November 2008

In this month's issue

Explore the Apollo archive

Look back over two vibrant years of Apollo: browse every issue from January 2006 to the present day.

Archive

The phenomenal rise in the 1920s of the popular European illustrated press was part and parcel of the craze (Life magazine in the US and Picture Post in England were founded only in the late 1930s, with the participation of central Europeans). Magazines had circulations in the millions. Photojournalism burst upon the scene. Amateur photography flourished, too, some of it with serious aspirations, and people flocked to photo exhibitions. The signature exhibition of the period, although not even the largest, was the 1929 ‘Film und Foto’ inaugurated in Stuttgart, from which the present show’s title clearly derives.

The exhibition is organised by themes rather than countries or movements, and two sections framing the others – as the world wars framed this ultimately tragic time – are devoted to photomontage. ‘The Cut-and-Paste’ technique, as Witkovsky terms it, was particularly suited to expressing the horrors and follies resulting from one war and leading to the next. Some of the well-known names appearing here include John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, and El Lissitsky; others less familiar are the Poles Mieczysław Szczuka and Teresa Žarnower. The painter Paul Citroen, who at the Bauhaus made a series of amazing photomontages (Fig. 1), was concerned with aesthetics rather than politics. Karel Teige, a founder of the Devetsil group and the key figure of the Czech avant-garde, is represented by an upbeat ‘travel postcard’ from a still-optimistic year, 1923; his almost pornographic later works, such as Collage no. 129, of 1940, are creepy. During World War II the medium was used privately by oppressed and hidden artists, such as Teige and Jindrich Heisler in Prague and Władisław Strzeminski in Łódz, who in 1945 created a series entitled To My Friends the Jews.

A section entitled ‘Laboratories and Classrooms’ is devoted to the institutionalisation of photography as a professional subject of study and includes technical experimentation. Here works by Jaromír Funke (Fig. 3), Franz Roh and Walter Peterhans stand out. ‘New Women, New Men’ gives us František Drtikol, Lotte Jacobi, Eva Besnyö and Hans Bellmer; ‘Modern Living’, Umbo, Ringl+Pit (Witkowsky is enlightening on women photographers) and Paul Wolff, whose view of Hitler’s autobahn reminds us of the Nazi embrace of modernity. Surrealism follows in Czechoslovakia and Poland. ‘Activist Documents’ includes a survey of worker photography. Karel Hájek’s blurred Demonstration at Charles University (1934) is mesmerising. The chapter devoted to ‘Homeland Photography’ should be an oasis in a landscape of disturbing images, but some of its views are too beautiful, reflecting a nationalism that led to catastrophe. Hungary excels here (Fig. 2). Some figures, such as the polymaths Stanisław Witkiewicz and Roman Vishniac, each remain one of a kind.