Traveling in Russia and Central Asia in 1932–33, the German-Jewish portrait photographer Lotte Jacobi produced an extraordinary archive of several thousand photographs documenting Soviet industrialization, collectivization, modernization, and, most profoundly, the revolution's human face. Yet she never assembled a photo book or other reflection about her experience. Based on a study of the archive in its entirety, this essay tells the story of Jacobi's journey through the lens of her photographs, building a portrait of the worlds in which she moved under the auspices of the Soviet photo agency Soiuzfoto. It discusses her portrayal of a diverse array of workers, collective farmers, peasants, street traders, intellectuals, and political figures, first in Moscow and Michurinsk and then in the newly established socialist republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where she was hosted by leading indigenous communists such as Abdurahim Hojiboyev and Fayzulla Xo'jayev. The essay theorizes some of the key problems that her corpus raises: the relative weight of political commitment and external control in its production; whether it operates in a realist or mythic mode; the extent to which it presents Soviet Russia's role in Central Asia as that of a modernizing state or colonizing empire, as its tsarist predecessor had been; and the critical status of what she called “types” with respect to the nineteenth-century racist “type” photograph. A coda considers Jacobi's belated return to her Soviet corpus for the first time in the late 1950s and early '60s, a period characterized by a post-Stalinist thaw and the nominal end of the Red Scare in the United States, to which she had emigrated in 1935 in the wake of Hitler's appointment as chancellor and Germany's subsequent transformation into a one-party dictatorship.
{"title":"Portrait Under Construction: Lotte Jacobi in Soviet Russia and Central Asia∗","authors":"Maria Gough","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00404","url":null,"abstract":"Traveling in Russia and Central Asia in 1932–33, the German-Jewish portrait photographer Lotte Jacobi produced an extraordinary archive of several thousand photographs documenting Soviet industrialization, collectivization, modernization, and, most profoundly, the revolution's human face. Yet she never assembled a photo book or other reflection about her experience. Based on a study of the archive in its entirety, this essay tells the story of Jacobi's journey through the lens of her photographs, building a portrait of the worlds in which she moved under the auspices of the Soviet photo agency Soiuzfoto. It discusses her portrayal of a diverse array of workers, collective farmers, peasants, street traders, intellectuals, and political figures, first in Moscow and Michurinsk and then in the newly established socialist republics of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where she was hosted by leading indigenous communists such as Abdurahim Hojiboyev and Fayzulla Xo'jayev. The essay theorizes some of the key problems that her corpus raises: the relative weight of political commitment and external control in its production; whether it operates in a realist or mythic mode; the extent to which it presents Soviet Russia's role in Central Asia as that of a modernizing state or colonizing empire, as its tsarist predecessor had been; and the critical status of what she called “types” with respect to the nineteenth-century racist “type” photograph. A coda considers Jacobi's belated return to her Soviet corpus for the first time in the late 1950s and early '60s, a period characterized by a post-Stalinist thaw and the nominal end of the Red Scare in the United States, to which she had emigrated in 1935 in the wake of Hitler's appointment as chancellor and Germany's subsequent transformation into a one-party dictatorship.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"65-117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/OCTO_A_00404","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41575949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article considers the prospects of “facial politics” in the wake of CoVID-19. Recounted through the author's positionality as an Asian American feminist academic, the article describes her encounters in the university and the street, in the United States and China. Addressing gestures of face touching and the trope of the mask relative to its wearer, the essay draws on the work of Mel Y. Chen on the viral conjunction of race, animality, illness, and gender as inflected further by both historical and contemporary treatments of “Chineseness” and visibility. In so doing, the article reframes concepts of perfomativity and the face that are associated with Judith Butler, with the face becoming “the fallen site of discourse” under the conditions of a pandemic.
