| This dissertation investigates a hitherto unexamined form: the photo-essays of late-Weimar Germany. These text-image hybrids intervened in the discourse of modernity as full-blown rhetorical forms. Unlike conventional philosophical and literary texts, however, photo-essays' primary units of signification are mechanically-reproduced photographs, not words.;Chapter one examines the form's evolution following the modernization of photographic production, reproduction, distribution, and consumption. Photographs transcended the primarily illustrative modes of their deployment in nineteenth-century mass media and became increasingly used to construct arguments and narratives. Chapter two examines photoreportages published in the Weimar illustrated press after Gustav Stresemann's death. Photo-essays across ideological lines transformed avant-garde photographic strategies to celebrate or mourn Stresemann, and implicitly, parliamentary democracy.;The final three chapters examine book-length photo-essays as interventions in Weimar Germany's key political and philosophical controversies. Chapter three compares Erich Salomon's Beruhmte Zeitgenossen in unbewachten Augenblicken and Ernst Junger's and Friedrich Buchholz's Der gefahrliche Augenblick, photo-essays constructed from snapshots, with Carl Schmitt's decisionist political theory. These works respond to the widespread perception of Germany's political instability by allegorizing the precarious historical juncture as the "critical moment" of instant photography. Chapter four compares August Sander's Antlitz der Zeit with Walter Benjamin's photographically-structured Deutsche Menschen. Unlike Sander's photo-essay, Benjamin's sequence of handwritten letters interprets German identity and the course of Enlightenment optimistically, in spite of fascism's rise. Chapter five compares feuilletons with photo-essays constructed from plant photography as interventions in debates about urbanism and modernization. In spite of their ostensibly benign subject matter, Albert Renger-Patzsch's Die Welt ist schon and Paul Dobe's Wilde Blumen der Deutschen Flora produce antagonistic arguments about the relationship of nature and culture. Whereas the right-wing Wilde Blumen uncritically venerates nature, Die Welt ist schon critically deconstructs the nature/culture dichotomy.;This project concludes by examining "Lichtbild and Personlichkeit," a tongue-in-cheek one-act play published in Das Deutsche Lichtbild , Weimar Germany's most important photography annual. The play dramatizes shifts in photography's deployment between the wars and shows how photographic forms, including the photo-essay, articulated a new function for mechanically-reproduced images in public discourse. |
