Getty Museum
Der Raucher (The Smoker)
Creator
Ellen AuerbachAmerican Photographer · 1906–2004
All works by this person →Ellen Auerbach, née Rosenberg, was a sculpture student in Karlsruhe, Germany, when she was given her first camera in 1928. Soon after she began to study photography privately with Bauhaus professor Walter Peterhans in Berlin. There she met Grete Stern, with whom she would form the photographic partnership "foto ringl + pit." They specialized in advertising photography. In 1933 Auerbach gave up the
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1932
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Ellen Auerbach's depiction of her husband Walter as the quintessential hoodlum is so convincing that this portrait was used for the cover of Bill Buford's 1993 novel *Among the Thugs.* The pose was an exercise in role-playing for Walter Auerbach--a stage designer, artist, and writer--who was reportedly a gentle man. Shown at close range, his shorn head and dispassionate, half-closed eyes seem threatening as he contemptuously exhales a puff of smoke in the viewer's face.
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