{"title":"Face Time, Pandemic Style∗","authors":"Pamela M. Lee","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00409","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00409","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the prospects of “facial politics” in the wake of CoVID-19. Recounted through the author's positionality as an Asian American feminist academic, the article describes her encounters in the university and the street, in the United States and China. Addressing gestures of face touching and the trope of the mask relative to its wearer, the essay draws on the work of Mel Y. Chen on the viral conjunction of race, animality, illness, and gender as inflected further by both historical and contemporary treatments of “Chineseness” and visibility. In so doing, the article reframes concepts of perfomativity and the face that are associated with Judith Butler, with the face becoming “the fallen site of discourse” under the conditions of a pandemic.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"230-241"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/OCTO_A_00409","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45296679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ilse Bing was one of those Weimar photographers whose work was recognized or rediscovered later than that of many of her more famous female peers. Her photographic project sprang largely from her persistent subversion of the stylistic oppositions of New Vision photography and New Objectivity. Just as complex was the work she produced after moving to Paris, defined as it was by her cross-cutting of Weimar socialist and French Surrealist photographic mentalities. Comparable in her precise socio-political analysis to the Frankfurt School's critiques of emerging mass-cultural and political formations, Bing's work in the United States, where, barred from publishing in magazines, she was able to pay witness to photography's functioning as a new ideological- and cultural-industrial medium—acquired the melancholic features of a mordant critique of traditional photographic genres such as the portrait.
{"title":"Ilse Bing: A Frankfurt School Photographer in Paris and New York","authors":"B. Buchloh","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00407","url":null,"abstract":"Ilse Bing was one of those Weimar photographers whose work was recognized or rediscovered later than that of many of her more famous female peers. Her photographic project sprang largely from her persistent subversion of the stylistic oppositions of New Vision photography and New Objectivity. Just as complex was the work she produced after moving to Paris, defined as it was by her cross-cutting of Weimar socialist and French Surrealist photographic mentalities. Comparable in her precise socio-political analysis to the Frankfurt School's critiques of emerging mass-cultural and political formations, Bing's work in the United States, where, barred from publishing in magazines, she was able to pay witness to photography's functioning as a new ideological- and cultural-industrial medium—acquired the melancholic features of a mordant critique of traditional photographic genres such as the portrait.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"176-206"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/octo_a_00407","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43407169","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This issue is the second part of a two-part October project dealing with the photographic practices of women in Weimar culture and in exile from it. Focusing on seven crucial figures (Ellen Auerbach, Ilse Bing, Anne Fischer, Gisèle Freund, Lotte Jacobi, Germaine Krull, and Grete Stern), the essays collected here address a wide range of productive changes and destructive conflicts challenging traditional models of the photographers' social, artistic, and professional identities. Some of these changes resulted from the impact of emerging technologies (both in the infrastructural organization of everyday life and in photography's own newly evolving technologies of cameras and color) and some from the dismantling of the liberal democratic nation state either by the rise of state socialism in the Soviet Union or of fascism in Germany. When these Weimar photographers had to find refuge in France, in the United States, in South Africa, or in Argentina, they found themselves not only confronted with the demands of a rapidly advancing and controlling culture industry but also with the caesura of cultural discontinuity and the disillusioning effects of living in exile.
{"title":"Photography's Exiles: from Painting, Patriarchy, and Patria","authors":"B. Buchloh","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00401","url":null,"abstract":"This issue is the second part of a two-part October project dealing with the photographic practices of women in Weimar culture and in exile from it. Focusing on seven crucial figures (Ellen Auerbach, Ilse Bing, Anne Fischer, Gisèle Freund, Lotte Jacobi, Germaine Krull, and Grete Stern), the essays collected here address a wide range of productive changes and destructive conflicts challenging traditional models of the photographers' social, artistic, and professional identities. Some of these changes resulted from the impact of emerging technologies (both in the infrastructural organization of everyday life and in photography's own newly evolving technologies of cameras and color) and some from the dismantling of the liberal democratic nation state either by the rise of state socialism in the Soviet Union or of fascism in Germany. When these Weimar photographers had to find refuge in France, in the United States, in South Africa, or in Argentina, they found themselves not only confronted with the demands of a rapidly advancing and controlling culture industry but also with the caesura of cultural discontinuity and the disillusioning effects of living in exile.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"3-6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/OCTO_A_00401","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47890811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article reexamines Germaine Krull's seminal 1928 photo book Métal, tracing the implications of the speculative analogy drawn by the project between metal and photography. Following this analogy through nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century architectural discourse, it newly situates the photographer's investigation against Sigfried Giedion's contemporaneous theorizations of iron construction and modern photography. Rather than critiquing or celebrating industry, Krull focuses on metal as it manifests the peculiar and fraught experience of living amid large-scale technical systems. In a singular way, Métal mobilizes its driving analogy to invoke—and, moreover, to theorize photographically—the infrastructures organizing Western European modernity.
