The German Eye
What makes a photograph
recognizably German? You'd think that photography, the most transparent of
arts, would defy those pesky national stereotypes. It would stand to reason
that a German eye and an Egyptian eye and an American eye and a Micronesian eye
would all be equally naked behind the lens. For the longest time, photography
didn't have enough of a history to promote any fixed notions of what a picture
should be or should show. But as you flip through the present volume, the
aggregate mass of images does look "German"--at least according to some
received notion of what that is. There's a precision, a prevailing cleanliness,
a crispness of focus, a strong use of light and shadow. The pictures tend not
to be pale, fluffy, indecisive or, for that matter, funky, gonzo, over the
top.
But then,
when you go back and look systematically, it seems that the most "German" of
these images derive from one period, the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and very
early '30s, and that most of them were made by left-wing modernists, many of
whom fled the country when Hitler came to power and not a few of whom were
Jewish. Take the stark cover image, for example, of crewmen repairing the Graf
Zeppelin in-flight over the Atlantic in 1934. The men are silhouetted in a
vertical stack as they pull guy lines across the dirigible's silvery skin. The
image is forceful and brooding, celebrates heroic labor, elides the
personalities of its subjects--and it was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt, who was
soon to remove himself and his talent to the safety of New York City and
Life magazine.
German photography took its time getting started. As one of
the essayists notes, Germany for various reasons failed to produce its Nadar or
its Matthew Brady. Few of the images herein predate the turn of the century by
much. Crystalline architectural views of the sort that Nègre was making in
France in the 1850s apparently did not get made in Germany for another 30
years. The most striking of the early works in the book are overwhelmingly
imitative of the style of the American pictorialists. The only things that look
distinctive at first are Baron von Gloeden's and Wilhelm Plüschow's pedophilic
tableaux of Greek and Italian youths decked out in laurel wreaths.
So German photography really
does seem to have begun where one might have thought it did, with the great
catalogers. Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) remains unrivaled for his close-up
depictions of the architectural forms of plant life. August Sander (1876-1964)
embarked on a study of human types that was so evenhanded, unprejudiced, and
unflinching that the Nazis burned his books. And Albert Renger-Patzsch
(1897-1966), drunk on the beauty of the visual world, recorded one thing after
another--trees, houses, faces, machinery, and on and on, in foursquare
simplicity. His work is more influential today than ever; recent German
documentarians of a cataloging persuasion, such as Bernd and Hilla Becher and
Thomas Struth, are his lineal descendants.
Modernism
in photography was less a national than an international phenomenon, but the
German work was perhaps the most striking. Very loosely speaking, photographic
modernism in its grandest period consisted of finding and framing the most
dramatic designs to be found in the accidental accretion of the world. László
Moholy-Nagy essentially invented the diagonal, for instance, and Umbo (Otto
Umbehr) shares credit with his Russian colleague Aleksandr Rodchenko for
discovering the graphic power of the shadow as seen from a perpendicular
perspective. A lot of people all over the world stumbled pretty much
simultaneously upon the smokestack, the double exposure, the multiple shadow,
the wall of humans, etc.--although Martin Munkàcsi deserves special mention for
his work on the last, and this book doesn't even reproduce my favorite picture
by him, a large scattering of schoolchildren lying on the grass, seen from
above and looking like so many clothespins.
Of course, the wall of humans was quickly
adapted by the modernists' natural enemies, the National Socialists. In place
of Munkàcsi's wonderfully motley and individuated agglomerations, party
photographer Max Ehlert devised solid blocks of anonymous party-rally heads, or
a whole sheet of stiff-arm saluters blurred into human coleslaw. Nazi
photography was correspondence-school modernism, only scarier. The strangest
thing about it is how unseductive any of it seems as propaganda--Hugo Erfurth's
portrait of Capt. Hauffe is the quintessential depiction of the Nazi as
Frankenstein, with the bolts sticking out of his helmet--but then what isn't
mystifying about that regime's allure?
After the war things
happened in dribs and drabs. This collection does contain some staggering
portrait studies from the late 1940s by Karl Heinz Mai of women who seem to
have been emptied of everything but their outlines--some of them were in fact
taken as ID-card photos. But otherwise there is some pleasant geometry, some
mostly unremarkable portraits, some jazzy fashion shots that culminate in
Helmut Newton's high-gloss simulated sadism. Most of the work from the 1950s
and '60s has the slightly desperate air of much continental art from that time,
unsure whether to please or to shock, failing to remember how to do either one,
and seeming to evaporate as one looks at it.
The book ends abruptly just
as things are picking up: with the Bechers' zoological catalogs of workaday
buildings, and some lively conceptual sequences by Johannes Brus and Sigmar
Polke. Thus, the second interesting period in German photography--the last 25
years--is almost completely omitted. Such is the hazard of arbitrary date
limits. But were it not for the 1920s, and for the historical value of the Nazi
and East German documents, this collection might rival Ruritarian
Photographs of a Century , with its obligatory nods to every passing wrinkle
of fashion devised elsewhere, its dull portraits of statesmen unknown outside
the fatherland, its honorable but unexceptional petits maîtres . This,
from a nation which invented the Leica, comes as something of a surprise. But
since so many of Germany's great photographers died in exile--Munkàcsi,
Eisenstaedt, Moholy-Nagy, Lotte Jacobi, Herbert Bayer, Tim Gidal, Felix H.
Man--not to mention in Auschwitz (the pioneering photojournalist Erich Salomon,
for one), we know whom to blame.
