This essay addresses the lacuna head-on by focusing on the portraits each produced, and advances the manqué relationship between Grete Stern and Gisèle Freund as a springboard to an expanded modernist visual culture.ĤIf such a scholarly gap is astounding, the concrete dissociation between Grete and Gisèle-their missed encounter-is mind-boggling. The lacuna around the two Jewish-German photographers who took the Porteño intellectual field unawares during the Second World War is astonishing.

Grete and Ellen Auerbach as the professional tandem ringl + pit, Grete and Horacio Coppola as the avant-garde couple, and finally, the twosome Grete and Gisèle Freund, make up Stern’s stereo landscape.ģExcept for the last two, these pairs involved collaborations that have all been critically explored. Duos are central in the photographic arc stretching from Walter Peterhans, her teacher at the Bauhaus, to Etelvina “Cacho” del Carmen Alaniz, her maid and personal assistant in Buenos Aires. Both in her Berlin years and after her relocation to Buenos Aires, Grete appeared in partnership with uncommon frequency. Critics have dismissed this dialog to put the photographer at center stage, seeking chiefly to repress co-authorships, even sometimes sneering at the sitter’s pose-which, in film, we would call “acting”-in face of the heroic portraitist’s performance.ĢNot alone in portraits-on which her fame is almost unfounded-but throughout her career, Grete Stern persistently appeared in duos.

The encounter sets the stage, the players interpret one another, they act, the fantasy of an identity is recorded.

Testimonios by Victoria Ocampo