Germany 1993, 55 min.

Directed by: Antonia Lerch

Production: Harun Farocki Filmproduktion in cooperation with ARTE and ZDF

 

Grete Stern was born in 1904 in Wuppertal. After taking her school-leaving exams, she studied graphic design at the School of Arts and Crafts in Stuttgart, but her attention was attracted to a new field of art – photography. In 1929, with her friend Ellen Rosenberg, she founded a photographic studio which worked on advertising photography and portraits. In 1933, due to the growing strength of the Nazis, both women closed down their studio and went to London. There they met other immigrants such as Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel, of whom Stern eagerly took portraits. In 1935, she married a former Bauhaus student, the Argentinian Horacio Coppola, with whom she opened a studio in Buenos Aires two years later. This space soon became the centre for meetings of local artists, writers and intellectuals. Stern then took portraits of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Clement Moreau. 

In 1959–1960, on behalf of the Universidad Nacional de Noroeste, she documented the lives of the Indians in the province of Gran Chaco. The photographs she took then comprised a vast solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires. In 1975, a Grete Stern retrospective exhibition was organised by the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin, and after her death in 1999, another exhibition of her works was exhibited in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and New York, and during Documenta XII in Kassel.