EllenAuerbach

Ellen Auerbach was born Ellen Rosenberg in Karlsruhe on 20 May 1906, and studied there at the Badische Landeskunstschule from 1924 to 1927. In 1928 she moved to the Kunstgewerbeschule in Stuttgart, then to Berlin in 1929 to study with the photographer Walter Peterhans, through whom she met Grete Stern. Together they opened the photo studio ringl + pit in 1930, which established itself successfully in portrait and commercial photography; in Berlin she also met her future husband, stage designer Walter Auerbach.

In 1933 she emigrated to Palestine, where in 1934 she opened the photo studio Ishon (Eyeball) with Liselotte Grschebina, specializing in children's portraits. After an unsuccessful attempt to settle in London in 1936, she married Walter Auerbach in 1937 and the couple emigrated together to the United States. From 1939 to 1940 they lived in Philadelphia, where Auerbach worked as a photographer for a private art collection and the couple produced experimental photographic studies, learning the carbro printing technique. From 1939 to 1955 she frequently stayed on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, producing photographic work on her own, without commission.

In 1945 she separated from Walter Auerbach, and from 1946 worked at the Menninger School of Psychiatry in Topeka, Kansas, using film and photography to document behavioral studies of children and infants. In 1954 she taught photography at the Junior College of Arts & Crafts in Trenton, New Jersey, and in 1955 traveled for four months in Mexico with Eliot Porter to photograph churches. Further travels — to Mallorca, Argentina, Greece and Norway — made travel and street photography a lasting part of her oeuvre. From 1965 to 1984 she worked as a therapist for children with learning disabilities at the Educational Institute for Learning and Researching in New York, and rarely photographed during this period.

Her photographic work, primarily from the Weimar Republic period, was rediscovered from the late 1970s onward, followed by a series of group exhibitions in the United States and Germany. In 1998 the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, organized the retrospective The Photographer Ellen Auerbach, and that same year she donated a large part of her photographic oeuvre to the Akademie and endowed the Ellen Auerbach Fellowship for Photography, awarded every two years. She died in New York City on 30 July 2004.