Ellen rosenberg (english)

Ellen Rosenberg Auerbach

Photographer who has died in New York aged 98, was one of the last links to the European avant-garde of the 1930s.In 1928, Ellen Rosenberg (as she then was) began studyingphotography in Berlin with Walter Peterhans, a member of the Bauhaus design movement. She soon became friends with another of his pupils, Grete Stern, and when Peterhans returned to Dessau to becomehead of photography at the Bauhaus school, Rosenberg and Stern took over his studio and set up one of the world's first female-run commercial photographic firms. They called it ringl + pit, from theirnicknames as children (Rosenberg was "pit"), which also had the advantage of disguising their genders in what was very much a male-dominated business. The German advertising industry was booming,however, and they soon gained a reputation for innovative work which remains representative of the heady sense of freedom that prevailed during the Weimar Republic.
They also came to know - and tophotograph - many of the leading cultural figures of the time, including Bertolt Brecht.
Photography was then still accepted by the public as something of an experimental discipline without rules orboundaries, and as can be seen in the pictures of their contemporary Man Ray it often reflected current ideas in painting.
Despite the commercial nature of their commissions, ringl + pit were able toplay with form and perspective to demonstrate the influence of Surrealism - as in their use of a mannequin with a real hand to sell hair tonic (Petrol Hahn, 1930) - while other images drew on thesimplicity urged by the Bauhaus (Elegant Lady, 1930).
The firm was widely used by mainstream manufacturers of goods such as cigarettes and petrol, but in 1933, shortly after one of their characteristicstill-life collages had taken first prize at the International Photography and Cinema Exhibition in Brussels, Rosenberg and Stern decided to leave Germany. Both were Jewish, and understood the...