Ellen Auerbach: Beach near Tel Aviv, photograph (1934)
Ellen Auerbach: Beach near Tel Aviv, photograph (1934)
When the photographer Ellen Auerbach emigrated to Palestine in December 1933 she had previously mainly worked as a studio photographer in Berlin. She had trained under Walter Peterhans, who later became a lecturer at the Bauhaus art school. He placed a particular emphasis on the perfect staging of a photograph in the studio. People and objects were positioned in the room and the lighting was calculated to an exact degree.
While in Palestine, Auerbach distanced herself from this style. She documented her encounter of a foreign country and its inhabitants in photographs that were shot exclusively outdoors. The young boy in Auerbach's picture is observing a typical scene of everyday life in Palestine: a caravan moving past on the beach.
It wasn't just things in her environment that became the subject of Auerbach's photography, her work with children also began in this phase of her career and ended with her founding Auerbach's Studio for Children's Photography.
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