Grete Stern

In 1935, two months after arriving in Argentina, Grete Stern and her husband Horacio Coppola presented what the magazine Sur called “the first serious exhibition of photographic art in Buenos Aires,” which comprised work produced in Germany and London between 1929 and 1935: portraits, compositions, advertising photographs and landscapes. Her work showed an unconventional approach to photography: advertisement collages and studies with crystals, objects and still-lifes. Even the most accepted subjects at the time, such as portraits and landscapes, were done in unconventional ways: perfect definition, wide chromatic spectrum, flat lighting, simple poses and untouched negatives. Between 1935 and 1981 she continued with this work in Argentina, adding an important series of photomontages, reproductions of art work and portraits. Stern brought with her from Germany a modernist sensibility, developed in bohemian Berlin and at the legendary Bauhaus School, that shook up the staid approach to photography in Argentina at that time and established her as one of the founders of Argentine modern photography.

Grete Stern was born in Elberfeld, near Wuppertal, Germany, on May 9, 1904. She was the first child of Frida Hochberger and Louis Stern, who died in 1910. Her family was involved in the textile business and often traveled to visit relatives in England, where Stern attended her first years of elementary school. She studied piano and guitar and from 1923 to 1925 studied graphic design with Prof. Ernst Schneidler at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Am Weissenhof) in Stuttgart. In 1926 she worked as a freelance graphic design and advertising artist in her home town of Wuppertal. After seeing a photography exhibition of Edward Weston and Paul Outerbridge she was inspired to study photography.

In 1927 Stern moved to Berlin to live with her brother Walter, who was working as a film editor. He sent her to meet photographer Umbo (Otto Umbehr) who in turn sent her to take private lessons with Walter Peterhans, a photographer well known for his meticulously produced still lives. In 1928 Peterhans also accepted Ellen (Rosenberg) Auerbach as a student. Stern and Auerbach began a profound friendship that lasted throughout their lifetime. “He taught us to see photographically. For him the camera was not just a mechanism to take a photograph. It was a new way of seeing,” she said in an interview in 1992. In 1930 Walter Peterhans was named Master of Photography at the renowned Bauhaus School for art and design in Dessau. Using the proceeds from an inheritance Stern bought his equipment and with Auerbach started a photography studio for advertising, fashion and portrait photography. They thought that calling it “Rosenberg [Ellen’s birth name] and Stern” sounded too much “like a Jewish clothes manufacturer” so they called it ringl+pit, after their childhood nicknames (Ringl for Grete, Pit for Ellen). They decided to sign all their work together.