Essay 1 - Discuss the attempts involving photography...

11/05/09

Discuss the attempts involving photography which were made in Germany during the twenties and the thirties to document and report on condition of German society.



In the years following the end of the first world war Germany witnessed enormous political, 'economic and social upheavals.
The end of Kaiser Wilheirn's empire in 1918 signalled the end of an era. There was mass unemployment, high inflation and fears of a
Russian style Revolution. However, it was also a period of unprecedent Cultural activity, covering the whole of Europa and centred mainly in Germany, where because connections with radical
politics, the most original and significant artists, writers, musicians, photographers, designers and film makers were to be found.
"All the forward looking ideas, enthusiasms, and
- tendencies of the Century have found a home there. . . .
Germany has suddenly become endowed with and intense /"Modern Conscience" and look forward more eagerly than others nations because it does not care to look back." (E3rian Stokoe 1978 Renger - patzsch: New Realist Photographer)
This desire for a new world order, new ideas and Utopias, is evident in the domain of photography in slogan like 'a new point of view', the new photographer, a new perception. The concept of new objectivity was defined by G. H Hartlaub in 1925 as characterising "the realist technique of a number of painters of the 20's, which was subsequently also applied to contemporary photography. (Photography and the State between the Wars Germany: the Weirnar Republic, pl42)
On the one hand there developed an abstract realism and on the other a realistic photography concerned with aspects of contemporary social life.
There was throughout the 1920's and 30's a specific desire for investigative documents and permanent records, and the camera was found to be an invaluable tool in a number of professions, namely architecture, city planning, industrial design and experimental sciences.
At the same time that groups of painters were discussing and arguing the political and social role of the artist, so there emerged in photography the Worker Photography Movement 'Arbeiter - Fotograh'
founded by Willi Munzenberg, editor of the succesfull AIZ Marxist -Leninist photo journal. One of the main functions of the movement
was so educate and convert amateur photographers into photo -correspondents able to supply AIZ with visual material that depicted
the social and economic conditions of the working class. Clear guidelines were given for the content of the photographs required: "Photographs the typify the social conditions of the workers. . .so
called 'genre pictures' which give a good impression of the daily life of the workers in all its phases photographers of the work place which clearly reveal the working conditions of photographers which show modern technology and its modes of labour, industrial buildings and their constructions (W. Korner & J.Stube, 'Germany: Arbeiter - Fotografie' ,p73
Photography/Politics One: Photography Workshop 1980)
The first group was set up in Hamburg but very quickly futher groups were set up in other German cities.

In the early days, however, such was the influence of the dominant bourgeois art photography cultivated at the turn of the century and
perpetuated by the commercial photo magazines (financed by the German photographic industry), that much of what was produced by members fell into predictable categories: the 'sweet portrait', the romantic 'landscape etc.

At the first worker -- photographers exhibition in Berlin in 1928, one of their critics commented -"Where was the material from the
working class, where the wide coverage of social conditions? We are not just any photographic club, we are worker correspondents". (ibid)
This debate over content continued within the rank of the movement and through the columns of the newspaper for sometime.

In 1931 Willi Munzenberg proclaimed in an edition of Der Arbeiter, "Photography has become an outstanding and indispensible means of propaganda in the revolutionary class struggle. "
(W. Munzenberg, tasks and objectives,
Der Arbeiter fotograf, 1931. )
But incresingly worker photographers were to suffer physical attacks and harrassrnent by the police and the law, until the newspaper ceased to exist when Hittler carne to power in 1933, although an
illegal edition was published later that year at risk to life. Many worker photographers were arrested and later send to concentration camps. Under the Third Reich,the ' Ministry of Propaganda* created a photography section in the department of "The Positive Conception of the World. Its role was to concentrate on two essential points; photography used to purvey information, in particular, political
information, and amateur photography which could be used as an instrument of crucial importance.
(op.cit (2) pl50)

The National Association of Amateur German Photographers was shortly set up, run on the lines of banned worker photography association
but with significantly different guidelines and aims. National photography was to be essentially of a documentary nature, "Expected to testify to the beauty of the fatherland.... record the dilapidation of public buildings and war damage and put together a picture of men at work.
(ibid pl50)
Photography courses were set up in 1936 by the German Labour Front in which propagandist intention is clear in a book written by one of
the organisers. "Amateur photography is the patrimony of a whole people and it should perform a useful task the nature of which is more manifest in Germany today than it has ever been
before. . . the education of the people includes
photography so that amateur photographers may aspire to be one of the major factors in the history of civilisation. . . it makes possible to leave to one' s
children and grand children a collection of images whose influence is far greater than any number of speeches. (ibid pl54)

