The Reception of Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt ist schön

Abstract

No history of photography or publication on the photography of the 1920s fails to mention the photo-book Die Welt ist schön. Regarded as a ‘manifesto of the revival of Realism,’¹ and hailed as the ‘bible’ of Neue Sachlichkeit photography,² ‘hardly any other book has influenced a generation of photographers to the same great extent and with such long-lasting effects as this volume‘.³ It was the book's tide in particular that was received like a catchword and influenced the reception of this photographic volume: ‘The tide became symbolic for an attitude of Neue Sachlichkeit to the world and the book was acknowledged as the ideal volume of Neue Sachlichkeit photography’.⁴ Hitherto in the history of the book's reception, this opinion has been restricted primarily to the reference to Walter Benjamin's well-known negative critique of 1931.⁵ Amongst the multitude of reviews of Die Welt ist schon, it is Benjamin's assessment which is most frequendy cited in the literature. That Benjamin was able to neglect explicidy mentioning Renger-Patzsch's name and to refer merely to the tide of the book can be interpreted as proof of the great fame of this photographic author. In fact, Die Welt ist schön had by this time been reviewed in nearly all leading cultural magazines and daily newspapers and evaluated as an exemplary volume of a modem, neusachliche photography. For critics such as Benjamin, however, the tide was synonymous with a new, sterile ‘l’art pour l'art' photography which manipulated reality and denied social contexts. But to confine negative criticism of Die Welt ist schön to the political left and its praise to a more conservative attitude is too simple a model as becomes apparent when all of the reviews are taken into consideration. Karl With's attempt to summarize the contradictions of this picture book may be cited here: ‘Ein seltsames Buch!} (A strange book!). Exciting in its busding abundance, as well as in its silence’.⁶     

Erotic Photography

Abstract

In his exhibition catalogue The Body Exposed: 150 Years of the Nude in Photography (Zurich 1995), Michael Kohler expresses the hope that ‘nobody will shy away from taking a closer look at nude photography, its aesthetics, its history and its ideology under the illusion that there is nothing left to discover; for it's exactly the opposite’. In fact, true academic attention toward the nude photograph has been surprisingly limited, the genre leaving behind instead a trail of pseudo-academic coffee-table books and prodigious, but unanalysed, collections. This is perhaps the reason that Michelle Olley's book is at once so heartening and so disappointing. Venus presents an anthology of erotic, and predominantly nude, photography of women spanning approximately the last 40 years. Unfortunately, where such a collection could be a prime opportunity to finally provide a cogent and analytical narrative of the genre's recent history, Olley instead offers a sparse text that uses the photographs merely as evidence of the modern world's sexual liberation. She asserts that ‘Our attitudes toward sex and sexuality, women and the depiction of erotic subjects has shifted, so that society no longer hides the nude away from us as something forbidden and too shocking even for adults’. Her argument is supported by a cursory history of the female nude in painting and photography and by references to ‘restrictive’ Victorian morality. This single-mindedness glosses over the diversity of issues posed by the photographs in the collection — issues such as identity, isolation and interaction, confinement and freedom, universality and incident.     

Between orientalist clichés and images of modernization

Abstract

In contemporary writing about nineteenth-century photography of the Middle East it has become almost a cliche to describe many of these images as ‘Orientalist’-that is, reflecting or propagating a system of representation that creates an essentialized difference between the ‘Orient’ and the ‘West’. Most of these scholars draw on Edward Said's influential book Orientalism, which traces how Europe manufactured an imaginary Orient through literary works and the social sciences.¹ For example, Nissan N. Perez writes in his book Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East (1839–1885) that ‘Literature, painting, and photography fit the real Orient into the imaginary or mental mold existing in the Westerner's mind .... These attitudes are mirrored in many of the photographs taken during this time [the nineteenth century] ... Either staged or carefully selected from a large array of possibilities, they became living visual documents to prove an imaginary reality’. ²     

