A presentation by Donna West Brett on art, politics and modernist aesthetics
Cover of Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold. Foto-Auge: 76 Fotos der Zeit (Photo-eye: 76 photos of the time). Stuttgart: F. Wedekind, 1929.
Conveying meaning often through photographs alone, the photobook is a radical format that enabled the widespread dissemination of modernist aesthetics through bespoke or commercial printers and publishers. The burgeoning of photographic books in the 1920-1930s coincided with the centrality of photographs to the illustrated press, to magazines and journalism, led by publishing houses such as Kurt Wolff. Like the illustrated press, photobooks provided unprecedented means for photographers to disseminate their work beyond the studio or exhibitionary models. Simultaneously the same benefits were recognised as a means to reach the wider public for the dissemination of social, cultural or political material.
From Germanie Krull’s Métal and Franz Roh’s Foto-Auge to Heinrich Hoffmann’s Jugend um Hitler and El Lissitzky’s Industrii͡a sot͡sializma, this paper considers modernist photobook aesthetics and its intersection with the visual languages of politics and propaganda in Europe between the wars.
This research was undertaken as a 2024 Sloan Fellow in Photography at the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts, and presented by the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.
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Donna West Brett
Donna West Brett is Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at The University of Sydney. She is author of Photography and Place: Seeing and Not Seeing Germany After 1945 (Routledge, 2016); co-editor with Natalya Lusty, Photography and Ontology: Unsettling Images (Routledge, 2019), and with Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Modernist Aesthetics in Transition: Visual Culture of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is Research Leader for Photographic Cultures at Sydney, Editorial Member for the Visual Culture and German Contexts Series, Bloomsbury, and Sloan Fellow in Photography at the Bodleian Libraries, 2024.