Background
The daughter of Frida Hochberger and Louis Stern, Stern was born on May 9, 1904, in Elberfeld, Germany.
The daughter of Frida Hochberger and Louis Stern, Stern was born on May 9, 1904, in Elberfeld, Germany.
She often visited family in England and attended elementary school there.
After reaching adulthood, she began studying graphic arts in the Kunstgewerbeschule, Stuttgart, from 1923 to 1925, but after a short term working in the field she was inspired by the photography of Edward Weston and Paul Outerbridge to change her focus to photography. Relocating to Berlin, she took private lessons from Walter Peterhans. In Berlin, she met fellow student Ellen Auerbach.
In 1930 Stern and Auerbach founded Ringl+Pit, a critically acclaimed, prize-winning Berlin-based photography and design studio.
They used equipment purchased from Peterhans and became well known for innovative work in advertising. Intermittently between April 1930 and March 1933, Stern continued her studies with Peterhans at the Bauhaus photography workshop in Dessau, where she met the Argentinian photographer Horacio Coppola.
The newlyweds mounted an exhibition in Buenos Aires at Sur magazine, which according to the magazine, was the first modern photography exhibition in Argentina. In 1958, she became a citizen of Argentina.
Stern and Coppola ran a studio together from 1937 to 1941.
Around the time of the divorce, Stern began exhibiting individually, including internationally, starting in the 1970s, returning particularly to her native country to exhibit in 1975 and 1978. She provided photographs for magazine and served for a stint as a photography teacher in Resistencia at the National University of the Northeast in 1959. From 1956 until 1970, she was in charge of organizing and directing the photography workshop of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
In 1985, she retired from photography, but lived another 14 years until 1999, dying in Buenos Aires on 24 December at the age of 95.