Andres Zervigon

The meeting of photography and Germany evokes pioneering modernist pictures from the Weimar era and colossal digital prints that define the medium’s art practice today. It also recalls horrifying documents of wartime atrocity and the relentless surveillance of East German citizens. Photography and Germany broadens these perceptions by examining photography’s multi-faceted relationship with Germany’s turbulent cultural, political and social history. It shows how many of the same phenomena that helped generate the country’s most recognizable photographs also led to a range of lesser-known pictures that similarly documented or negotiated Germany’s cultural identity and historical ruptures.

The book rethinks the photography we commonly associate with the country by focus­ing on how the medium heavily defined the notion of ‘German’. As a product of the modern age, photography intervened in a fraught project of national imagining, largely productively but sometimes catastrophically. Photography and Germany covers this history chronologically, from early experiments in light-sensitive chemicals to the tension between analogue and digital technologies that have stimulated the famous contemporary art photography associated with the country.

From its official introduction in 1839, photography has commonly been understood in the West as a direct imprint of nature, one made without intervention of the human hand. At best, it would bear witness to the world and “persuade the viewer to take action against social forces that are believed to be responsible for suffering or injustice.” But standing at the core of such beliefs lay a paradoxical faith in the effectiveness of appeals to emotion. A properly persuasive photograph had to be more than coldly objective. It had to excite passion, or even provoke such responses as disgust and fear in order to activate a viewer. As this book and exhibition underscore across the last century of its existence, social documentary photography grounded its persuasiveness on the expectation of objectivity and the power of subjectivity, both tuned to perfect harmony.

Recent decades have seen photography’s privileged relationship to the real come under question. Spurred by the postmodern critique of photography in the 1980s and the rise of digital technologies soon thereafter, scholars have been asking who and what built this understanding of the medium in the first place.
Photography and Doubt reflects on this interest in photography’s referential power by discussing it in rigorously historical terms. How was the understanding of pho- tographic realism cultivated in the first place? What do cases of staged and manipu- lated photography reveal about that realism’s hold on audiences across the medium’s history? Have doubts about photography’s testimonial power stimulated as much knowledge as its realism?
Edited by Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, Photography and Doubt is the first multiauthored collection specifically designed to explore these questions. Its 13 original essays, illustrated with 73 color images, explore cases when the link between the photographic image and its referent was placed under stress, and when photogra- phy was as attuned to its myth-making capabilities as to its claims to authenticity.
Photography and Doubt will serve as a valuable resource for students and scholars in art history, visual and media studies, philosophy, and the history of science and technology.

"Working in Germany in the interwar era, John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld, 1891–1968) developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. A pioneer of modern photomontage, he assembled images that transformed the meaning of the mass-media photos from which they were taken. In John Heartfield and the Agitated Image, Andrés Mario Zervigón explores this crucial period in the life and work of this brilliant, radical artist whose desire to disclose the truth obscured by the mainstream press and the propaganda of politicians made him a de facto prosecutor of Germany’s visual culture.

Zervigón charts the evolution of Heartfield’s photomontage from an act of antiwar resistance into a formalized and widely disseminated political art in the Weimar Republic, when his work appeared on everything from campaign posters to book covers. He explains how Heartfield’s engagement with montage arose from dissatisfaction with photography’s capacity to represent the modern world, and the result was likely the most important combination of avant-garde art and politics in the twentieth century. A rare look at Heartfield’s early and middle years as an artist and designer, this book provides a new understanding of photography’s role at this critical juncture in history."

Im Februar 1930 veröffentlichte der damals bereits bekannte Fotomontagekünstler John Heartfield seinen ersten Beitrag
in der Arbeiter-Illustrierten-Zeitung (AIZ), einem Periodikum am linken Rand des polarisierten politischen Spektrums der Weimarer Republik. Ermöglicht wurde dieser Erfolg durch den Mann hinter der AIZ und ihrem Neuen Deutschen Verlag (NDV): Willi Münzenberg.

This book chapter explores the historical context behind Benjamin's formation of the the optical unconscious. It suggests that the increasingly dire diagnosis of photography's ill effect on human consciousness, particularly in the medium's mass-proliferation, was something that Benjamin wrestled with before devising the more positive notion of a photographic optical unconscious.

