| This dissertation offers an analysis of avant-garde photography in Germany in the 1920s emphasizing its relationship to new technological paradigms that emerged during and shortly after World War I. My central argument is that the “new photographers” in Weimar Germany approached the medium not merely as a new method for making pictures, but more ambitiously, as a radical new technology of perception. The photographic camera, with its capacities to see faster, sharper, microscopically, telescopically, and, under most conditions, better than the naked eye, was conceived as a type of optical prosthesis, a mechanical supplement to the built-in deficiencies of human vision.; Chapter One considers the new intimacy between bodies and machines brought about by the First World War, examining the practical and ideological efforts of the medical-technical industry to reintegrate maimed soldiers into the postwar industrial economy. In Chapter Two, I trace a parallel development of forms in postwar prosthetic technology and photographic aesthetics, arguing that in both fields there was a shift from an imitative to a functional paradigm. Chapter Three focuses on the work of Karl Blossfeldt, a German professor of decorative arts whose austere photographs of plant forms were discovered and championed by advocates of the new photography in the late 1920s. I argue that Blossfeldt's photographs were viewed as evidence of the primordial basis of functional form and served as the foundation for a reconciliation between organic nature and the “second nature” of modern technology.; In Chapter Four, I discuss the phenomenon of “image fatigue,” a concept that emerged in photographic discourse shortly after the pivotal Film und Foto exhibition of 1929. Here I suggest that underlying the enthusiasm about the new photography was a dramatic loss of faith in the perceptual power of the naked eye, and that by the early 1930s, photography was held accountable for a new kind of modern blindness—a pollution of vision through an overwhelming glut of images. |
