Ellen Auerbach

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Ellen Auerbach (born May 20, 1906 in Karlsruhe as Ellen Rosenberg ; † July 30, 2004 in New York City ) was a famous German - American photographer . She became internationally known under her birth name in the 1930s through her work with the artist Grete Stern , with whom she founded the ringl + pit photo studio . Her work was seen as a major innovation in portrait and advertising photography. She influenced numerous European and American artists.

Life

Auerbach came from a middle-class Jewish family. Her parents gave her the nickname Pit . At the age of 18 she began studying sculpture at the Badische Landeskunstschule in Karlsruhe. In 1928 she moved to the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart . There she made experiments with a 9x12 plate camera that her uncle gave her. Since then she has turned to photography.

In 1929 she moved to Berlin to study photography with Walter Peterhans . Through Peterhans, who taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau , she met Grete Stern , who became her business partner. They built the photo studio ringl + pit from a former Peterhans studio , named after their two nicknames. Right from the start they specialized in advertising and portrait photography . In the early 1930s she got to know the set designer and Marxist Walter Auerbach.

In 1933 ringl + pit won first prize for their “Komol” advertising at the Exposition Internationale de la Photographie et du Cinéma in Brussels . In the same year they first parted ways. After the National Socialists came to power , Ellen Rosenberg emigrated to Palestine with Walter Auerbach . Her parents were deported to the French internment camp Camp de Gurs , survived and later returned to Karlsruhe. Her brother escaped to Buenos Aires in 1936 .

In Tel Aviv , she opened the Ishon photo studio , which specialized in baby photography. In 1936 she left Palestine again and went to see Grete Stern, who had emigrated to London in 1933 . With no prospect of professional success in England, she married Walter Auerbach in 1937 and moved with him to the USA . Grete Stern emigrated to Argentina .

The Auerbachs first lived in Philadelphia , then moved to New York , where Ellen worked, among other things, as a freelance photographer for Time Magazine . The New York photos are among Ellen Auerbach's most beautiful works. Here she managed to capture the mixture of glamor and misery. One of her photos shows a framed drawing of the Statue of Liberty , which is sold with other junk at a street stall. For many critics, this picture says more about the great expectations and equally great disappointments of many exiles at the time than a novel.

In 1945 she separated from her husband. From 1946 to 1948 she made filmic and photographic behavior studies on children and babies. Since 1953 she has worked as a lecturer at various art schools. In 1956 she ended her career as a photographer and turned to pedagogy and psychology . From 1965 to 1984 she was an educational therapist for learning disordered children at the Educational Institute for Learning and Research in New York.

Ellen Auerbach felt homeless all her life, she said:

"I don't feel like a European or American, but as a completely inadequate global citizen!"

Exhibitions (selection)

  • 1946 Menninger Foundation (children's portraits)
  • 1957 Madonna's and Market Places , Lime Light Gallery, New York City | New York
  • 1963 Mexico (with Eliot Porter ), Cosmopolitan Club, Philadelphia
  • 1977 Women Artists International , Berlin 1877–1977, Charlottenburg Palace , Berlin (group exhibition)
  • 1978 Mexican Church Interiors (with Eliot Porter), Sander Gallery, Washington, DC
  • 1979 Studio ringl + pit , Sander Gallery, Washington DC
  • 1980 Avant-Garde Photography in Germany 1919-1939 , San Francisco (group exhibition)
  • 1981 photographs ringl + pit , 1930–1933, Bauhaus Archive , Berlin
  • 1982 Ellen Auerbach. Pictures after 1934 , The Photographer's Gallery, London
  • 1984 ringl + pit , German Embassy, Buenos Aires
  • 1984 Photography of the 30s , Sander Gallery, New York (group exhibition)
  • 1985 ringl + pit , Goethe-Institut , New York
  • 1986 Photography and Bauhaus , Kestner Society , Hanover (group exhibition)
  • 1989 Advertising photography in Germany since the 1920s , Folkwang Museum , Essen (group exhibition)
  • 1990 Photography at the Bauhaus , Bauhaus Archive , Berlin (group exhibition)
  • 1991 ringl + pit , Goethe-Institut , Vancouver
  • 1993 Women on the Edge. Twenty Photographers 1919-1939 , J. Paul Getty Museum , Los Angeles (group exhibition)
  • 1993 ringl + pit , Folkwang Museum, Essen
  • 1994 Ellen Auerbach: From the Bauhaus to God's House , Robert Mann Gallery, New York
  • 1994 Photographers of the Weimar Republic , Folkwang Museum, Essen (group exhibition)
  • 1995 ringl + pit , Berlin 1928–1933, Port Washington Library, Port Washington
  • 1997 German photography. Power of a Medium , Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany , Bonn (group exhibition)
  • 1998 The photographer Ellen Auerbach. Retrospective . Academy of Arts , Berlin
  • 2006 Homage à pit, Ellen Auerbach on her 100th birthday , Pinakothek der Moderne , Munich
  • 2008 Ellen Auerbach "All the new beginnings ..." , Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum Cologne
  • 2009 Ellen Auerbach "All the new beginnings ..." , Municipal Museums, Zwickau
  • 2015 Berlijn - Tel Aviv - New York - Een photographic Wereldreis , Museum de Fundatie , Zwolle

estate

Ellen Auerbach's extensive estate is in the archive of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

The Ellen Auerbach Scholarship is named after her, endowed with 20,000 euros from Auerbach's estate and awarded every two years by the Berlin Academy of the Arts.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Boris Friedewald : Ellen Auerbach . In: Boris Friedewald: Masters of Light: Great Women Photographers from Two Centuries . Prestel, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-7913-4673-1 , pp. 20-23
  2. ^ Estate in the archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
  3. ↑ AdK: Ellen-Auerbach- Stipendium, adk.de, accessed August 17, 2020
  4. ^ Marietta Harder: Three female photographers. A documentary by Antonia Lerch on AVIVA-Berlin , accessed on May 1, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Auerbach, Ellen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rosenberg, Ellen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American photographer
DATE OF BIRTH May 20, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Karlsruhe
DATE OF DEATH July 30, 2004
Place of death new York