Photography and Germany

(Paperback)

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Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished images, Photography and Germany is the first single-authored history of German photography, and deepens our understanding of how photography cultivates notions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Richly illustrated with many previously unpublished images, Photography and Germany is a cogent, insightful history of photography's relationship with Germany's sometimes difficult past.

Reviews

'Delicately navigating the complex history of Germany, a nation state invented in the same century as photography, Andres Mario Zervigon shows how photographic images have both buttressed and fissured that state ever since. Addressing vernacular and artistic photographs with equal aplomb, Zervigon offers a welcome overview of German photography that will be essential reading for anyone interested in this topic.' - Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of Art History, Victoria University of Wellington, and author of Burning with Desire: Conception of Photography

Author Bio

Andres Mario Zervigon is Associate Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His previous books include John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-garde Photomontage (2012) and Photography and Its Origins (co-edited with Tanya Sheehan, 2014).