PARIS PHOTO 2023

Grand Palais Éphémère
November 9-12, 2023
Booth C 31

Grete Stern • ringl+pit • Horacio Coppola

For the 2023 edition of Paris Photo we have selected a comprehensive group of photographs coming from The Estate of Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola, which ilustrate the profoundly original and modern way of looking of these major influential figures of avant-garde photography, highly regarded as visionary modernists in Europe and South America.

Our presentation will spotlight early works produced by Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach under their collaborative pseudonym ringl +pit. We will also show Vintage prints of works produced by Horacio Coppola while he was attending photography courses at the Bauhaus, and of the series he took during his travels around Europe in the 1930s. The exhibition will also include photographs taken by Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola after their arrival in Buenos Aires in 1935, including a large number of Vintage and modern prints of Coppola’s most famous series “Buenos Aires 1936” as well as a selection of Grete Stern’ s celebrated photomontages “Sueños” (Dreams).

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“Sometimes, things are there. You just have to know how to look”
Horacio Coppola

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Horacio Coppola, Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach were major influential figures of avant-garde photography, highly regarded as visionary modernists in Europe and South America.

All three were fellow students, attending the lessons of Walter Peterhans, a renowned photographer, mathematician and philosopher in charge of the Photography Department at the Bauhaus in the early 1930s. Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach had met in Berlin while taking private photography lessons with Peterhans. In 1929 the two fellow photographers opened a highly experimental Berlin-based commercial design, advertising and photography studio: ringl + pit, named after their childhood nicknames (Grete was ringl, Ellen was pit). They created innovative, proto-feminist portraits and commercial assignments that defied the conventional style of current German advertising, often exploring alternative models of the feminine.

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Horacio Coppola, who became Stern’s husband, was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where the couple settled in 1935 after the rise of the Nazi regime and the subsequent closure of the Bauhaus. But before leaving Europe the three photographers traveled to London , where Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach re-opened ringl + pit. One year later the studio closed after Ellen was forced to leave England and moved to the United States. In 1935 Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina. There they continued their photographic practice, producing groundbreaking work imbued with the New-Vision ideas they had acquired during their European sojourn.

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Sueños, (Dreams) is a series of photomontages that Grete Stern produced on a weekly basis for the women´s magazine Idilio, from 1948 to 1951. The images were meant to illustrate the column El psicoanálisis le ayudará (Psycoanalys Will Help You). The women readers where invited to share their dreams that were subsequently analyzed by Germani and Butelman (a psychologist and a sociologist working under the pseudonym Richard Rest). But it was the richly imaginative, technically outstanding, poetic images that Stern provided with her photomontages that really grasped the complex feelings at work in the dreams of the correspondents.

Grete Stern is, without any question, the first Argentinian photographer to address the subject of female oppression, and proved to do it with a wonderful sense of humor and originality, while exploring the female role in society at the time, both in the private and public sphere.

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