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

我的建议是出版一本8 - 9万字的书，我希望这本书能由耶鲁大学出版社承包（与他们的讨论处于后期阶段），汇集德国分裂四十年期间对东德和西德摄影的六年研究。这将是第一本在冷战的背景下，在现代主义和后现代主义的关系中探索德国摄影艺术的书。人们普遍认为，出现在20世纪上半叶的德国现代主义视觉文化--从达达到包豪斯和新客观主义--都是通过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，这种先锋派的研究受到了猛烈的限制，冷战对德国的影响进一步破坏了这种现代主义遗产。摄影是如何以及为什么在战后的两个德国再次成为一种重要的艺术媒介，这一点还有待于令人满意的研究，这也是本研究的主题。这本书是基于这样一个前提，即尽管冷战的分裂，有可能定义一个纪实摄影范式与类似的特点，在东，西德国，从战后立即延长到1989年，为新客观性的遗产，以及与之相关的现代主义摄影师的工作-奥古斯特桑德，Karl Blossfeldt和Albert Renger-Patzsch尤其重要。新客观性（Neue Sachlichkeit）预示着一种与相机的机械化视图明确相关的新的观看方式。但“Sachlichkeit”不仅仅意味着客观性;它意味着某种物质性，一种“对象性”，它存在于事物的力量中。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应，并建立在对这一主题的批判之上，而这一批判本身在一定程度上是表现主义失败的产物。然而，最终，新客观主义失败了，并因其反动倾向和政治审美化而受到左派的批评。然而，它的更激进的支持者受到了赞扬，本书将论证它留下了一个宝贵的遗产：寻找对象的适当政治。这本书将主张，从20世纪50年代到80年代末，摄影师如贝恩德和希拉·贝歇尔，迈克尔施密特，伊夫林·里希特和鲁道夫·舍费尔回到这一困难的现代主义遗产，以及对摄影的客观性和现实主义的批判性重新评估，以探讨德国身份和艺术作者的作用问题。我认为，这种对新客观性传统的回归--在西方尚未得到充分的考察，在东方则完全被忽视--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将摄影师及其拍摄对象去心理化的摄影，他们更喜欢相机的艰难客观性，而不是艺术家个人的“声音”。与他们的现代主义先驱不同，我们认为这些从业者的作品积极地参与了对摄影传统功能的含蓄批判，拥抱了序列性和更自我反思的“后现代”感受力，批判了摄影的表征功能和理想化的视觉。战后摄影实践的特点将被证明是源于对摄影的“客观性”和“物质性”的关注，以及对现实主义和相机透镜下物体的追求。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视为一个抽象的普遍范畴，而是将其视为一种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.