Ellen Auerbach: Photograph of Little Dorrit’s Playground (1936)
Ellen Auerbach: Photograph of Little Dorrit’s Playground (1936)
Das war ein Wendepunkt meiner fotografischen Arbeit, denn man muß Kinder als Kinder fotografieren, d.h. in der Bewegung. [...] Ich mußte mich von Teilen der Peterhansschen Lehre lösen, denn Lebendigkeit und Spontaneität traten manchmal an die Stelle technischer Vollkommenheit. Es war also nicht das Land, sondern es waren die Bedingungen, die meine fotografische Arbeitsweise und Auffassung veränderten.
[That was a turning point in my photography, because you have to photograph children as children, and that means, in action. [...] I had to leave parts of Peterhans’ teachings behind me, because liveliness and spontaneity took the place of technical perfection. And so it was not the country, but the conditions there that changed the way I worked and how I perceived photography. (ed. trans.)]
Ellen Auerbach in an interview, 1994
The working style of photographer Ellen Auerbach underwent a sustainable transformation in Palestine. Instead of still lives, she began choosing everyday scenes and people as the motifs for her photographs. Children in particular can be found very often in her works. When Auerbach again worked together with Grete Stern in London in 1936 after her stay in Palestine, besides commissioned work, she went on long walks through the city taking photographs as she went. In this way, she also took many photographs of the everyday lives of ordinary Londoners. Releasing the shutter at exactly the right moment played a decisive role in her photography.
The shyly smiling children in the photograph are from the working class London district of Southwark. It is there that Dickens’ serial novel Little Dorrit takes place, in which he criticises the social problems of the times. Auerbach had the children pose beneath the sign of the park that was named after Dickens’ story thus highlighting the living circumstances of the English working class.
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