Ellen Auerbach

Ellen Auerbach, née Rosenberg, was born in Karlsruhe on 20 May 1906. She studied sculpture at the art academy there from 1924 to 1927. She began training with the photographer Walter Peterhans in Berlin in 1929. One year later, she opened the Berlin photo studio ringl + pit together with Grete Stern, who had also been training with Peterhans. After an initially inadequate level of interest among potential customers, their works began to gain recognition; in 1933 one of their advertising photographs even received an award at an exhibition of photography and film in Brussels. That same year, Auerbach decided to leave Germany because of her Jewish ethnicity. She first lived in Palestine, where she ran a children’s photo studio and shot a film about Tel Aviv. In 1936 she travelled to London, where Stern was living, and they began working together again. When Stern immigrated to Argentina, Auerbach was not granted a work permit to continue running Stern’s studio. In 1937 she married Walter Auerbach, and the couple immigrated to the US. In New York, Auerbach worked as a photographer for “Time magazine”. During this period, she also devoted attention to film and photo studies of early-childhood behavior. In 1953 she became a professor of photography in Trenton, New Jersey. She created numerous photos of churches when she travelled across Mexico with the photographer Eliot Porter in 1956. The rediscovery of her photographic work began in 1979. Ellen Auerbach died in New York on 30 July 2004.