{"title":"From Material to Infrastructure: Germaine Krull's Métal∗","authors":"M. Boersma","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00405","url":null,"abstract":"This article reexamines Germaine Krull's seminal 1928 photo book Métal, tracing the implications of the speculative analogy drawn by the project between metal and photography. Following this analogy through nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century architectural discourse, it newly situates the photographer's investigation against Sigfried Giedion's contemporaneous theorizations of iron construction and modern photography. Rather than critiquing or celebrating industry, Krull focuses on metal as it manifests the peculiar and fraught experience of living amid large-scale technical systems. In a singular way, Métal mobilizes its driving analogy to invoke—and, moreover, to theorize photographically—the infrastructures organizing Western European modernity.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"118-142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/octo_a_00405","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43695162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1929, in the midst of the artistic and political ferment that was Weimar Berlin, the young photographers Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern formalized their personal and creative affinities to create Studio ringl + pit. Their collaboration, which would continue for the next four years, produced groundbreaking portraits, still lifes, and a handful of print advertisements that were celebrated for their inventively formal daring. In line with their training with Bauhaus photography master Walter Peterhans, ringl + pit's pictures were meticulously constructed and technically perfect, but they were also uniquely imprinted with the artists' characteristic blend of the playful, the strange, and, in multiple senses of the word, the queer. In this essay, Auerbach and Stern's adventurous approach to photographic experimentation is explored within the context of their correspondingly adventurous inclination to defy bourgeois conventions in their personal lives. In concert with the aesthetic synchrony that inspired their creative collaboration (such that, for its duration, they disavowed individual authorship in favor of the collective moniker “ringl + pit”) they were also lovers, a fact which, until now, has not been integrated into scholarly engagement with their work. Passionate photographic explorations, their work consistently privileged play, discovery, and intimacy over such conventional markers of success as money or fame. In this light, ringl + pit's audaciously anticipatory collective body of work might be said to adhere to the delineations of what Jack Halberstam has described as a “queer art of failure.”
{"title":"ringl + pit and the Queer Art of Failure∗","authors":"Elizabeth A. Otto","doi":"10.1162/OCTO_A_00403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_A_00403","url":null,"abstract":"In 1929, in the midst of the artistic and political ferment that was Weimar Berlin, the young photographers Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern formalized their personal and creative affinities to create Studio ringl + pit. Their collaboration, which would continue for the next four years, produced groundbreaking portraits, still lifes, and a handful of print advertisements that were celebrated for their inventively formal daring. In line with their training with Bauhaus photography master Walter Peterhans, ringl + pit's pictures were meticulously constructed and technically perfect, but they were also uniquely imprinted with the artists' characteristic blend of the playful, the strange, and, in multiple senses of the word, the queer. In this essay, Auerbach and Stern's adventurous approach to photographic experimentation is explored within the context of their correspondingly adventurous inclination to defy bourgeois conventions in their personal lives. In concert with the aesthetic synchrony that inspired their creative collaboration (such that, for its duration, they disavowed individual authorship in favor of the collective moniker “ringl + pit”) they were also lovers, a fact which, until now, has not been integrated into scholarly engagement with their work. Passionate photographic explorations, their work consistently privileged play, discovery, and intimacy over such conventional markers of success as money or fame. In this light, ringl + pit's audaciously anticipatory collective body of work might be said to adhere to the delineations of what Jack Halberstam has described as a “queer art of failure.”","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"37-64"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/OCTO_A_00403","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48413392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay examines the work of German-French photographer Gisèle Freund during the interwar years, with special focus on her volte-face from black-and-white depictions of the collective subject of political demonstrations in pre-exile Frankfurt to color portraits of individual French intellectuals after her arrival in Paris. Pivoting around the short period between 1938 and 1940, when using color became the standard rhetorical maneuver of Freund's portrait series, this essay will trace the photographer's change in practice as a response to the mounting crisis within France's Popular Front and its aesthetic strategies in the face of the rise of fascism. One of the essay's claims is that Freund turned color photography from a material and commercial commodity into the emblem of an alternative, mass-mediated culture—the culture of Americanism—that she, like many European intellectuals of the 1920s, imagined capable of competing with and ultimately countering the fascist mobilization of spectacle.
