Schools for Seeing: German Photobooks between 1924 and 1937 as Perception Primers and Sites of Knowledge.

Abstract

My dissertation investigates the phenomenon of the photobook in interwar Germany and reconstructs the

reasons for its popularity through reference to illustrated newspapers, exhibitions, and bookmaking

experiments. Examining a series of photobooks and writings on photography from 1924 to 1937, I argue that

the photobook appears against a historical horizon where political warnings of the manipulability of

photography proliferate. The photobook arises as a training device that slows down perception, imposes a

critical distance, and develops new forms of visual engagement.

In the dissertation’s opening chapter, I propose that the photobook in the 1920s contains a theory of

photography and a training manual to learn to read photography. The chapter focuses on the elements of the

photobook, and on notions of reading it, using Kracauer’s essay “Die Photographie” (1927) as an

interpretative horizon. The analysis of Aenne Biermann’s 60 Fotos (1930) allows me to argue for the

alphabetization for photography through the photobook. Chapter two contextualizes the concept of

alphabetization in children’s books, perception primers, and the form of the atlas. This chapter brings

Benjamin’s notion of reading to bear upon interpretations of Blossfeldt’s photobook Urformen der Kunst (1928)

and a photographically illustrated picture book from around the same time (1930). The space between the

images is explored as crucial part also in Warburg’s Mnemosyne-Atlas (1924-1929). Closely examining the

concept of the atlas in terms of notions of objectivity, knowledge production, and a visual training, this

chapter traces the question of standpoint and orientation of the beholder towards photography. Chapter three

further explores this question and examines notions of landscape photography in relation to abstraction in a

photobook entitled Das Watt (German for “mudflats”) from 1937. The photobook in this chapter is viewed

in its capacity to disrupt contemporary political, cultural, and aesthetic discourse at the time of publication.

Das Watt brings together landscape and abstraction, and critically re-examines, re-negotiates and potentially

destabilizes key concepts in Nazi propaganda at the time (Boden, Landschaft and Kunst).

My project argues that the photobook—with its page layouts, spaces in between the individual

photographs, and photographic sequences—demands an active reading process that in turn has an effect on

the beholder. Thus a mobilization is achieved in the act of perception.