The Worker-Photography Movement Towards a political history of the origins of photographic modernism Date: January 21, 22 and 23, 2010 In March of 1926 the magazine AIZ published a call to the potential amateur photographers among its mobilized working-class readership. The call took the form of a photo competition that would bring together photographic representations of everyday proletarian life, of the material conditions affecting industrial labor and of the political organizations and activities of the workers. Every worker was considered a potential photo-correspondent in the new context of visual culture and communication, highly determined by the centrality of the illustrated press. Image wars increasingly appeared to be a structural part of larger political struggles. The call for photographies was the beginning of a whole photographic movement that would spread through Central and Northern Europe and would eventually arrive in the United States, even if its core remained in Germany and the USSR, or more precisely, in the photo-political exchanges that took place between the main Communist organizations of these two countries, until the end of the first Five-Year Plan and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. If the USSR represented the center of the political avant-garde, Germany was the center of the new visual culture’s industries and technologies. The worker-photography movement started with this Soviet-German dialogue but its branches extended far beyond, albeit not in homogeneous ways, and even sometimes in contradictory ways, depending on the local singularities of the social movements. Starting in the late 1920s, different circles of documentary or social photography linked to Communist movements developed in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Holland, Great Britain, France, the United States, Mexico and beyond. Broad and sophisticated documentary groups and practices developed in cities such as Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Zurich or Amsterdam, and promoted social photography and worker-photography exhibitions and publications between 1932 and 1936. Many of the photographers participating in the movement were forced to migrate repeatedly or go into political exile as a result of the expansion of Fascist regimes in Central Europe, most radically after 1933. Significantly, the magazine AIZ itself moved to Prague in 1933 and later to Paris, where it worked until it stopped production in 1938. The kind of photography promoted by the worker photographers and their publishers stood in relative opposition to photomontage and to abstraction and can be connected to the Soviet factographic discourse and practice as well as to the broader film and photography documentary movements and debates that emerged internationally around 1930 in order to visualize the economic crisis and its social effects, particularly among the underclasses. Double-page reportages by amateur worker-photographers were occasionally published in AIZ. The worker-photographers provided non-idealized depictions of the conditions of proletarian everyday life, the work in factories and in the countryside, their domestic life. All without romanticism, without sentimentality, without beauty: poverty, hunger and despair were structural conditions of proletarian life that needed to be visualized. The German critic Edwin Hoernle defined the “proletarian eye” as antagonistic towards bourgeois humanism, in which compassion was a symptom of class superiority. Hoernle wrote: “we must proclaim proletarian reality in all its disgusting ugliness, with its indictment of society and its demand for revenge. We will have no veils, no retouching, no aestheticism; we must present things as they are, in a hard, merciless light”.(1) By the mid-1930s the political strategy of the international Communist movement changed and it began to accept broad new alliances of left-wing or progressive parties in order to counterbalance the advance of Fascism in Europe. This change led to the Popular Front government experiences in France and Spain after 1935. But only for a short time, as the Spanish Civil War, which started in July of 1936, represented the final stage of the movement, its defeat, both politically, esthetically and biographically. At that time we find in Spain a confluence of many photographers from France, Germany, Central Europe and even the USSR who had participated in the worker-photography experiences in their different formations. They include Walter Reuter, Tina Modotti, Robert Capa, Joris Ivens and even Mikhail Koltsov, journalist and media innovator since the mid-1920s, who participated in the birth of Sovetskoe Foto, just to mention a few of the best known. Today, the worker-photography movement remains a difficult, still-pending chapter in the history of photography, a missing link in the evolution of photographic modernism. This conference is part of the research process undertaken for the exhibition A Hard, Merciless Light. The Worker-Photography Movement, 1926-1938 (Museo Reina Sofía, 2011) which intends to make up for that deficiency and provide elements for a history of the movement, for the first time in a major modern art museum. Program The conference will consist of three intensive days. The program includes six parts, or case studies, which combine the different geographic contexts of the movement with more general issues that are common to all the contexts. The tension between the social movement and institutional politics, and between subjectivities and mass movements are some of the issues to be addressed in an effort to trace the movement’s continuities and discontinuities. Download Program Date:Thursday, January 21st Presentation, by Jorge Ribalta Soviet paradigms: Factography, Photo-correspondants and the birth of the ROPF Panel: Berlin-Moscow. Is Soviet photography a German invention? Date: Friday, January 22nd The German Worker-Photography Movement and the communist press in Germany. German debates on the document. Panel: The problem of amateurism: has there even been an amateur-proletarian worker-photography? Time: 16:30 to 20:30 h A trans-national proletarian public sphere. The worker-photography network in Central and Northern Europe. Panel: The discursive public spaces of worker-photography Date: Saturday, January 23rd
