A Hard, Merciless Light

A product of the Third Communist International (the first one to follow the Soviet Revolution), the movement finds its origin in the competition organised in 1926 by the magazine AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, or Workers' Pictorial Newspaper), in the context of the Weimar Republic. Simultaneously, in the Soviet Union, the magazine Sovetskoe Foto came to life, with the mission of leading and co-ordinating Soviet photographic culture in an effort to help build the new Socialist state. From these beginnings, worker photography would expand to the point of becoming paradigmatic for leftist movements in central and northern Europe and the United States; these ramifications would impregnate the experiences of the Popular Front in Spain and France, two case studies that underline the transnational nature of the movement. Around 1939, with the end of the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of World War II, a new world order would begin, leading to the decline of a movement that had produced such names as Sergei Tretyakov, David Seymour, Robert Capa, Paul Strand, Tina Modotti, Walter Ballhause or Max Alpert, among many others.

If the various workers' revolutions proposed new visions of the world and radical methods for re-educating our way of seeing, worker photography was born of this same social consciousness, which led to the appropriation of the photographic medium and, therefore, of the image itself. This exhibition paints a fresco of the moment in which self-representation by the working class became a form of social emancipation, offering a look across to, not down at, the working class during the central years of the first half of the 20th century. The items displayed and the corresponding catalogue create a whole that explains a fundamental chapter in the historiography of photography. In parallel, the film series Proletarian Documentary analyses the emergence of the audiovisual document which, along with the photographic document, constitutes the beginning of modern visual culture.