Ellen Auerbach (née Rosenberg) was born into a Jewish family in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1906, moving to Berlin in 1929 to study photography and befriending fellow student Grete Stern, with whom she co-founded the ringl + pit photographic studio. Fearing the rise of Nazism, in 1933 Auerbach fled to Palestine, settling in London in 1936. While in London, Auerbach collaborated with Stern and worked independently, yet, unable to obtain a work permit, she immigrated to the United States in 1937.
Photographer Ellen Auerbach (née Rosenberg) was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1906. She studied sculpture at the Badische Landeskunstschule in Karlsruhe between 1924 and 1927 before moving to Stuttgart in 1928 to continue her studies at the Academy of Art Am Weissenhof. The same year, after being given a 9 x 12 cm plate camera by her uncle, she decided to become a photographer because she ‘wished to be independent from home, and feared that it would be difficult to become independent as a sculptor’ (interview in Ammann and Schubert, 1998). Following the example of her friend Liselotte Grschebina (née Billigheimer), Auerbach moved to Berlin in 1929 to study photography with Walter Peterhans, befriending fellow student Grete Stern. When Peterhans was made Master of Photography at the Bauhaus in 1930, Stern and Auerbach purchased his photographic equipment and established the ringl + pit studio (deriving their name from Stern’s childhood nickname (Ringl) and the shortened form of Pepita, a dancer whom Auerbach apparently resembled). They specialised in advertising, fashion and portrait photography and unusually rejected individual authorship, instead crediting all their photographs to their collective signature (Otto, 2020).
Following Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship in March 1933, Stern and Auerbach closed their studio that autumn. In December 1933, Auerbach immigrated to Palestine and in the spring, was joined in Tel Aviv by her future husband Walter Auerbach, a politician and anti-Nazi resistance fighter. Together with Grschebina, the couple established Ishon (Hebrew for ‘apple of my eye’), a studio specialising in photographs of children. Auerbach also made a 16mm film about Tel Aviv for the Women’s International Zionist Association (WIZO). When the Arab Revolt began in 1936, the Auerbachs swapped Palestine for London, where they visited Stern. Reflecting on her time in London, Auerbach later commented, ‘I really like London, above all the English sense of humour. German advertising was terribly serious, but I was enthusiastic about English humour, also in advertising’ (Ammann and Schubert, 1998). Auerbach collaborated with Stern on several commissions, including a maternity hospital brochure which was their final work together. She also met the German-Jewish playwright Bertolt Brecht and photographed him shaving, sitting at his typewriter and smoking a cigar (Akademie der Künste, Berlin). Auerbach also wandered the streets of London, photographing tourist attractions including St Paul’s Cathedral and Trafalgar Square, as well as less prosperous areas of the city and its inhabitants. When Stern and her Argentine photographer husband, Horacio Coppola, emigrated to Buenos Aires in 1935, Auerbach took over Stern’s studio. Unable to obtain a work permit, however, following her marriage to Walter in 1937, the couple immigrated to the United States (on the strength of an affidavit from a distant relative (Sandler and Mandelbaum)).
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Ellen Auerbach]
Publications related to [Ellen Auerbach] in the Ben Uri Library