Carola J\u00fcllig | 1 December 2020<\/span><\/p>\n The collections of the East German Museum f\u00fcr Deutsche Geschichte contained a great number of photographs, which were taken into the picture library of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in 1990 and since that time continually expanded. Alongside socio-documentary and critical photos, the DHM began at the beginning of the 1990s to acquire more official press photos through endowments and by purchasing a number of estates. In her DHM blog, Carola J\u00fcllig, head of the photography department<\/a>, gives us insight into the state of the picture collection.<\/strong><\/p>\n A young woman with a red headscarf, red-striped blouse and blue trousers is framed against the cloudless blue sky. She smiles as she holds the steering wheel of a tractor, whose red steering rod juts into the blue sky while she looks steadily into the distance. With this engaging motif by Martin Schmidt, the Deutsches Historisches Museum promoted the 2014 exhibition \u201cColour for the Republic \u2013 Commissioned photography on life in the GDR\u201d<\/a>. It was an initial attempt to take up a previously neglected topic of GDR photography: the role of colour photography in the press and commissioned photography since the 1960s.<\/p>\n With the demise of the GDR, interest in the artistic legacy of the \u201cother\u201d Germany grew in the Federal Republic. In the area of photography, it was above all the artistic, critical and socio-documentary pictures of the GDR that were exhibited, published and studied. They were unvarnished black-and-white images that peered behind the glossy surface of socialist propaganda. Such motifs by photographers like Ute and Werner Mahler, Gundula Schulze-Eldowy or Harald Hauswald were taken into the museum\u2019s collections.<\/p>\n Since the beginning of the 1990s the Deutsches Historisches Museum has deliberately been acquiring archives and estates of other East German (press) photographers, with the aim of augmenting these stocks. This new focal point initially came about when the extensive collection of the Museum f\u00fcr Deutsche Geschichte was transferred to the DHM in 1990. For East German photographers, the end of the GDR often meant the end of their career, because their principal employer no longer existed. Some of them then offered their life\u2019s work to our museum \u2013 an opportunity which we gladly seized in order to be able devote ourselves to the largely neglected field of press and commissioned photography.<\/p>\n In 1992 and 2002 the archives of the photojournalists Martin Schmidt (1925\u20132019) and Kurt Schwarzer (1927\u20132012) came to the Deutsches Historisches Museum. The two photojournalists were typical representatives of their discipline. Both, like many other photographers and photojournalists (most of them male), were self-taught and began their careers in the 1950s. They saw themselves as professional journalists; but as freelancers, they were in a minority in the GDR. They both gave tens of thousands of negatives to the museum, mostly black-and-white, but also colour negatives and positives. The photographs cover a broad palette of topics, because they both worked for many different clients \u2013 newspapers and magazines, publishing houses, companies, mass organisations. Martin Schmidt concentrated on agricultural topics and worked for the \u201cSociety for German-Soviet Friendship\u201d and other mass organisations, while Kurt Schwarzer photographed primarily for women\u2019s journals, but also for cookbooks. Today their pictures grant us insights into the work and everyday life in the GDR from the 1950s to the 1980s \u2013 always, to be sure, anticipating the censorship, because critical pictures could not be sold, and the photographers knew what goes and what would not be printed. Run-down machinery and factory facilities or long lines queuing up in front of shops were undesirable motifs. The pictures should spread optimism and show the pioneering spirit on the way to the socialist society. None the less, they show us many details of the reality of life in the GDR.<\/p>\nHow colour made its way into the photo collection of the DHM<\/h3>\n