Documentary poetics and institutional politics in the era of the Popular Front in Southern Europe (France, Spain and Portugal) Panel: Spanish civil war and the networks of worker photography. Time: 16:30 to 21:00 h The Photo League in the context of the thirties documentary culture in the US Panel: The Photo-League and The Farm Security Administration Final debate
PARTICIPANTS Anne Tucker. Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography in Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Christian Joschke. Lecturer in history of photography at the Université Lumière-Lyon 2. His book Les yeux de la nation. Photographie amateur et société dans l’Allemagne de Guillaume II [The nation eyes. Amateur photography and society in Germany during William II] is forthcoming in Presses du Réel en 2010. Cristina Cuevas-Wolf. Public Programmes curator in Wende Museum and Archive of Cold War in Los Angeles. Has recently published Montage as Weapon: The Tactical Alliance between Willi Münzenberg and John Heartfield, in New German Critique. Devin Fore. Lecturer in modernism and media theory at Princeton University. Has written the articles The Operative Word in Soviet Factography, in October, The Entomic Age, in Grey Room, and Döblin’s Epic: Sense, Document and the Verbal World Picture, in New German Critique. Duncan Forbes. Chief photography curator in Scotland National Galleries in Edinburgh and lecturer in history of art at Aberdeen University between 1996 and 2000. Emilia Tavares. Photograhy historian and curator in Museo do Chiado, Lisbon. Erika Wolf. Lecturer in history of art in University of Otago. Has published Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) and the article The Author as Photographer: Soviet Writers and the Camera, in Aperture. Flip Bool. Chief curator and researcher in Nederlands Fotomuseum and lecturer in photography in AK|St. Joost, Avans University for Applied Sciences in Breda. Has publishedFotografie in Nederland 1920-1940 (Staatsuitgeverij,1979), De arbeidersfotografen: Camera en crisis in de jaren '30 (Van Gennep, 1982) and A Critical History of Photography in The Netherlands: Dutch Eyes (Hatje Cantz, 2007). John Raeburn. Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Iowa. Author of A Staggering Revolution. A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (University of Illinois Press, 2006). Jordana Mendelson. Visual culture lecturer in New York University. She has published Documenting Spain: artists, exhibition culture, and the modern nation, 1929-1939 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), co-author of Photography public spaces: exposiciones de propaganda, de ‘Pressa’ a ‘The Family of Man’, 1928-’55 (edited by Jorge Ribalta), editor of Revistas, modernidad y guerra (Museo Reina Sofía, 2008) and curator of Revistas y guerra, 1936-39 (Museo Reina Sofía, 2007). Jorge Ribalta. Photography historian, independent curator and editor. He has co-editted with Gloria Picazo Indiferencia y singularidad: la fotografía en el pensamiento artístico contemporáneo(Gustavo Gili, 2003); Efecto real: debates posmodernos sobre fotografía (Gustavo Gili, 2004) and the recent Public Photographic Spaces: propaganda exhibitions from Pressa to The Family of Man, 1928-1955 (Macba, 2009). He is currently curating Una luz dura, sin compasión. El movimiento de la fotografía obrera, 1926-1938 (Museo Reina Sofía, 2011). Maria Gough. Modern art lecturer in Stanford University. She has published the bookT he artist as producer. Russian constructivism in revolution (University of California Press, 2005). Matthew Witkovsky. Director of the department of photography at Chicago Art Institute. He is the author of Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945 (Thames and Hudson, 2007). Naomi Rosenblum. Lecturer in history of photography in New York University. Author of A World History Photography(Abbeville Press, 1997) and A History of Women Photographers (Abbeville Press, 1996). Olivier Lugon. History of photography professor in University of Lausanne. He has written Le Style documentaire. D'August Sander à Walker Evans, 1920-1945(Macula, 2001) and La Photographie en Allemagne. Anthologie de textes, 1919-1939 (Jacqueline Chambon, 1997). Simon Dell. History of art lecturer in University of East Anglia. Author of The image of the Popular Front: The Masses and the Media in Interwar France (Palgrave, 2007) and editor of On Location. Siting Robert Smithson and his Contemporaries (Black Dog Publishing, 2009). Wolfgang Hesse. Researcher in Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde [Institute of Saxon History and y Folklore], in which he develops the research The eye of the worker. Studies on ‘amateur’ photography in the example of Weimar Republic. He is the editor of the journal Rundbrief Fotografie. (1) Edwin Hoernle, “The Working Man’s Eye”, in David Mellor (ed.), Germany. The New Photography, 1927-1933, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1978, page 49. |
