German Photography: The Demands of Realism & The Aesthetics of Objectivity

该提议是出版一本8万至9万字的书，我希望这本书将由耶鲁大学出版社(与耶鲁大学出版社的讨论已进入后期阶段)签约，汇集德国分裂40年期间对东德和西德摄影的六年研究成果。这将是第一本在冷战背景下，与现代主义和后现代主义有关的比较德国摄影艺术的书。人们普遍认为，20世纪上半叶出现的现代主义德国视觉文化--从达达到包豪斯和新客观性--都是由它接受摄影媒介来定义的。随着国家社会主义和第二次世界大战的爆发，这种前卫的调查受到了猛烈的限制，冷战对德国的影响进一步撕裂了这一现代主义遗产。摄影如何以及为什么在战后时期再次成为两个德国的核心艺术媒介尚未得到令人满意的考察，这也是本研究的主题。这本书的前提是，尽管冷战分裂，但有可能在东德和西德定义一种具有相似特征的纪实摄影范式，从战后不久到1989年，对这一范式来说，新客观性的遗产以及与之相关的现代主义摄影师--奥古斯特·桑德、卡尔·布洛斯费尔特和阿尔伯特·伦格-帕茨奇的作品--尤其重要。新的客观性(Neue Sachlichkeit)预示着一种与相机机械化视角明确相关的新的观看方式。但是Sachlichkeit不仅仅意味着客观性，它还意味着某种物质性，一种驻留在事物的力量中的“对象性”。这种对客观性的颂扬在更广泛的魏玛文化和知识潮流中得到了回响，并基于对主体的批判，而主体本身在一定程度上是对表现主义失败的感知的产物。然而，最终，《新客观性》失败了，并因其反动倾向和对政治的审美化而受到左翼的批评。然而，它更激进的支持者受到了赞扬，这本书将辩称，它留下了一项宝贵的遗产：为目标寻找合适的政治。这本书认为，从20世纪50年代到80年代末，伯恩德和希拉·贝歇尔、迈克尔·施密特、伊夫林·里希特和鲁道夫·舍费尔等摄影师回到了这一艰难的现代主义遗产，并对摄影的客观性和现实主义进行了批判性的重新评估，以探索德国身份和艺术作者的角色。我认为，这种对新客观性传统的回归--这在西方没有得到充分的审视，在东方也完全被忽视--是制度连续性与复杂的历史经验相结合的结果。这些战后摄影师追求的是一种试图使摄影师和他或她的主体去心理的摄影，他们更喜欢相机的困难客观性，而不是艺术家个人的声音。与他们的现代主义先驱不同的是，这些实践者的作品积极地参与了对摄影传统功能的含蓄批评，拥抱了序列性和一种更自我反省的、批评摄影的表现功能和理想化视觉的后现代情感。所探讨的战后摄影实践的特点将被证明源于对摄影的“客观性”和“物质性”的关注，以及对现实主义和相机镜头下对象的特权。至关重要的是，在探讨摄影客观性的问题时，本研究不会试图将其描述为一个抽象的普遍范畴，而是一个危险的脆弱和不可能的艺术理想。

The proposal is to publish a book of 80-90,000 words, which I hope will be contracted by Yale University Press (with whom discussions are at an advanced stage), bringing together six years of research on East and West German photography during the four decades of Germany's division. This will be the first book to explore comparatively German photographic art, in the context of the Cold War and in relation to modernism and postmodernism. It is widely recognised that the modernist German visual culture which emerged in the first part of the twentieth century was defined - from Dada, to the Bauhaus and New Objectivity - by its having embraced the photographic medium. With National Socialism and the Second World War, such avant-garde investigations were violently curtailed, and the impact of the Cold War on Germany further fractured this modernist legacy. How and why photography once more emerged as an artistic medium of central importance in both Germanies in the postwar period is yet to be satisfactorily examined, and is the subject of this study. This book is based on the premise that, despite the division of the Cold War, it is possible to define a documentary photographic paradigm with similar characteristics in both East and West Germany, extending from the immediate post-war period up to 1989, for which the legacy of New Objectivity, and the work of the modernist photographers associated with it - August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt and Albert Renger-Patzsch - was particularly important. New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) heralded a new way of seeing explicitly associated with the mechanised view of the camera. But 'Sachlichkeit' meant more than just objectivity; it connoted a certain materiality, an 'object-ness', which resided in the power of things. This eulogy to objectivity was echoed in wider Weimar cultural and intellectual currents, and was based upon a critique of the subject which was itself in part a product of the perception of the failure of Expressionism. Yet, ultimately, New Objectivity failed, and was criticised by the Left for its reactionary tendencies and aestheticisation of politics. Its more radical proponents, however, were praised, and this book will argue that it left one valuable legacy: the search for a proper politics of the object. The book will contend that from the 1950s up until the end of the 1980s, photographers such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Michael Schmidt, Evelyn Richter and Rudolph Schäfer returned to this difficult modernist inheritance, as well as to a critical re-evaluation of photography's objectivity and realism, in order to explore issues of German identity and the role of artistic authorship. This return to the tradition of New Objectivity - which has not been fully examined in the West, and has been entirely neglected in the East - was, I argue, the consequence of institutional continuities combined with complex historical experience. Pursuing a photography which attempted to de-psychologise both the photographer and his or her subject, such postwar photographers favoured the difficult objectivity of the camera above the 'voice' of the individual artist. Unlike that of their modernist precursors, it will be argued that the work of these practitioners actively engages in an implicit critique of the traditional functions of photography, embracing seriality and a more self-reflexive, 'postmodern' sensibility that critiqued photography's representational functions and idealised vision. The characteristics of the postwar photographic practices explored will be shown to have originated in a concern with the 'objectivity' and 'materiality' of photography, and a privileging of realism and the objects under the camera's lens. Crucially, in approaching the question of photographic objectivity, this study will not attempt to cast it as an abstract universal category, but rather as a perilously fragile and impossible artistic ideal.