Grete Stern’s Weird World of Dreams

Amidst the weird objects found in the Getty Research Institute’s archives are a series of illustrations of women in vexatious situations: walking along a beach covered in nails, dangling from a rope, clambering up a rocky cliffside, falling out of the sky.

For photographer Grete Stern, images like these were all part of a day’s work. Stern studied photography in her native Germany, and even took courses at the influential Bauhaus, before immigrating to Buenos Aires in the mid-1930s to escape Nazi persecution.

In 1948, she started working for an advice column called “El psicoanálisis te ayudará” (“Psychoanalysis will help you”) in the Argentinian women’s magazine Idilio. The column encouraged readers to send in their dreams so they could be interpreted for repressed fears and desires using new techniques pioneered by Sigmund Freud.

People today often picture psychoanalysis as lying on a couch while a man with a beard asks you about your mother. But when it was first developed, this early branch of psychology was much more revolutionary. Thanks to the work of Freud and others, people were finally coming around to the fact that events from your past could unconsciously impact how you felt—and that it helped to talk about those feelings with someone who could unpack them. In Freud’s famous book The Interpretation of Dreams, he argued that dreams were the key to unlocking unconscious thoughts because they showed things that our waking brains would rather deny.

This idea had a huge impact on culture in general, but especially the world of art. Psychoanalysis and the movement that became known as surrealism went hand in hand;in fact, surrealism probably wouldn’t have existed were it not for The Interpretation of Dreams. The surrealists took the idea of dreams as meaningful and ran with it, viewing their strangeness as an escape from the oppressive demands of reality. Dreams were liberating, a space where base, primeval urges that were otherwise unacceptable to society could be represented.

Idilio’s column embodied this connection between psychoanalysis and surrealism, drawing from themes Freud had described in his book and pairing them with images by Stern. Topics included things like Los sueños de caida (Dreams of falling), Los sueños de cuerpo (Dreams about the body), and El sueño de la puerta cerrada (The dream of a closed door).

To create these surreal dreamscapes, Stern used a collage technique called photomontage to layer different images, emphasizing the disparity between objects—like a harbor seamlessly emerging from a bedroom wall, conveying the unreal sense of dream logic.

For Stern, though, the images for Idilio weren’t solely about their strangeness; they were about revealing the contradictions placed on women under a patriarchal society. The figures in her photomontages are presented in dangerous, precarious, and helpless situations. Despite having their hair done up and dressed in prim everyday attire, they find themselves in threatening landscapes facing insurmountable obstacles.

In Stern’s world, the banal, internalized struggles of women become visible and high-stakes. In keeping with the other content found in Idilio, which featured serialized adventure comics and bodice-rippers, Stern’s powerful images stand as expressions of women’s emotional needs and frustrations.

Stern’s work at the Research Institute joins those of other women surrealists photographers who worked in Latin America as well, including Delia Ingenieros, Gertrudis de Moses, and Alice Rahon.