Portraits portrayed

Abstract

The coffee-table is where Faces looks as if it belongs. A weighty package of 540 expensively produced pages, with 380 duo-tone reproductions, the book exudes a familiar slickness. But, as often with photographs themselves, the surface impression misleads. Ben Maddow's text is no mere accompaniment to the pictures. Winding among the landmarks of photographic history, the text vies in interest with the images; the text too is an artful performance. This alone gives this otherwise overproduced book high marks. Intelligent and interesting (let alone artful) writing about photographs, especially in the presence of images powerful enough to threaten speech with the charge of impertinence, is rare indeed. Novelist, poet, film maker, Maddow here undertakes ‘a narrative history’ of faces in photography, and while the history itself holds no surprises, the sheer facility and alertness of the writing keeps the text always slightly ahead of the pictures The writing dominates the book, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, and that is a welcome change in photography publications.     

Obituary

Abstract

This handsome book is a superb introduction to the history of photography in Japan as well as a catalogue of The History of Japanese Photography exhibition held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Cleveland Museum of Art (2003). The over-sized (12 x 10 inches) volume contains 207 beautifully reproduced photographic plates, seven chapters discussing the history of photography in Japan from 1848 until 2000, and a helpful series of appendices. The latter includes the ‘Exhibition Checklist’, a ‘Chronology’, ‘Artist Profiles’, listings of ‘Major Photography Clubs and Associations’ and ‘Major Photography Magazines’, a ‘Selected Bibliography’ and an ‘Index’. For those interested in a well written, informative and visually stimulating introduction to the subject, this is the book to consult.     

Southern exposure

Abstract

The 150th anniversary of the birth of photography has been celebrated this year with a deluge of exhibitions, books, catalogues, articles and symposia on the medium. One such exhibition, ‘The Art of Photography: 1839 – 1989’, originating from the Royal Academy of Art in London, is accompanied by a hefty catalogue of the same title. This work contains superior reproductions — for the most part full-page — of all 462 photographs included in the show as well as 16 essays by 11 authors (illustrated with small visual images), 15 excerpts from historical writings, a chronology, a glossary, and biographies of the photographers. All this material seems designed to suggest how the art of photography evolved, and of what it consists; the book therefore can be considered on its own merits as a critical history; indeed its size, weight, and format render it inconvenient for consulting while looking at actual works. At the same time, like a fraternal twin, separating it from its sibling exhibition is difficult because the same intellectual decisions and images prescribe the character of both exhibition and book.     

James Van Der Zee's Harlem book of the dead

Abstract

‘Night Funeral in Harlem’ by Langston Hughes, which was first published in 1951, exemplifies the importance of funerals to African-Americans throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Like James Van Der Zee's Harlem Book of the Dead, the poem is about the crossroads of life and death. Like the Haitian Voudoun God Ghede, whose capacity for living is legendary but whose symbol is the cross on the tomb, the Hughes poem and the Van Der Zee book show how the bodies of the dead affect the souls of the living. Van Der Zee's book is about judgement: about how the living and the dead view each other at their final encounter. This dialogue also describes Ghede who is lord of the interaction between the living and the dead and who is ‘the final judge of a man's life and the worth of his soul in death’.¹ Through its poems and pictures the book depicts people at a cosmic threshold, and like Ghede, who is guardian of the history and heritage of the race, the Harlem Book of the Dead is intimately connected to the culture from which it springs.²     

Trend & taste

Abstract

Autumn 1977 saw the appearance of the first comprehensive book in German on the history of photography in this century. The work is divided into three sections of which the first, on ‘The Forerunners of Modern Photography’, deals with the technical and intellectual foundations of the field, as they were at the beginning of the century. At about that time photography was able to break away from pamtmg, and although it was still strongly influenced by Impressionism it succeeded in establishing itself as a medium in its own right, through the avant-garde trends in fine art. The principal subjects remained allegories, meaningless portraits and genre pictures, but this soon changed before, and especially after, the First World War when photography was subjected to new forces, which led to the development of modern styles.     