This book chapter discusses a 1927 controversy in the radical-left magazine  Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, or A-I-Z, which answered charges that its photomontages lied by responding "The A-I-Z tells the truth!" The chapter discusses how the photographic conditions of the Weimar era arose under the shadow of agit-prop, and what such circumstances meant about the constitution and experience of photographic publics at this key moment of modernity in crisis. By doing so, it will suggest that today’s isolated spheres of competing knowledge and their ‘alternate facts’, cultivated by social media, the ongoing significance attributed to photographic testimony, and the then Trump administration itself, may have a rich historical precedence in the tense media environment of interwar Germany.

This article discusses National-Socialist-aligned photographer Erna Lendvai-Dircksen and her first phonebook of peasant portraits. The volume constituted a series of aesthetically pioneering images that consciously associated themselves with new trends in the medium, yet simultaneously solicited the most anti-modernist, anachronistic modes of thinking that were closely associated with National-Socialism just prior to its coming into power. Given its right-wing orientation and its inventive pictorial approach, Lendvai-Dircksen’s book was trying to intervene spectacularly in at least two seemingly incompatible discursive streams over the pages of her book, doing so in such a way that each aesthetic gesture enhanced the power of the other. This helped assure her book’s broadest possible impact and audience. As I maintain, it is here that an implied equation of the face stamped with German identity and the photo imprinted by light became so important.

In a worldwide aesthetic economy seemingly without borders, how can we write about contemporary photographers who claim an origin for their pictures in non-Western national or regional histories? Can our recent “global turn” in photographic studies provide methodologies that critically unpack these claims and interrogate why they are made? Or do these approaches, often built on the same notions of geographic identity undergirding Euro-American photographic histories, only affirm declarations of belonging and their attendant claims to authenticity?
  In addressing such queries, this essay takes the case of Moroccan-born artist Lalla Essaydi to propose a mode of analysis based on the very instability of national identity, on its status as “imagined.” Essaydi, for instance, claims a home in the visual culture of her North African country of birth. But she is actually a Saudi Arabian living in New York, synthesizing an Arab-oriented aesthetic vision that appeals to Western viewers and Gulf-Arab collectors alike. Western museums exhibit her work for its apparent regional authenticity while Dubai collectors take this endorsement as confirmation of her pictures’ worth.
  To make sense of this increasingly common global status of artist and image, I propose the notion of an itinerant photography that borrows wildly from national idioms and thereby defines photography and its histories as porous and borderless. Essaydi’s increasingly popular prints operate in this way by restaging Orientalist paintings of North African women while over-producing signals of Moroccan visual culture that Gulf collectors demand of this region’s art. By deftly navigating numerous traditions and expectations, Essaydi photography reveals its itinerant status, its lack of a secure home.

Beginning around 1910, vanguard artists demanded that true art go beyond the intellectual and transform daily life. This volume highlights the work of six influential European artists who took this idea into the wider world, where it merged enthusiastically with demands in the industrial marketplace, the nascent mass media, and urban popular culture.

Featured are Piet Zwart, a Dutch designer who brought his minimalist aesthetic vision to ubiquitous items like biscuit boxes and postage stamps; Karel Teige, leader of the Czech avant-garde, who produced brilliant book and journal designs; his compatriot Ladislav Sutnar, who brought modernist "good design" to tableware, clothing, and children's toys; Gustav Klutsis, who pioneered using photomontage for political purposes; Lazar (El) Lissitzky, who produced some of the most exciting book, poster, and exhibition designs of the 1920s and '30s in Germany and Russia; and German artist John Heartfield, who worked exclusively in photomontage to design book covers, journals, and agitational posters for the Communist cause.

Tachisme is an exhibition that ruptures any clear distinction between photography and painting. The negatives from which these photographs derive were smeared and stained with pigment during their long exposures. When these negatives are then printed from at large-scale in the darkroom, the latent inscriptions are revealed to intermingle with the distinctive signature of the artist's !ngertips, a trace of touching that is generally forbidden in the production of photographs.

Can a Berlin Dadaist participate in unnerving performance pieces by night and direct propaganda films for his wartime government by day? Such a question may seem preposterous, given the Dada's foundational anti- war character and its subversive agitation against the conflict. Yet three of the movement’s most productive members, the photomonteur John Heartfield, his brother Wieland Herzfelde, and painter George Grosz, were in fact all engaged with precisely this form of moonlighting through the “Club Dada’s” first year, 1918. This article explores the films that these men created and the likely subversive potential of their contents.

