Died: December 24, 1999, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Matriculated: 1930
Locations: Germany, UK, USA, Argentina, France, Greece, Israel
It is a commonplace that advertising as art arose after the Second World War in the United States of America, above all on New York City’s stylish Madison Avenue. But decades earlier, interwar Germany witnessed a similarly productive collision of consumer culture with new visual technologies in which illustrated newspapers, magazines, and advertising made high-quality photographic images ubiquitous. It was in this image-rich environment that two young women, Bauhaus member Grete Stern and her close friend and fellow Walter Peterhans student Ellen Rosenberg (later Auerbach), created the avant-garde advertising studio ringl + pit. Their collaboration blended exacting technique with a madcap response to the world. They operated their studio from 1930 to 1933, during the Great Depression, and named it with their childhood nicknames; Stern was ringl and Rosenberg pit. The latter later quipped that if they had called it “Stern and Rosenberg,” it would have sounded like a Jewish clothing business. They worked as a collective entity, simply stamping the studio’s name and logo on the back of all photographs. The question of who released the camera shutter to complete the process of composition was irrelevant to them.
Born in Wuppertal, Stern began her training at Stuttgart’s School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule) from 1923 until 1925, where her education was already based in progressive design; her most influential teacher was Werkbund-trained graphic designer and typographer Friedrich Schneidler. She integrated bold graphic elements with collages of photographs, text, and colored paper, as a draft advertisement for the emerging business of air transport reveals. In 1926, she began working as an independent graphic designer in Wuppertal and then—after seeing her first photography exhibit, a show of work by Edward Weston and Paul Outerbridge—in Berlin, where she moved to learn photography. There she met Umbo (Otto Umbehr), the famed photographer and former Bauhaus student, who advised her to seek out Walter Peterhans. She did, and, in 1927 became his first student. In 1929, Peterhans’s second student, Rosenberg, arrived from Karlsruhe, where she had studied with and modeled for Karl Hubbuch, whose wife Hilde would soon join the Bauhaus. Stern helped to teach Rosenberg Peterhans’s methods. Peterhans became the Bauhaus’s first full-time photography instructor, and Stern followed him to Dessau in April of 1930; among his other students were Gertrud Arndt and Bella Ullmann. Tired of the commute from Berlin, in 1930 Peterhans sold his studio equipment to Stern, who purchased it with a small inheritance. Studio ringl + pit was born. Meanwhile, Stern would continue her Bauhaus studies with Peterhans until the school closed in 1933, first in Dessau and then, from 1932, in Berlin.
Grete Stern, D.L.H. (Deutsche Lufthansa), 1925
Of Peterhans, Stern stated: “[he] taught me how to create a vision of what I wanted to reproduce before using the camera.” Peterhans referred to this approach as “photographic seeing,” and it was the basis of ringl + pit’s work. Careful composition and setup of lighting and the camera obviated photographic retouching. The results were often extraordinary photographs of the ordinary and led to commissions from Ernst Mayer (founder of the Mauritius photography agency) of stock photographs for use in advertisements by diverse clients. Among the other photographers who worked for Mauritius was Lucia Moholy. The Mauritius agency also commissioned more specific contracts from ringl + pit for particular firms, for example, Petrole Hahn.
Fronted by one of their own stark photographs showing an elegant lady seated on a Marcel Breuer stool, ringl + pit were featured in the influential, bilingual graphic design journal Gebrauchsgraphik: International Advertising Art, in a 1931 article by Traugott Schalcher, who placed them squarely in the vanguard of their generation. The pair was, explained Schalcher, doing nothing short of renewing photography for advertising. While many prized photography for the naturalistic reproductions of objects it created, they did not see it as an art form.
The apparatus catches and reproduces the elementary force at the object, but too often the retouching process softens all the power away, ringl + pit declare with a special emphasis that their pictures are never retouched. This proof of strong-mindedness is a welcome sign that photography has entered upon a new stage. It is no longer the thing to make a “flattering” picture, but a characteristic one. It has been recognized that one should not interfere with Nature and that all attempts to “beautify” can only be a weakening of the effect and lead to “pretty-pretty” pictures.
