Their photographs, here exhibited at Robert Mann Gallery, are more than survivals of a dead avant-garde; they are light-and-texture manifestos, in which materiality, design, and gender become indistinguishable.
Written by: Çisemnaz Çil
As images came to shape the modern psyche, ringl + pit—the joint pseudonym of Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach—transferred photography into a language of subversion and resistance. Working within Weimar Berlin's charged atmosphere, the duo used the visual idiom of advertising to expose its machinations, converting commercial commissions into subtle acts of rebellion.
Both Stern and Auerbach studied with Walter Peterhans at the Bauhaus, where formal training was wed to utopian vision. Precision was what Peterhans demanded—every surface, shadow, and reflection measured as geometry—but his female students took that order and made it an embodied experience. When Stern and Auerbach opened their Berlin studio in 1930, adopting the childhood nicknames ringl and pit they assumed as children, they began to occupy a border space between commercial and conceptual work. They did ads for cigarette smoke, gloves, and hair color, but beneath the gloss of their creations was a particularly feminine intelligence—a feeling that the picture might attract and judge simultaneously.
Weimar modernism was obsessed with the Neue Frau, the "New Woman" who smoked and worked and drove. But that icon was itself constructed through visual design—a figure negotiated by magazines, posters, and fashion spreads. Ringl + pit appropriated this imagery only to deflate it's power. Their women do not flirt or sell; they think, they resist, or they fade out. In an age of mass illusion, their photographs reclaim control through wit and abstraction.
The earlier works in the exhibition, like Klärchen (1930) and Ellen + Walter Auerbach (1930), illustrate how structure was infused with intimacy by the couple. Klärchen, a close-up of a young woman with her eyes closed, resists the external gaze. The sitter is not muse or model but subject—a turned-in consciousness. The tonal subtlety and sculptural softness of the silver print remind one of Peterhans's technical manner, but the impact is very different: vulnerability undecorated. The title itself, a German diminutive, is a subtext of irony—a gentle reproach to how femininity gets linguistically and visually minimized.
In Ellen + Walter Auerbach, tenderness is dialectical. The entering male hand makes touch a question: who possesses, and who decides? The diagonal of Ellen's arm, the stripes on her shirt, and shadow cutting across her face turn affection into a pattern, intimacy design. The photograph alternates between empathy and constraint, remembering Weimar fascination with the boundary between desire and control. But because Ellen is also co-creator of the work, the power dynamic dissolves. The gaze no longer belongs to one; it moves.
By the time Stern and Auerbach created Dents, London, they had already left Germany. The photo—taken as a commercial for gloves—condenses into essence their adult vision: the world of commodities as a stage of signs. Together on a bare surface, gloves of different materials—leather, mesh, paper cut-out—stage a strange dance of contact and vacancy. Suspended above them, metal letters spell out "DENTS" like a machine halo. The composition recalls Constructivist design, but its tone is ironic rather than utopian.
Here, the human body is present only in trace. The glove, originally a metonym of luxury and control, becomes uncanny: an empty gesture, a ghost of work and of luxury. The photograph is operating on multiple registers—it fulfills the promises of advertising but subverts them by dissonance. What is meant to entice now repels; what is meant to be touched becomes untouchable. It is this dissonance that makes ringl + pit's work anticipatory. Well in advance of postmodern theory and it’s disassembling consumer icons, these two women had already turned commerce into criticism.
The long-term singularity of ringl + pit owes less to formal innovation than to their humor—a facility most often shortchanged in modernist historiography. Their wit is architectural: demanding, ironic, and ruthlessly clear. In their Komol Haircoloring Advertisement, they replaced the model's hair with plastic wigs and silhouettes cut out of cardboard, a preposterous, self-conscious arrangement that ridicules both the product and its fantasy. The duo's approach anticipated the later visual strategies of conceptual artists like Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman, who likewise used parody to dismantle systems of representation.
This was not escapist comedy but protective, born from a historical edge. As Jewish women in increasingly radicalizing Germany, Auerbach and Stern found themselves the targets of both misogynist and antisemitic sentiment. Their images of disconnection—half-hidden faces, averted eyes—can be understood as foretellings of exile, an affective estrangement soon to become actual. When they departed in 1933, their professional partnership dispersed geographically but not mentally; the 1985 Fotografie ringl + pit retrospective would reconstruct their vision on two continents, an act of friendship past displacement.
From our modern vantage, ringl + pit occupy the polemical edge between art and advert, intimacy and irony. They anticipated not only feminist photography but the entire discourse surrounding authorship and the gaze. Their collective practice—two females each in turn photographer and model, designer and subject—was in itself a reworking of patriarchal authorship. From their archive there speaks a shared vision: rigorous, experimental, and profoundly ethical.
In their world, light does not just reveal; it interrogates. Each surface, each reflection, is a site of negotiation—between self and trade, object and sign, woman and image. Their photographs remain luminous not because they are flattering but because they are unflinchingly reflective.