PROJECT OUTLINE:

In its second funding phase the project aims to focus on the particular significance and function of photographic images with regard to processes of cultural change. We are proceeding from the assumption that images do not merely express and bear witness to such processes but that they partake in their generation and significantly influence their course. The project will thus examine the twentieth century formulation and formation of human representations from this dual perspective. For the purposes of this project, the relatively new medium of photography offers a particularly fruitful plane for exploring the link between image production and cultural change. Photography and its multilayered coding of representational modes intrinsically combines the contrary aspects of exact reproduction and creative reinterpretation, documentation and the staging of reality. The two sub-projects are conceived in a way so as to analyze processes of cultural change from two opposing perspectives: sub-project 1 focuses on the symbolic incorporation of colonial power through the lens of postcolonial discourse, while sub-project 2 examines the photography of National Socialist propaganda. Both projects analyze strategies of recording, formulation, and incorporation from the viewpoint of totalitarianism and that of resistance against the ruling principles. The establishment of a scientific discursivity as developed over the course of the eighteenth century constitutes the common ground for the chosen strategies. The desire to catalogue and categorize nature in all its manifestations in order to transfer them into an interdependent classificatory system gave rise to the pivotal concepts of race and the encyclopaedia and, most importantly, to extensive inventories of images that aimed at their comprehensive recording, comparison, and, last but not least, evaluative classification.


Sub-project 1 (Klaus Krüger, Leena Crasemann)
Recording and incorporation: Postcolonial visual critique in contemporary art photography

The sub-project focuses on contemporary art photography critiquing the visual forms of human representation and production in colonial photography. The postcolonial critique of the colonial photograph traces the medium's historical origins and intended applications. Nineteenth century ethnographers, doctors, and travellers invariably preferred photography over other visual media, confirming their belief in the possibility of an unbiased, authentic record and documentation of the visible world. It was subsequently pressed into service as ethnographic observation, anthropological documentation, and colonial reporting to reinforce their own ways of seeing. The photographic works of such artists as Iké Udé, Lorna Simpson, or Carrie Mae Weems analyzed by the sub-project follow a contemporary perspective to question the representation of people in colonial discourses. They address immanent power structures, essentialist concepts of identity, and historical and contemporary perceptions of the ostensible 'Other' and its derivative constructions. By referring to colonial forms of representation - the ethnographic inventory or anthropological measurements - and to contemporary advertising strategies in their photographs, the artists bring into focus and challenge the specific historical context and the viewer's multilayered modes of perception and participation. The sub-project aims to analyze the complex interplay of the historical, aesthetic, and media-specific discourses that led to the establishment of an image repertoire shaped by colonial power structures and has since been taken up and reinterpreted by contemporary art photography in a similarly multilayered manner.


Sub-project 2 (Matthias Weiß)
Recording and formulation: Strategies of normative photography at the time of National Socialism

The second sub-project covers German propagandistic photography that aimed at the 'total' re-formation of man as part of a comprehensive cultural, social, and political apparatus. By examining the image production of an historical era as clearly defined as the so-called 'Third Reich', the sub-project aims to show how photography was used not only to anticipate a future image of man resulting in a new social order but to systematically induce it with the help of concrete 'behavioural guidelines'. The body of works to be analyzed ranges from professional photographs, especially by Erich Retzlaff and Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, whose works did not merely conform to National Socialist ethnography but also displayed a certain artistic aspiration, to the works of amateurs published in such widely-circulated magazines as Volk und Rasse. Yet, the majority of these images hardly seem ideologically motivated when viewed individually. Rather, they convey the impression of a portrait or study of traditional costumes. Therein lies the scientific challenge of their analysis. The propagandistic potential of these images manifests itself only through supplementary framings, written comments, or the sequencing and interaction with a number of other images. The sub-project will investigate in how far these images generate a multiply paradoxical gaze: On the one hand, the representation of human beings staged through the medium of photography takes on mythical and utopian dimensions to the extent that it claims an eternal validity which necessarily excludes the viewers themselves. On the other hand, the staging of this 'new man' manifests criteria of distinction and belonging in the present that aim at stimulating a desire for identification in the viewers. This aspect of the photographic representation of people - the desire for identity by the producer and the recipient - will be addressed as a performative process of participation. It will be of key importance to investigate to what extent mental and emotional dispositions were transmitted through these photographs, which were intended to create a collective future by recourse to ostensibly anthropological constants and national traditions.

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