Ellen Auerbach, a photographer best known for innovative portraits and advertising images made during the Weimar Republic in Germany in the early 1930s, has died, according to a friend, artist Christine Graf.
Ms. Auerbach was 98 and lived in New York.
While in her 20s, together with her colleague and friend Grete Stern, the then-Ellen Rosenberg formed a commercial photography studio in Berlin named Ringl & Pit. They were intent on cracking what had been the male-dominated field of photography.
From 1929 to 1933 the women collaboratively produced advertising still lifes and studio portraits that reflected the energetic, experimental style of their mentor, Walter Peterhans, a professional photographer who taught at the Bauhaus design school. Their pictures were part of a wave of innovation in European design and photography that today is referred to as the New Vision, and that temporarily erased distinctions between commercial and artistic motives in photography.
The partnership of Ms. Auerbach and Stern produced offbeat, often humorous photographs, frequently of women.
One of their best-known advertising pictures, for a hair product called Petrole Hahn, shows a lifelike female mannequin holding a bottle of lotion; only on close inspection is it clear that the hand in question belongs to a real woman.
In their portraiture, they sometimes depicted their sitters with eyes closed or half shut, as if dreaming. In addition, they experimented with mirrors and unusual camera angles in an attempt to disrupt familiar perspectives.
Relatively little of Ringl & Pit’s work has survived, but it was reproduced and exhibited widely at the time it was made.
In 1933, Ms. Auerbach and Stern received first prize at an international exhibition in Brussels for “Komol,” an advertising still life constructed like a collage. Despite their success, the photographers closed their studio in 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler came to power.
Stern and Ms. Auerbach, both Jews, realized what was happening. “In a country with concentration camps, you cannot live,” Ms. Auerbach later recalled, and they quickly left Germany.
Ms. Auerbach emigrated to Tel Aviv, London, and, in 1937, the United States. Stern left for London and later Argentina.
Ms. Auerbach continued her career as a photographer through the 1950s, but her interests were increasingly focused on children and the psychology of childhood development.
In 1965 she began working as an educational therapist at the Educational Institute for Learning and Research in New York, where for 19 years she taught children with learning disabilities.