Amateur photographers were encouraged to produced documentary evidence to prove the racial purity and superiority of the Aryan race with pictures of everyday life; idyllic landscape scenes the depicted a ' timeless beauty', picturesque sites of the fatherland. Portraiture had to convey the concept of the ‘Aryan race’. The work
of Erna Lendvai-Dickson and Erich Retzlaff whose massive project of the country and its inhabitants "Portraits of the German people” we
the sort of thing to aspire too.

Guidelines of what was permissible and styles to be adopted were
p u b l i s h e d. N o t h i n g e x p e r i rn e n t al , p r o g r e s s i v e, u n f i n i s h e d; p h o t o montage was definitely out. * Picture like' photography, parallel of the return to the pictorial tradition in painting, was acceptable a
was the naturalistic style of photo-journalism. Hitter’s accredited photographer; Heinrich Hoffmann, published a series of looks of photographs that could be used as a model by amateur photographer “consisting of the simplest type of photo-reportage of a quite mediocre technical quality like those* to be found in family albums that gave the image an air of authenticity and credibility"
(Berthold Heinz 'Art in the Third Reich'
Introduction: Blackwell 1979
All this was part of a much wider and deliberate attempt by the
National Socialists to 'Nazify' art and create an," uncontarninated*
culture. When they took power in 1933 much of what was recognised
representing modern German art up to that time was removed, taken
out of circulation and repressed, along with Jewish intellectual,
liberal and artist connected with the Modernist Movement. The
cosmopolitan culture that had flourished during the Weimar Republic
had to be eliminated and replaced by a new German Art and Culture.
A culture that emanated naturally, from the German people, from the
soil, from the-? Blood.
The third Reich used all available means to project its image.
There regular marches, spectacular pageants and huge elaborately
orchestrated mass meetings addressed by the Fuehrer.
There were countless industrial fairs, art exhibitions and public
events. When motorways, bridges, buildings or cities were planned
or built they were justified in terms of their aesthetic and
cultural significance.

The visual arts and photography in particular were given
exaggeratedly high social value. For it was "only with the help o
the mass media could the fascist attempt to prove that Germany had
become as Hitler promised it would, an empire of art and culture"
(ibid chapter 1)
Under the Nazi regime, 'Art' became an object of politics and
photography as a media became one of its valuable weapons in that
it illustrated Hitler’s "promised national rebirth of art. . . . It
fulfilled the political task required of it."
(ibid chapter 6)
Worker photography was the left's attempt to develop a way of
documenting the ' reality' of everyday working class experience,
which like a ' window on the world ' is supposed to reveal the truth
about the events or scenes depicted.. But Brecht has made clear, a
photograph of the Krupp's works does not tell us much about the
actual 'reality' of that institution "something has to be
constructed, something artificial, something setup... "

( B e r t o 1 d B r e c hi t, T h i n k i n g P h o t o g r a p h y,
chapter... 3,.. Vic tor Bur gin )
That is precisely what radical artist such as Alexander Rodchenko
in Russia and Grosz, Hausrnann and Heart field in Germany attempted to
do in their work by developing montage techniques to meet specific
political ends.
In conclusion then, both the Left and the Right were engaged during
this period in creating a populist cultural policy and in so doing
enrolled the amateur photographer to their cause. The role of
amateur photography in society remains deeply problematic to this
day, and many issues remain unresolved. There are millions of
amateur photographers who continue-? To produce the* * sweet' and
'quaint' image. One of Jo Spence's project was to try and develop a
critical relationship to the world of the family album and amateur
p ho t o g r a p h y.





B i b 1 i o g r a p h y

John Willett,'The New Sobriety', Thame & Hudson, 1982
David Evans & Silvia Gohl, 'AIZ A Marxist - Leninist Picture
Magazine Camerawork, Nov. 1980
Edwin Hoernie, The Working Man Eye; Der Arbeiter - Fotograf, from
The New Photography, Ed David Mellor
Herbert Moldering, ' Urbanising & Technological Utopianisrn’; ibid
Ute Eskilden , Photography & The New Sachlichkeit Movement' source
unknown.