Kurt Tucholsky,John Heartfield and Deutschland,Deutschland über Alles

This essay analyses Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield's 1929 Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles. In this ‘picture‐book’ right‐wing nationalism, the military, the democratic system, and capitalism were trenchantly criticized. This essay argues, however, that Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles is as much about the role of photography in society as it is about Weimar's political situation. The late 1920s are generally seen as a period of medium optimism in which the new photography was in the forefront. Yet a close analysis of the use of photography in Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles nuances the so‐called optimism of Weimar visual culture and its sudden disruption by the advent of fascism in the 1930s. While from the early 1910s onwards, Tucholsky had promoted the polemical power of photography, his position shifted by the end of the 1920s. An ambivalence marked Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles: on the one hand the photographic medium was used as a critical tool; on the other, the book reflects an underlying critique of and frustration with photojournalism and its association with urban modernity.     

A scene in a library

Abstract

This essay concerns one photograph: the eighth plate in The Pencil of Nature, called A Scene in a Library, which originally appeared in the second installment of Talbot's inaugural book on photography (figure 1). I have already written extensively about A Scene in a Library — and given its title to a book on illustrated books.¹ But it is a photograph that, together with the text that accompanies it, has never ceased to intrigue me. I continue to wonder what Talbot's intentions were when he chose this photograph for his book. Why did he choose it over similar photographs that he had made and could possibly just as well have used? Why did he title it the way he did — A Scene in a Library — when we know that it was not actually taken in his library? Why and when did it occur to him to write the piece of text that accompanies the plate — which speaks of experimentation with the invisible end of the light spectrum? And what did he have in mind when he put the plate, the caption and the accompanying text together? For A Scene in a Library is remarkable — and exceptional — for the unaccountable way in which it puts text together with image. Almost all the other plates have text that bears on them fairly straightforwardly, either explaining how and where they were made or indicating possible uses for the photograph in question. Not so A Scene in a Library, which functions, rather, as a kind of clef de roman, and which has, as I hope to show, an emblematic status in The Pencil of Nature precisely because it is an exception.     

New York and Photography

Abstract

This exhibition catalogue about the New York School of photography, begun long before 11 September 2001, fortuitously lifts up the city as both image and source of visual ideas. Comforting in this accidental homage, the book also offers significant essays that explore the reasons for the flourishing of photography in twentiethcentury New York. New York: Capital of Photography offers some especially thought provoking explanations. Max Kozloff, art historian, critic and photographer, traces the development of a particular way of seeing that evolved from the early years of the century in the Reform Movement through the ‘made-to-order Surrealism’ of New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Five of his six essays approach a textbook treatment of this art form in this period and place. The sixth, ‘Jewish Sensibility and the Photography of New York’, poses the intriguing thesis that the aesthetic of New York photography as a whole is a Jewish one. This idea may not be accepted as fact in actual photography history texts until another hundred years have passed, but is worthy and fascinating, in Kozloffs telling, of consideration.     

Greenback Shutterbug

Abstract

Maud Sulter combines a number of art media in new ways. She was born in Glasgow in 1960 and has published two books of poetry. The first was titled As a Blackwoman (1985) and her second book, Zabat: Poetics of a Family Tree, came out in 1989. She's a visual artist who uses photography first and foremost, but she also draws and paints. She's currently Momart Artist-in-Residence at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool. Maud Suiter describes herself as a cultural activist, and she's concerned with some very large issues. Her exhibition, Zabat, means, variously, ‘a sacred dance’, ‘an occasion of power’ (as in Witches Sabbath), and ‘black women's rite of passage’. The exhibition re-presents the nine Muses–each is portrayed by a black woman with symbolic attributes such as a flute, flowers, a picture, and so on. The writer Alice Walker appears as the ‘Muse of Comedy’. Ysaye Maria Barnwell, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, is ‘Polyhymnia, the Muse of Sacred Song’.     

Henry Peach Robinson and Victorian theory

Abstract

Any history that treats 19th-century photography mentions the work of H. P. Robinson (1830–1901). He is acknowledged to be a foremost practitioner of picture making by rule and combination. His Fading Away (1858) in which a young girl is seen on her deathbed, is as well known as Reijlander's Two Ways of Life (1857) and, at the time, excited much controversy for its ‘morbid sentiment’.     

