Ringl and Pit were the childhood nicknames of Grete Stern and Ellen Rosenberg Auerbach. In the 1920s, the two women studied with Walter Peterhans, director of photography at the Bauhaus. Peterhans favored a geometric, machine-inspired modernist aesthetic. In 1930 Stern acquired Peterhans’s commercial photography studio in Berlin and together with Auerbach began to specialize in portraiture, still life, advertising photography, and magazine illustration. The team signed their work Ringl + Pit; the studio acquired a reputation as one of the most innovative in Germany, producing clear, precise, and haunting imagery in the spirit of what was then called the “new photography.” In this pair of portraits the two explore various aspects of the portrait photograph: Ringl (Stern) is shown as a close-cropped bespectacled face, so that the focus is on the artist’s inner concentration on her work. Pit (Auerbach), with exaggeratedly stylish veil and feathered headgear, suggests the idea of the portrait as disguise or theater: the costume and expressionless, sidelong glance toward the viewer seem at once performative and distanced.