For her birthday in 1931, Rosenberg presented Stern with the Ringlpitis album, full of photos the pair had taken of each other—masquerading in silly poses and in drag. Their work was receiving wider recognition, including a first prize in Belgium’s 1933 Deuxième Exposition International de la Photographie et du Cinéma (Second International Exposition of Photography and Film). With the National Socialists’ rise to power in 1933, neither Rosenberg nor Stern wanted to risk staying in Germany, though their logic had less to do with their Jewish ancestry than their leftist-communist commitments, initially the prime focus of Nazi roundups. They closed the studio and parted ways; Rosenberg left with her partner Walter Auerbach for Israel with the help of a loan from Stern. Meanwhile, Stern and her partner Horacio Coppola—an Argentinean photographer she had met at the Bauhaus—went to the United Kingdom, with none of their belongings, but all of the studio’s equipment. While in London she met up with fellow Bauhaus member Stella Steyn and took a haunting portrait of her, devastatingly beautiful and seemingly half asleep (p.185). She also made portraits of other friends in exile including playwright Berthold Brecht and Marxist theorist Karl Korsch.
In the mid 1930s, Stern and Coppola married, immigrated to Argentina, and welcomed their daughter Silvia. They also opened their own photography and advertising studio in Buenos Aires, through which they mixed with intellectuals and artists, and had a tremendous impact on modernizing photography in Argentina, as a 2015 exhibition of their work at the Museum of Modern Art revealed. After the birth of their son in 1940, the pair separated and divorced the following year. Stern stayed in Argentina and remained the active photographer in the pair. Her knowledge of psychoanalysis in Europe made her ideal to help popularize the method in post-war Argentina, together with a cadre of psychoanalyst friends. Paired with their essays in an Idilio (Idyll) magazine column, from 1948 to 1951 “Psychoanalysis Can Help You” debuted a spectacular series of Stern’s photomontages titled Sueños (Dreams). Like the ringl + pit work, these are often playful but also testify to Stern’s knowledge of psychoanalysis and her familiarity with trauma through her own forced break with her past. Dream No. 1 evokes both the ridiculousness of dreams—a tiny, Alice-in-Wonderland woman has turned into a lamp base—but also their capacity to reveal repressed desires, in the hand of an otherwise unseen man who reaches out to turn her on. Late in Stern’s career, from 1959 to 1960, she was invited to teach at the Universidad Nacional del Nordoeste, in Resistencia, the capital of Chaco Province. Four years later, she received a Fondo Nacional de las Artes (National Arts Fund) fellowship to travel the region; in more than eight hundred photographs, she documented the lives, work, craft traditions, and struggles of the indigenous people there.
The prehistory of ringl + pit as advertising pioneers leads us back to Madison Avenue and the Mauritius photographs. Mayer too had to flee, and he went to New York with three suitcases filled with photographs. These formed the basis of the famed Black Star photo agency, whose clients would include Life and Time magazines. The photographs circulated without the photographers’ names and, once too worn for use, were discarded. Ellen Auerbach also eventually settled in New York, and Stern, her lifelong friend, came to visit her in 1972 in the midst of a trip that also included England, France, Greece, Israel, and her first return to Germany since 1933. In 1992, having given up her craft because of failing eyesight, Stern said: “Photography has given me great happiness. I learned a lot and was able to say things I wanted to say and show.”
Attraktion, 1930–1931, collage with Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern in costume from Die Ringl-Pitis, gifted by Ellen Auerbach (pit) to Grete Stern (ringl)
Article by Traugott Schalcher, “Fotostudien / Camera Studies, ringl + pit (Ellen Rosenberg, Grete Stern),” in bilingual graphic design journal, Gebrauchsgraphik, 1931
Grete Stern, Dream No. 1: Electrical Appliances for the Home, 1949