Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished images, Photography and Germany is the first single-authored history of German photography, and deepens our understanding of how photography cultivates notions of a nation and its inhabitants.
Photography and Germany examines photography’s multi-faceted relationship with Germany’s turbulent cultural, political, and social history. It shows how many of the same phenomena that helped generate the country’s most recognisable photographs also led to a range of lesser-known pictures that similarly documented or negotiated Germany’s cultural identity and historical ruptures.
The book rethinks the photography we commonly associate with the country by focusing on how the medium heavily defined the notion of ‘German’. As a product of the modern age, photography intervened in a fraught project of national imagining, largely productively but sometimes catastrophically. Photography and Germany covers this history chronologically, from early experiments in light-sensitive chemicals, to the tension between analogue and digital technologies that have stimulated the famous contemporary art photography associated with the country.
Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished images, Photography and Germany is a cogent, insightful history of photography’s relationship with Germany’s sometimes difficult past.
