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

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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.