In 1890, the famous Jena Glass Works of Carl Zeiss released the Anastigmat photographic lens to great fanfare. The nearly faultless realism it generated seemed to conclude a chapter in optical technology that had progressed in a predetermined manner since photography’s origins. But why exactly had Zeiss developed its expensive mechanism, and what drove photographers to buy it? This article proposes that the consistent focus and varied depth of field that the Anastigmat provided were not in and of themselves the desired goals of the new corrected lens, but that they were instead visible signals of a pictorial model that makers and consumers had been circling since the public introduction of photography in 1839. The goal was a strict verisimilitude that remained stubbornly external to the medium, an illusionistic standard that had largely been mediated by painting and was now apparently possible in photography as well. But this history of pictorial perfection and the Anagstimat was not inevitable. Other lenses developed around the same time answered to dramatically different technological and aesthetic imperatives. They tell an alternative story of photography’s identity that is less tethered to mimetic fidelity and the idealized human vision with which photography was increasingly associated.

German Quarterly Forum: Visual Studies-The Art Historians' View.
Edited by Maria Makela; with contributions by Marsha Morton, Erin Maynes, Barbara McCloskey, Freyja Hartzell, Camilla Smith, Nina Lübbren, Andrés Mario Zervigón, Daniel H. Magilow, Christian Weikop, and Deborah Ascher Barnstone

Using the case of a contest published in a 1927 issue of the radical-left Arbeiter-Ilustrierte Zeitung (A-I-Z), this article inquires in the relationship with photography that the magazine cultivated for its readers. On this occasion, a prize was to be awarded for recognizing photos published in further issues and arranging these images into a compelling narrative. The contest ultimately encouraged readers to recognize the degree to which a photograph’s meaning could be authored to both reactionary and radical political ends, and correspondingly to perceive the urgent need to take control of pictorial authorship.

Some time around the year 1930, the increasingly famous Dutch artist César Domela-Nieuwenhuis set to work designing a brochure (prospekt in German) for the port of Hamburg.1 The photomontage Hamburg, Germany’s Gateway to the World (Hamburg, Deutschlands Tor zur Welt; fig. 1), now in the Thomas Walther Collection at The Museum of Modern Art, reportedly graced the cover of what was essentially intended to be promotional literature for the large north German city. This fact would already make Domela’s work noteworthy, given that it neatly rep- resents the move of many fine artists from the isolation of their bohemian garrets to the popular realm of advertising, where they could disseminate the fruit of their avant- garde experimentation to vast audiences. But even more striking is the montage’s size and quality, characteristics suggesting that Domela intended this enlarged version
to be placed in an exhibition venue, where the piercing eyes of critics, as well as everyday gallery-goers, could inspect the work carefully. Hamburg is, in other words, most likely
a showpiece produced by one of the era’s leading advocates of photomontage in the realization of a high-end commis- sion. As such, the object demands careful attention.

The traveling exhibition Film und Foto, inaugurated in 1929 by the famous German Werkbund association, stands as a critical landmark in the exhibition of modernist photography and film. The FiFo, as it was called even then, was a didactic but spectacular affair whose structuring logic of the printed page placed a profusion of pictures directly before the visitor in pedagogical pairings or groupings, most of which sought to redefine the medium’s aesthetic merit. In this important precedent for the modern exhibition of prints, the photograph’s didactic or revelatory use was being distilled into an aesthetic value often unrelated to the image’s original function. At the same exhibition, however, photomontage artist John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld in 1891) defined an alternative space where visitors no longer stood before a photo essay in three dimensions but something resembling the urban street outside, where images and objects aggressively competed for attention. He oriented his arrangement not toward the passive visitor who lingered over pictures to gather the aesthetic or use-value they dispensed, but the peripatetic viewer who took a quick gaze as she or he scurried past in the daily shuffle. This article argues that Heartfield’s room at the FiFo offered a vision of what the exhibition of modern photography could have been, both in the show’s other rooms and in display venues to come.