{"title":"Practice in Color: Gisèle Freund in Paris∗","authors":"Hye-Joon Yoon","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00402","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the work of German-French photographer Gisèle Freund during the interwar years, with special focus on her volte-face from black-and-white depictions of the collective subject of political demonstrations in pre-exile Frankfurt to color portraits of individual French intellectuals after her arrival in Paris. Pivoting around the short period between 1938 and 1940, when using color became the standard rhetorical maneuver of Freund's portrait series, this essay will trace the photographer's change in practice as a response to the mounting crisis within France's Popular Front and its aesthetic strategies in the face of the rise of fascism. One of the essay's claims is that Freund turned color photography from a material and commercial commodity into the emblem of an alternative, mass-mediated culture—the culture of Americanism—that she, like many European intellectuals of the 1920s, imagined capable of competing with and ultimately countering the fascist mobilization of spectacle.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"7-36"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/octo_a_00402","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44429992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay considers Florence Henri's interwar photographic project from the standpoint of phenomenology. In doing so, it displaces the disinterested formalist framework that generally straightjackets her work to look askance at the terrain of subject-object relations that was urgently being rethought by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hellmuth Plessner, among others, in the turbulent decade after World War I. Composed in a cultural context in which the boundaries between self and other and between individuality and collectivity were being renegotiated, Henri's photographs materialize human-object kinships that query the operations of sovereign subjecthood in the postwar world. Ineluctably drawn to the dynamics of isolation and empathy, Henri exploits the paradox of photography's simultaneous objectivity and intimacy, staging subject-object encounters whose apparent technological, material rationality is subtended by volatility, contingency, and groundlessness. Allied with Bauhaus precepts, Henri's photographs amount to a set of investigations about subjecthood in a material world that propose new pathways of Being in modernity.
{"title":"Florence Henri's Oblique∗","authors":"S. Kriebel","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00391","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers Florence Henri's interwar photographic project from the standpoint of phenomenology. In doing so, it displaces the disinterested formalist framework that generally straightjackets her work to look askance at the terrain of subject-object relations that was urgently being rethought by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hellmuth Plessner, among others, in the turbulent decade after World War I. Composed in a cultural context in which the boundaries between self and other and between individuality and collectivity were being renegotiated, Henri's photographs materialize human-object kinships that query the operations of sovereign subjecthood in the postwar world. Ineluctably drawn to the dynamics of isolation and empathy, Henri exploits the paradox of photography's simultaneous objectivity and intimacy, staging subject-object encounters whose apparent technological, material rationality is subtended by volatility, contingency, and groundlessness. Allied with Bauhaus precepts, Henri's photographs amount to a set of investigations about subjecthood in a material world that propose new pathways of Being in modernity.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"8-34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/octo_a_00391","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49531327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay discusses some of the stakes involved in this issue's cluster of texts on women photographers of Weimar Germany. They are critical assessments by contemporary art historians that draw attention to the still unfinished feminist project of questioning disciplinary assumptions around gender, sexuality, labor, and technologies of reproduction. These essays accompany four new translations of articles written in the 1960s and ’70s by a participant of that historical moment, Lucia Moholy, whose early reflections on the historical avant-gardes anticipate its feminist critique.
{"title":"A (Still) Marginal Modernity, or The Artist as Stenographer","authors":"Jordan Troeller","doi":"10.1162/octo_a_00390","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00390","url":null,"abstract":"This essay discusses some of the stakes involved in this issue's cluster of texts on women photographers of Weimar Germany. They are critical assessments by contemporary art historians that draw attention to the still unfinished feminist project of questioning disciplinary assumptions around gender, sexuality, labor, and technologies of reproduction. These essays accompany four new translations of articles written in the 1960s and ’70s by a participant of that historical moment, Lucia Moholy, whose early reflections on the historical avant-gardes anticipate its feminist critique.","PeriodicalId":51557,"journal":{"name":"OCTOBER","volume":"1 1","pages":"3-7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1162/octo_a_00390","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49416266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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