ringl + pit: (Un)figuring the New Woman

Abstract

The photography of Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern of the studio ringl + pit consistently shirks established advertising formulas. The emphases on traditional gender roles and an exaggerated femininity in conventional Weimar advertisements reaffirm heterosexual male desire and attempt to combat the development of the modern female ‘type’ into the independent and androgynous masculine woman [männliche Frau]. The disparity between media-constructed Weimar-era femininity and the actual ways in which Germans at this time understood their own selves as women and individuals is evidenced by Auerbach and Stern’s advertisements, which challenge such objectifying and sexualizing imagery by suggestive figures in the absence of real bodies, formed from the very goods being sold.Using theoretical frameworks derived from the work of Siegfried Kracauer, this article examines how ringl + pit’s advertisements for artificial silk and other new commercially available goods use substitution techniques to suggest a desire to create one’s self, while acknowledging the power of the commodity in identity formation. Stern and Auerbach’s photographs work as a reflection of their own understanding of the power of the commodity, whose uncanny beauty is revealed through detailed focus on texture and materiality, and surprising reconfigurations. Their revisioning of such materials suggests connotations of identity formation beyond the material being photographed. ringl + pit’s advertisements become semi-blank receptacles that allow numerous modern women, and even non-binary and queer individuals, to see themselves represented as possible consumers for such products, and thus be in control of their own identities.

Keywords

• New Woman
• Weimar Republic
• Gender Construction
• Photography
• Illustrated Magazines