Powerful Ideas: New Research in Art History at the University of Sydney is convened by Mary Roberts and presented by the discipline of Art History at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.
29 August, 2024, 03:00PM - 04:30PM. Schaeffer Library Seminar Room 210, Mills Building (A26) Free. This research seminar series is also accessible via Zoom (click here to join).
Conveying meaning often through photographs alone, the photobook is a radical format that enabled the widespread dissemination of modernist aesthetics through bespoke or commercial printers and publishers. The burgeoning of photographic books in the 1920-1930s coincided with the centrality of photographs to the illustrated press, to magazines and journalism, led by publishing houses such as Kurt Wolff. Like the illustrated press, photobooks provided unprecedented means for photographers to disseminate their work beyond the studio or exhibitionary models. Simultaneously the same benefits were recognised as a means to reach the wider public for the dissemination of social, cultural or political material. From Germanie Krull’s Métal and Franz Roh’s Foto-Auge to Heinrich Hoffmann’s Jugend um Hitler and El Lissitzky’s Industrii͡a sot͡sializma, this paper considers modernist photobook aesthetics and its intersection with the visual languages of politics and propaganda in Europe between the wars.
This research on the Chadwyck-Healey Photobook Collection was undertaken as a 2024 Sloan Fellow in Photography at the Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.
Image: Cover of Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold. Foto-Auge: 76 Fotos der Zeit (Photo-eye: 76 photos of the time). Stuttgart: F. Wedekind, 1929.
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