In 1948, the avant-garde photographer Grete Stern, a German Jew living in Buenos Aires, was hired by Idilio, a popular women’s magazine, to illustrate a weekly column called Psychoanalysis Will Help You. The column solicited readers’ dreams, and thousands responded—a majority with nightmares. Anxiety, domination, and entrapment were common themes.
Starting with a sketched composition, she juxtaposed photographs of women (enlisting her daughter and friends as models) with stock images of objects and scenery, surreally shrunken or enlarged.
In her Sueños (Dreams), as the montages were known, women daydream inside a corked bottle, or drown helplessly in a living room as fish snap at them.
From “Visionaries: Grete Stern” by Judith Thurman for the New Yorker; Photo collage by Grete Stern
