In 1927, Grete Stern moved to Berlin to pursue photography and became the sole private student of Walter Peterhans, who would soon become head of the first specialized photography class at the Bauhaus in Dessau. A year later Ellen Auerbach (née Rosenberg) also began studying with Peterhans. The two became fast friends and founded the ringl + pit photography studio, named after their childhood nicknames (Stern was “ringl” and Auerbach was “pit”). To practice portraiture, they turned their cameras on themselves and their partners, Horacio Coppola and Walter Auerbach. The four shared a progressive and bohemian lifestyle, often working together in the same apartment, collaborating on photo and film projects, and participating in Berlin’s avant-garde artistic and leftist political circles of the late 1920s and early 1930s.