Germany is considered one of the central sources of modernist aesthetics after the First World War when innovation and experimentation were ubiquitous in all the arts. Conventional histories tend to present the new aesthetics as fixed and agreed values yet, as this volume demonstrates, modernist aesthetics were developing at a rapid rate and largely in flux during the 1920s and 1930s.The established historical narrative used to posit a stark difference between the explosion of modernist art innovation during the Weimar Republic, the conservative aesthetics favored during the Wilhelmine era, and stifling of modernist expression during the National Socialist period. In fact, the story is far more nuanced and complex in art historical and socio-cultural terms.

Authors: Erin Maynes, Ben Seyfert, Donna West Brett, Birgit Lang and Eliza Coyle, Camilla Smith, Patrick Roessler, Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Peter Chametzky, Mila Ganeva, Nina Lübbren and Fae Brauer.

Image: NSDAP portfolio on “Typographical Sketching”, cover (c. 1940; designer unknown). Private Collection.

This edited collection explores the complex ways in which photography is used and interpreted: as a record of evidence, as a form of communication, as a means of social and political provocation, as a mode of surveillance, as a narrative of the self, and as an art form. What makes photographic images unsettling and how do the re-uses and interpretations of photographic images unsettle the self-evident reality of the visual field? Taking up these themes, this book examines the role of photography as a revelatory medium underscored by its complex association with history, memory, experience and identity.

BOOK PRIZE: Awarded Best Anthology in the Association of Australian and NZ AWAPA 2020 Book Awards.

“This fascinating and deeply researched anthology contains significant and original critiques concerning the photographic and filmic medium as evidence of social, cultural, and political states of being. Including essays by an international group of researchers, it brilliantly contributes to knowledge and debates associated with the photographic archive. The basic premise underpinning all the essays is that the meaning and definition of photography is inherently unsettled. Among the many stimulating arguments found in the book are that the medium’s epistemology of ownership – “the photograph is always tethered to a witness” (Katherine Biber) — challenges photography’s relation to the arrested historical moment. Each essay rigorously tests its argument about photography’s inherent value and brings in a range of complex issues such as displacement, democracy, truth, reality, and the imaginary. Its theoretical, philosophical, aesthetic, and ontological premises are riveting. The images reproduced in the book are targeted to each contributor’s ideas in a meaningful rather than spectacular way, and the design quality of the publication is in keeping with Routledge’s scholarly, understated style. The editors Donna West Brett and Natalya Lusty have produced an extremely important book which will have profound repercussions in debates about photography for years to come.” Dr Sheridan Palmer and A/Prof Anthony White.

BOOK REVIEW: “Overall, the book makes a timely addition to the available list of classroom staples that provide a convenient mapping of the latest methodological and theoretical issues pertaining to photography.” Anton Lee, History of Photography, 43:4, 423-425.

IMAGE: Magnesium-Blitz mit Schüttungseinrichtung 1928, glass plate negative, 9 x 12 cm, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Bildarchiv / Fotograf: Photographisches Institut der ETH Zürich

As a recording device, photography plays a unique role in how we remember places and events that happened there. This includes recording events as they happen, or recording places where something occurred before the photograph was taken, commonly referred to as aftermath photography. This book presents a theoretical and historical analysis of German photography of place after 1945. It analyses how major historical ruptures in twentieth-century Germany and associated places of trauma, memory and history affected the visual field and the circumstances of looking. These ruptures are used to generate a new reading of postwar German photography of place. The analysis includes original research on world-renowned German photographers such as Thomas Struth, Thomas Demand, Michael Schmidt, Boris Becker and Thomas Ruff as well as photographers largely unknown in the Anglophone world.

Donna West Brett, (Routledge, 2016) Available to order from: Routledge

BOOK REVIEW:

Sarah Goodrum: Rezension zu: West Brett, Donna: Photography and Place. Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945. Abingdon 2016 , in: H-Soz-Kult, 16.09.2016, <www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-25814>.

"The book focuses on and theorizes images taken after the fact – of trauma, or simply of history – and “investigates how this kind of aftermath or late photography represents a dramatic rupture in the field of vision” (p. 2). The rupture in the visual field is tied, according to Brett, to the ruptures of 1945, caused by Germany’s defeat and the impact of the Holocaust, and that of 1989’s fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent German reunification. For Brett, these photographs of place tied to rupture present the viewer with a tension between seeing and unseeing – and astigmatic vision that conceals or diffuses as much as it seems to reveal (see particularly ibid., Chapter 3, p. 79).

This book gathers a fascinating collection of photographers and images, and addresses the idea of place in a way and to an extent that has not been done before in the history of German photography focused around the Cold War period and its historical roots. It offers scholars of photography, German History, and those interested in themes of memory, trauma, and landscape a useful assortment of theory and imagery and a body of discourse on these themes that contributes to the discussion of this material."

Sarah Goodrum, BTK University of Art & Design, Berlin. http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/index.asp?id=25814&view=pdf&pn=rezensionen&type=rezbuecher

IMAGE: Friedrich Seidenstücker, Reste der kriegzerstörten Löwenbrücke im Tiergarten von Berlin, 1946. bpk, Berlin.