The article inquires into the marked absence of aesthetic innovation in postwar German photography during the five years that followed the Second World War’s conclusion. Looking specifically at the genre known as Trümmerfotografie (rubble photography), it asks why this corpus of images was so conventional both in content and style, despite its shocking subject matter? The article suggests that after the horrors of fascism and war, psychological denial, a guilty conscious, and deep melancholy overtook German image making. As a consequence, the country’s increasingly thriving industry of illustrated periodicals and photobooks pursued tepid pictorial approaches that effectively sought to assuage and reconstruct the traumatized capacity of visual perception. [Etudes Photographiques, No. 29, May 2012, 82-123]

Ungefähr zur selben Zeit, in der auf Initiative Willi Münzenbergs und der Internationalen Arbeiterhilfe begonnen wurde, proletarische Fotoamateure in der „Vereinigung der Arbeiter-Fotografen Deutschlands“ zusammenzufassen, startete die KPD ein Ausbildungsprogramm für nicht als Künstler ausgebildete Parteiaktivisten auf dem Gebiet der visuellen Propaganda. Die Agitprop-Abteilung des Zentralkomitees folgte damit dem sowjetischen Modell der Arbeiterkorrespondenten und bildete eine riesige Gruppe von Menschen aus, die in der Lage waren, Plakate, Transparente, Schaufenster und komplizierte Installationen rasch zu produzieren. Das Ergebnis war um 1930 ein enormer Anstieg von amateurischer Bildproduktion für nahezu jede KPD-Veranstaltung. Der Beitrag skizziert die Entwicklung dieser neuen „proletarischen Kunst“ und erörtert, wie diese letztlich vollkommen mit den Anstrengungen der Professionellen in der Assoziation Revolutionärer Bildender Künstler Deutschland (ASSO) übereinstimmte. Diskutiert werden auch die bemerkenswerten Fotografien dieser Arbeiten, die von den Künstlern selbst oder von Arbeiterfotografen für die kommunistische Presse aufgenommen wurden – aber auch von schockierten Bildberichterstattern der illustrierten bürgerlichen Magazine.

Review of the following:
Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Era Barbican Art Gallery, London, England September 25, 2014–January 11, 2015
&
Constructing Worlds: Photography and Architecture in the Modern Era
By Alona Pardo and Elias Redstone Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2014
280 pages, 84 color illustrations, 81 black-and-white illustrations
ISBN: 978-3-7913-8115-2
Hardcover, $55.00

Review of Madrid venue

Review of three book on the photobook:

Horacio Fernández
The Latin American Photobook
Exh. cat. New York: Aperture Foundation, 2011. 256 pp.; 250 color ills. Cloth $75.00 (9781597111898)

The Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond
London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. 288 pp.; 45 b/w ills. Paper $31.00 (9781848856165)

Ryuichi Kaneko and Ivan Vartanian
Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s
New York: Aperture Foundation, 2009. 240 pp.; 400 ills. Cloth $75.00 (9781597110945)

Print Matters: Histories of Photography in Illustrated Magazines
April 8-9, 2016
New York Public Library
Convened by:
The Developing Room at the Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University; the Photography Collection, New York Public Library; and the Department of Art and Art History, Hunter College, CUNY
Maria Antonella Pelizzari (Hunter College, CUNY)
Andrés Mario Zervigón (Rutgers University)

Between 1910 and 1970, the vast majority of photographs printed and consumed around the world appeared on the pages of illustrated magazines. These pictures rarely surfaced as autonomous entities, set off from their paginated context as the sort of discrete objects that generally figure in our standard histories of photography. Instead they were presented in carefully edited sequences, set cheek-by-jowl against other photographic series, and placed into the integrated company of text and graphic work. Unlike the single prints from which it was heavily drawn, the illustrated magazine was a broadly expansive and alluring amalgam that regularly arrived on private doorsteps and local kiosks before spilling into the everyday lives of consumers of goods and politics. As the Internet does today, the illustrated magazine significantly defined a global visual knowledge of the world.
Despite such potent omnipresence, however, we have yet to devise a method for studying this plenitude of mass-printed matter that foregrounded the photograph so powerfully. At our workshop Print Matters, we are encouraging participants to address this lacuna by exploring a fundamental question: how do we isolate and define the illustrated periodical as an object of research? In approaching this question, we have encouraged studies that explore the magazine as a physical object and, in turn, a complex cultural artefact firmly embedded in any one location and time.
Our analytic point of departure is that illustrated magazines took shape as a rich ecosystem of multi-media representation, and provided an important transactional frame where artists, authors, advertisers and readers coalesced into communities not just through printed text, graphic work and image, but also, and most especially, through photography. This two-day discussion revisits paradigmatic cases of magazine histories in Europe and the United States. It also covers illustrated periodicals from areas of the world where the format thrived but has, until now, received limited scholarly attention, including Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia and Latin America.