Histories of Photography 1839–1939

Abstract

In this essay I will attempt to sketch the historiography of the history of photography, concerning myself mainly with the histories that were published between 1839 and 1939 in book form rather than in periodicals. This is therefore, first a study of how photographic history was presented by the medium ‘history book’ and second an attempt at finding the sources for certain approaches to and changes in the writing of photographic history.     

Talbot's natural magic

Abstract

We might begin with a passage from Talbot's first public utterance about his derivation of the process soon to be named ‘photography’. The date is 31 January 1839, the place is the Royal Society in London, and it is six days after Michael Faraday had communicated to the Royal Institution that the idea of making pictures with light had an English as well as a French origin. That evening Talbot read his paper Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing, outlining the history of his involvement with experiments using nitrate of silver to make images on paper, the successes and failures of prior investigators, and the accuracy of the process for copying flat objects. In due course, in a section captioned ‘On the Art of Fixing a Shadow’, he asserts:     

Michael Fried's Modernist Theory of Photography

This essay critically analyses Michael Fried's book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. It examines the relevance of Fried's categories of absorption and theatricality to contemporary photography and his assumption that photography is an inherently modernist art. In his book Fried explains the shift to large-scale colour photographs in the 1980s as signalling a return to problems of beholding, which dominated painting since the 1750s and 1760s. In contrast, this essay argues that this shift reveals the importance of the legacy of conceptualism and minimalism to recent photography and, in particular, the role of the conceptual ‘document’ within contemporary artistic practices.     

Nicholas Henneman

Abstract

In 1992, Allen Ellenzweig published a pioneering work on the male nude as it was presented in photography, a study tracing the historical development of the masculine body in pictures from the daguerreotype to the present.¹ Ellenzweig's book accomplished more than a mere survey of homoerotic images. Quite the opposite, it challenged art historians to embark on the search for ‘an iconography of the homoerotic’ and to identify, if it existed, an art historical tradition within which gay modes of representation could be situated. It is the pursuit of a tradition of gay signs which motivates this brief examination of Robert Mapplethorpe's stilllifes.     

Photography at the Institute of Design

Abstract

In 1937, László Moholy-Nagy planted the Bauhaus seed, a hybrid of art and mass production, in the soil of the American Midwest. The New Bauhaus in Chicago only survived a year, but its successor, first called the School of Design and then the Institute of Design (ID), would be an influential centre of photographic experimentation for the next thirty-five years. Taken by Design: Photographs from the Institute of Design, 1937–1971 traces the tumultuous history of the school's small but seminal photography programme, the work of its major instructors, and their combined influence on photography in the USA. The essays in this handsome catalogue tell the story of how the ID approach evolved, from Moholy's formalist view of photography as one of the design arts, into the arrival of the medium as an art form in its own right under Hany Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siege!. Published to accompany David Travis and Elizabeth Siegel's exhibition of the same title for the Art Institute of Chicago, the book is the first comprehensive documentation of the vital contribution of the Institute of Design to the history of photography.     

John Collier,Jr

Abstract

After sending off a portfolio of his pictures to the headquarters of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, DC, John Collier, Jr, became so preoccupied with just trying to survive in photography that he forgot about his submission. As weeks turned into months, he bounced from one photography job to another. Collier felt that he had hit rock bottom in 1941 working as a printer for Gabriel Milan's, ‘a very cut-throat photography company in San Francisco’. Then one day his labour in the laboratory was interrupted by a telephone call from Washington. ‘I was called out of my little dungeon where I was tinting goldtoned baby portraits and picked up the phone and couldn't hear what the man said, having a life-long hearing difficulty’. Collier handed the receiver over to the nearest person, who happened to be his boss, to relay the message. ‘There's a crazy guy in Washington, DC, who wants to pay you $2,300 a year. You'd better take it because I'm going to fire you’. A shocked and elated Collier took the receiver, and confirmed his acceptance with a simple ‘Yes’. Although Collier did not hear anything that Roy Stryker, Head of the Historic Section, said in reply, he immediately prepared to leave for the nation's capital, and became what turned out to be the last photographer hired for the greatest documentary project the world has ever known. ‘This was the climax of the concern that I had to do something about direct analysis and observation, about what was going on around me at the time of the Great Depression’. ¹