The Ghost and the Rock: Albert Renger-Patzsch and the Shape of Time

The career of photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch began in the early 1920s in the storerooms of Germany's ethnographic museums, and ended in 1966 with the publication of his last photobook, Gestein (Rock). His reputation as a leading exponent of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) developed in tandem with heated debates over sculptural facsimiles and contemporary art in the historical museum in the late Weimar Republic. These debates gave expression to the ‘non-simultaneity of the simultaneous’ (Ungleichzeitigkeit des Gleichzeitigen), a central concept for the crisis of historicism in the post-inflation years. In an age of mass reproduction, could ‘things’ still reliably embody and convey the past into present? This question took on renewed urgency for Renger at the end of his life – as, indeed, it did for many writers of his generation, who, if they outlived Nazi terror, genocide, and war, looked back on the historical valence of objecthood as unfinished business.