The exhibition \u201cProgress as a Promise. Industrial Photography in Divided Germany\u201d<\/a> juxtaposes commissioned photographs from East and West Germany of selected branches of industry in the time between 1949 and 1990 and explores the purposes they served. Carola J\u00fcllig, head of the photography collection, describes the acquisition activity of the museum in the area of photography and explains the concept of the exhibition, which takes its place in the long tradition of photo exhibitions in the DHM.<\/strong>
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The Deutsches Historisches Museum has been collecting photographs since its founding in 1987. Alongside prints by photographers working in the area of art and culture and works of social and political relevance, the Photography Collection also includes a number of archives of commercial photographers from the German Democratic Republic (GDR).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the 1990s, the museum was able to acquire the archives of Martin Schmidt (1925\u20132018) and Kurt Schwarzer (1927\u20132012), who worked in the GDR as freelance photographers for various outlets. In 2017, we acquired the estate of Uwe Steinberg (1942\u20131983), who worked as a photojournalist, primarily for the \u201cNeue Berliner Illustrierte\u201d. This was followed in 2019 by the archive of Peter Straube (born in 1936), who had been employed by the magazine \u201cDDR-Export\u201d and other publications. And finally in 2020, the museum secured the estate of the photojournalist Joachim Fieguth (1942\u20132019), who had worked for the \u201cBerliner Zeitung\u201d since the 1970s and also for \u201cNeues Deutschland\u201d for many years. For a long time, our perspective on the photography of the GDR was largely determined by the kind of critical, documentary-style, black-and-white pictures by photographers like those represented in the photo agency Agentur Ostkreuz. However, these photographs are only part of the visual memory, because it is precisely the mass of photos published in newspapers, magazines, brochures, and so on, that have inscribed themselves in the collective memory. It has long been of great importance to me to preserve these photos from oblivion or obliteration, because not many museums collect them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And for this reason the emphasis of our collection on the topic of \u201ccommercial photography\u201d has often been the starting point for photo exhibitions: In 2014, the museum presented \u201cColour for the Republic. Commissioned Photography of Life in the GDR\u201d<\/a>, a selection of colour photographs from the archives of Martin Schmidt and Kurt Schwarzer that showed the important role that colour photography played from the 1960s on in communicating socialist ideology. The exhibition \u201cThe Invention of Press Photography. From the Ullstein Collection 1894\u20131945\u201d<\/a> in 2017 dealt with press photography based on the example of the German magazine with the widest circulation, the \u201cBerliner Illustrierte Zeitung\u201d, published by Ullstein Verlag. And in 2019, the early press photography of the photographer Stefan Moses (1928 \u2013 2018) was featured in the exhibition \u201cThe Exotic Country\u201d<\/a>. In all of these exhibits, the main focus of interest was on photography as material, its use, and its contextualisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Commercial and commissioned photography, like artistic \u201cauteur\u201d photography, is an independent genre, whereby its producers were often active in both areas: art photography also has a commercial side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Foto: DHM\/Thomas Bruns<\/p>\n<\/td>\n | \nCarola J\u00fcllig<\/h4>\nCarola J\u00fcllig is head of the photographic collection and postcards at the German Historical Museum.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Progress as a Promise. Industrial Photography in Divided Germany Carola J\u00fcllig | 15. Februar 2023 The exhibition \u201cProgress as a Promise. Industrial Photography in Divided Germany\u201d juxtaposes commissioned photographs from East and West Germany of selected branches of industry in the time between 1949 and 1990 and explores the purposes they served. Carola J\u00fcllig, head […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[207,2576,2574,205],"class_list":["post-7131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inside-dhm-en","tag-collection","tag-industrial-photography","tag-industriefotografie","tag-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7131"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7138,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7131\/revisions\/7138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |
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