Crisis and Classification: Photographic Portrait Typologies in Early 20th- Century Germany.

Photographic Portrait Typology;August Sander;Helmar Lerski;Eugen Fischer;Brecht;Photography and Weimar Culture;Germanic Languages and Literature;Humanities;Germanic Languages & Literatures

Steinbock, Kathryn AliceVon Moltke, Johannes ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Photographic Portrait Typology;    August Sander;    Helmar Lerski;    Eugen Fischer;    Brecht;    Photography and Weimar Culture;    Germanic Languages and Literature;    Humanities;    Germanic Languages & Literatures;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/86563/kabauss_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation investigates the heuristic aims and aesthetics of several different photographic portrait typologies (Eugen Fischer, August Sander, and as a counter example, Helmar Lerski) against discourses of decline prevalent in a variety of cultural contexts in early 20th century Germany, from the human and social sciences, to philosophy and the arts.I analyze relationships between crisis and classification by exploring how these widespread, scientifically informed representations order, narrate, and intervene in a modernity characterized by mass culture, the anonymous city crowd, and the perceived loss of individuality. In deconstructing the desire to visualize the masses and individuals as types, close readings of photographs and related texts by contemporaneous artists, authors, and philosophers work to reject typologies as pure expressions of the positivist ethos, and highlight instead their tenuous position between opposing epistemic poles - between empiricism and philosophical speculation, science and art.Chapter One establishes conceptual foundations for the ;;classification mania’ of the 1920’s and 1930’s (Helmut Lethen) by examining the history of typology and its real and quasi-scientific methods (Carl Hempel), and reads typology against critiques from ;;Lebensphilosophie’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Simmel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal), literary ;;decadence,’ and from Naturalism.Chapter Two examines an early 20th century bio-anthropological text as a symbolic system geared towards overcoming the sameness of modernity and cementing an authentic, genetically uncompromised collective Self.I explore how the medical doctor and later Nazi eugenicist Eugen Fischer exploits a particular Bildaesthetik, rhetoric, and scopic regime to create a biological cosmos in which a German nation in crisis could imagine itself, via a foreign Other. Chapter Three investigates theories of physiognomy (Lavatar, Goethe) and melodrama (Peter Brooks) to assert the cultural resonance of August Sander’s photographic archive ;;People of the 20th Century” when read as a ;;super-drama’ of Spenglerian decline, rather than as a merely objective inventory of social types of the Weimar era. In the final chapter, I explore photographer Helmar Lerski’s critical position on contemporary photographic representations of ;;the masses,’ and show how perspectives from Brecht’s Mann ist Mann (1926) exacerbate the aesthetic and semantic tensions of Lerski’s expressionist Menschenbild, ;;Verwandlung durch Licht” (1936).