Ordinary Weimar: Global Press Photography, ‘Distant Seeing’ and the Normalcy of Crisis in the 1920s

Abstract

Press photography was an important medium of public communication in Germany in the 1920s. Scholarship on the topic has had two distinct foci. First, research on the ‘golden age’ of visual news has mainly concentrated on the visual coverage and political implications of singular events or certain topics. Secondly, the history of photography tends to concentrate on the period’s most prominent photographers, highlighting exceptional and high-quality examples of the genre. This article argues for a change of perspective, emphasizing press photography as an industry that disseminated thousands of pictures to a wide public. Focusing on its production side and a form of ‘distant seeing’ gives a better understanding of the transnational iconography of the present as it was manufactured within this professional field. Examining portfolios distributed by important actors, such as Georg Pahl’s Berlin-based photo agency, helps chart the visual media landscape through which people became acquainted with local events and national and international politics. This iconography contributed to an image of ‘Weimar’ as a society which appeared much more ‘normal’ and more comparable to the developments in other countries than ex post interpretations of Weimar as a society in crisis suggest. Global press photography fostered homogenization of the ‘mattering maps’ of a transnational public. This concentration on the global embedding of press photography and its products balances interpretations which use photographic sources to stress either the glamorous or the dramatic aspects of life in the 1920s. The transnational collation of visual news created an image of Weimar as only one among several societies challenged by modern crisis.