The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany by Patrizia McBride

Author:Patrizia McBride
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

When it appeared in 1928, Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Die Welt ist schön was immediately hailed as a paradigmatic achievement for the aesthetics of the New Objectivity and a compelling example of new trends in photography. Comprised of one hundred uncaptioned black-and-white images of the natural and industrial worlds, including flowers, animals, landscapes, cultural monuments, commodities, and industrial sites, the photobook at once celebrates photography’s revelatory power and the awe-inspiring forms of everyday objects. The images’ mode of presentation is designed to harness the evidentiary force of straight photography in ways that seem antithetical to contemporary, experimental uses of the medium, first and foremost photomontage. Each photograph takes up the recto of a double-page spread and Page 122 →faces a blank verso, demanding in its isolation an immersive mode of reception that plunges the viewer right into the object. Yet the images’ unconventional perspectives and radical use of cropping, their conspicuous decontextualization of the depicted objects and emphasis on abstract formal patterns clearly inscribe them in the horizon of what has become known as New Vision photography. Their unadorned directness is further testament to its agenda of developing a visual idiom specific to the photographic medium over and against the conventions of art photography, which sought to endow mechanical images with the aura of art by emulating the visual styles of painting. Renger-Patzsch openly endorsed this objective, pointedly rejecting any attempt at assimilating photography to art and rather insisting on the photographer’s duty to exploit the camera’s mechanical exactitude, what he called its objectivity, in providing a record of the phenomenal world.

Objectivity, however, meant more to Renger-Patzsch than the banning of a photographer’s subjective effusions. For him photography’s ability to capture the visible surface of things entailed a fidelity to the object that allowed for disclosing its essence beyond the moment’s contingency.19 This ability grounded for him in the distinctive mimetic power of photography, which allowed for reproducing the essential physiognomy of things by purging them of the transient and the redundant. As Thomas Janzen has noted, Renger-Patzsch often achieved this effect through an innovative use of cropping, which he deployed to magnify an object’s details in order to at once convey a plastic sense of its materiality and foreground its abstract formal patterns. This emphasis on the paradigmatic aspects of the visible world and disavowal of transience accounts for the peculiarly static quality of Renger-Patzsch’s photographs, which endow things with hieratic presence by downplaying or altogether erasing temporal markers, be they clues to an object’s environment or movement and shadows that would indicate a specific moment in time.20

Renger-Patzsch’s aesthetics thus postulated that essence and transience are both inscribed on the visible surface of things, ready to be told apart by the camera’s objective eye. This objectivity was rooted for him in photography’s distinctive mimicry, understood as the ability to produce copies that enable humans to reach through to things’ essential being. Its implicit disavowal of transience accounts for the peculiar mood that suffuses the photographs collected in Die Welt ist schön, which often recall still-life painting in their blend of lush physicality and embalmed fixity.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.