László Moholy-Nagy predicted in 1927 that people who could not take photos were the “anal fabulas of the future”. This sentence by the famous Bauhaus master may sound arrogant, but historically it marked a change of epoch. Until the middle of the twenties, photography was in the carriage age of image production. Clumsy equipment with endless exposure times turned the photographer’s profession into a sweaty, patient work. However, with the presentation of the Leica 35mm camera as a series model in 1925 at the Leipzig Spring Fair, the chain reaction in photography started, which now leads to over 100 million photos being uploaded to Instagram every day. The “anal experts” became autodidacts, the photograph became the leading medium for advertising, propaganda and self-expression. The belief was born that a picture is worth a thousand words.
New order in the world: Fred Koch’s close-up photo of a dandelion, 1933.
(Photo: Städel Museum)
“Seeing Newly” is the title of the exhibition at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt from this era when photography replaced illustration in advertising and reportage. A new, sharp black and white aesthetic was created at a rapid pace, which mostly sought its artistic claim in objectivity. Apart from a few avant-garde experiments in artistic circles, which are much more famous today than when they were created, the eye between the wars tried less to copy the expressive nature of painting through the viewfinder than to create a new order in the world.
Typification and purification: August Sanders’ double portrait of the painter couple Martha and Otto Dix from 1925.
(Photo: Die Photographische Sammlung / Sk Stiftung Kultur – August Sander Archive, Cologne / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021)
The plant details arranged by Karl Blossfeldt showed nature in the style of technology, Albert Renger-Patzsch composed industrial landscapes graphically tidied up to tell of the superior plan of the economy, and August Sander concentrated on portraits of people who are exemplary of their profession and their status could apply. Typing, purifying, sorting and aligning perception with easily understandable systems shaped this generation of photo pioneers in a time when everything else went haywire. The photographic style of reduction and clarity has a downright therapeutic effect from those years when the downfall of Europe was being prepared in an industrially waged war.
Is that still art or is it already advertising? Hans Finsler: “Cup, Saucer and Plate”, 1931.
(Photo: Estate of Hans Finsler / Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main)
The selection of exemplary motifs that the curator Kristina Lemke obtained for this memory of photography from the twenties and thirties shows not only the invention of a mass aesthetic through a new medium in various fields, from portrait to company photography to sports and fashion photography. The show, which is extensively enriched with biographical and historical information, leads the visitor with its examples to a central thesis: In the field of photography there was no aesthetic break between the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.
As in all other forms of culture, livelihoods were destroyed and people murdered if they did not fit into the templates of fascist ideology. But in contrast to painting, sculpture or film, there was no aesthetic selection, no “degenerate photography” in photography. The stylistic devices of the new medium developed in democracy had proven so resounding in their overwhelming quality that they were most welcome in the new control state. Where Jewish or leftist photographers had created famous motifs, these were used under other names. And many well-known “avant-gardeists” in the art of photography such as Renger-Patzsch or Paul Wolff continued to work in their profession with great success in the harmonized Germany.
Goebbels’ perverse ingenuity recognized both factual and glamorous photography as being highly useful for propaganda. The manipulative success of photographic advertising only had to be turned a little further to make even the darkest targets appear desirable in the brilliant light of the spotlights. With this twist, the celebrated clarity of the new medium became the compromising method. Seeing new did not mean seeing true. And that also applies to the cell phone photographers from László Moholy-Nagy’s future with 20,000 photos in memory. Wherever they say no more than a word, humans remain illiterate of the visual.
See in a new way. Städel Museum, Frankfurt. Until October 24th. The catalog costs 49.90 euros.