Throughout Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasizing the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photography’s multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.

A leading critic’s inside story of “the photo boom” during the crucial decades of the 1970s and 80s When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography’s “boom years,” chronicling the medium’s increasing role within the most important art movements of the time, from Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also traces photography’s embrace by museums and galleries, as well as its politicization in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s. Grundberg reflects on the landmark exhibitions that defined the moment and his encounters with the work of leading photographers—many of whom he knew personally—including Gordon Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He navigates crucial themes such as photography’s relationship to theory as well as feminism and artists of color. Part memoir and part history, this perspective by one of the period’s leading critics ultimately tells a larger story about the crucial decades of the 70s and 80s through the medium of photography.

This lucid and comprehensive collection of essays by an international group of scholars constitutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who embraced National Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordination with the regime), continued to practice as photographers throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich. The volume explores, through photographic reproductions and accompanying analysis, diverse aspects of photography during the Third Reich, ranging from the influence of Modernism, the qualitative effect of propaganda photography, and the utilisation of technology such as colour film, to the photograph as ideological metaphor. With an emphasis on the idealised representation of the German body and the role of physiognomy within this representation, the book examines how select photographers created and developed a visual myth of the ‘master race’ and its antitheses under the auspices of the Nationalist Socialist state. Photography in the Third Reich approaches its historical source photographs as material culture, examining their production, construction and proliferation. This detailed and informative text will be a valuable resource not only to historians studying the Third Reich, but to scholars and students of film, history of art, politics, media studies, cultural studies and holocaust studies.

"An essential guide."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"A continuation of volumes one and two listing general areas of interest in photography and, in volume three, individual photographers born after 1950 (the other volumes end in 1936). Since the reference is dealing with contemporary photography, video and CD-ROM photographic innovations and topics are also included. Contains over 5,092 entries; each subject is listed alphabetically and in chronological order with references to translations (in the case of non-English books and articles), new editions, and illustrations. In some cases a very short commentary is also offered, although the bibliography is not annotated. The index comprehensively includes the 17,000 names cited in all three volumes."--Review from Booknews.

In September 1939, thousands of German soldiers were turned loose on Poland. In 1940, they descended on Holland, Belgium and France. In 1941 they went to the Balkans, and then to the USSR. Armed with Leica and Rolleiflex cameras, some of these soldiers were officially commissioned as photographers, while others were asked by their commanders to snap records of events. Among them were trainees who knew about the Bauhaus, and other, older men who could remember Weimar. Some excelled at formal portraiture, others were storytellers, stylists or humanists who wept at what they saw. The style and content of their work changed along with the collective mood after 1942, a change that is discernible in the photographs themselves.00Celebrated author and art historian Ian Jeffrey ? author of How to Read a Photograph and The Photography Book ? has trawled through these albums, picking out the most compelling of these works to create an intimate record of anonymous lives experiencing the unprecedented.

Between the end of World War I and the Nazi assumption of power, Germany's Weimar Republic (1919-1933) functioned as a thriving laboratory of art and culture. As the country experienced unprecedented and often tumultuous social, economic and political upheaval, many artists rejected Expressionism in favour of a new realism to capture this emerging society. Dubbed Neue Sachlichkeit - New Objectivity - its adherents turned a cold eye on the new Germany: its desperate prostitutes and crippled war veterans, its alienated urban landscapes, its decadent underworld where anything was available for a price. Showcasing 150 works by more than 50 artists, this book reflects the full diversity and strategies of this art form. Organised around five thematic sections, it mixes photography, works on paper and painting to bring them into a visual dialogue. Artists such as Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann are included alongside figures such as Christian Schad, Alexander Kanoldt, Georg Schrimpf, August Sander, Lotte Jacobi and Aenne Biermann. Also included are numerous essays that examine the politics of New Objectivity and its legacy, the relation of this new realism to international art movements of the time; the context of gender roles and sexuality; and the influence of new technology and consumer goods. Published in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. AUTHOR: Stephanie Barron is a Senior Curator and heads the Modern Art department at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. Sabine Eckmann is the William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri. 300 colour illustrations

The Dusseldorf School is renowned around the world, and is today synonymous with high artistic standards and a highly diverse and new approach to the medium of photography. There has been no other art movement since the Bauhaus to possess such a worldwide appeal. This volume traces its ascendancy from the mid-1970s.

Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) photographed thousands of plants; these are almost never seen from above, but rather from the side, and against a neutral background. This book featuers these images of plants.