Contact Zones in Motion

This book explores the Latin American photography of German-born Jewish American émigré photographers Fritz Neugass (1899–1979) and Ellen Auerbach (1907–2004). It analyzes their portraits of children and dancers, and series of still lifes of objects of daily life as artistic creations of trans-cultural exploration with a camera in hand. By doing so, it helps broaden the archive of travel photography from the 1940s-1970s from Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Colombia, in addition to the United States by adding both exile artists’ perspectives conceived as the shaping of engaged cultural practices. Neugass’s and Auerbach’s works from the Americas remain relatively unknown to this date; the reasons for this touch on their biographical realities of cultural uprooting and aesthetic values that were at times out of sync and untimely related to those of the countries they lived in. Yet they reveal less studied facets of belonging, historical inscription and self-perception, observed from marginal perspectives, link modernist with early postmodern sensibilities, based on the notion of photography as shared practice in motion, informed by the trans-disciplinary philosophy of the Bauhaus and adapted to the realities encountered.