Grete Stern is one of the photographers that represent modern photography in Argentina. Her house in Ramos Mejía, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, was a meeting place for local and foreign artists and intellectuals.
Stern was born in Wuppertal-Elberfeld, Germany, in 1904. She first studied in Stuttgart, before moving to Berlin to attend Walter Peterhans’ class, who later went to the Bauhaus in Dessau. There she met the Argentine photographer and filmmaker Horacio Coppola in October 1932. At that time, Stern worked together with Ellen Auerbach in their photo studio ringl + pit. Three years later, fleeing Nazi persecution, Stern and Coppola decided to leave Europe for his native Argentina. They arrived just after their marriage in 1935. Stern’s integration into the cultural scene of Buenos Aires was facilitated by her husband. Indeed, before travelling to Europe, Coppola had already achieved recognition in Argentina for his photographic work, which was regarded as innovative and modern. Through him, Stern met Victoria Ocampo, who was surrounded by artists and writers, among them the Spanish painter, engraver and designer Luis Seoane, the Czechoslovak sculptor Gyula Kosice, the Austrian painter Gertrudis Chale, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the German caricaturist Clément Moreau, the dancer Renate Schottelius, and the German photographer Annemarie Heinrich. Furthermore, it was at the Sur editorial headquarters —headed by Ocampo— that Stern and Coppola exhibited their work for the first time in Argentina, in October 1935.
In 1937, together with Seoane, Grete Stern and Horacio Coppola opened a photographic studio at Avenida Córdoba 363 which specialised in advertising and which eventually had to close two years later due to a low demand for the type of advertising products they offered. By then, Grete Stern was already fully integrated into the Argentinian artistic and cultural scene. She would later follow in the footsteps of Victoria Ocampo, gathering together the European intellectual diaspora and providing space for their exchanges in her house in Ramos Mejía, at what is today Calle Hilario Ballesteros 1054 (Villa Sarmiento district). Stern and Coppola moved there in 1940 with their daughter Silvia. The Russian architect Vladimir Acosta was chosen to carry out the construction of the building in 1939. Born in Odessa, Acosta had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1928. He was a close friend of Victoria Ocampo, who probably helped him find a position in the studio of the architect Alberto Prebisch. For his friends Stern and Coppola, Acosta devised a modern house which stood out in every way from the surrounding buildings. Because of its style and building materials — reinforced concrete and masonry — the house was called ‘the factory’. A two-storey atelier, the main space in Stern’s house, unites the ground floor with its living spaces to the first floor which contains the terraces, an office and a guest room. The house was a meeting place for foreign artists and intellectuals, and also for Argentinians such as María Elena Walsh, Sara Facio and Jorge Luis Borges.