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Pit [Ellen Auerbach]

Creator

Photographer · 1904–1999

Grete Stern was a graphic and commercial artist in Stuttgart when the work of Edward Weston and Paul Outerbridge inspired her to study photography. She took private lessons with Bauhaus professor Walter Peterhans, taking over his Berlin studio in 1930. While studying with Peterhans, Stern met Ellen Auerbach, with whom she formed the photographic partnership "foto ringl + pit." They specialized in

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Date: 1929
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Culture: Argentinian
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

Grete Stern made this engaging portrait of her later business partner Ellen Auerbach, nicknamed "Pit," in 1929, when they were both art students in Berlin. Auerbach, then twenty-three years old, appears as a modern woman with bobbed hair, meeting the viewer's gaze head-on. The combination of the overhead perspective and the use of close-up, as well as the graphic patterning of Auerbach's clothing and the background, positions this image as a progressive portrait of one of a new breed of urban women who were moving away from traditional female roles.

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