#revision - NEW OBJECTIVITY AND THE PHOTO BOOK

In an era where the avant garde movements of Europe wanted to stray away from traditional representation and realism in favour of a more abstracted, political artwork, New Objectivity ceased photography and the photo-book as its medium and created work that was born out of stark realism. Photographers like August Sander, Albert Renger-Patzsch and Karl Blossfeldt created narratives through images in their photo books, taking art out of the gallery space and into the sphere of the general public. The 'objective' nature of New Objectivity would suggest an un-biased nature to the movement, where the aesthetics of the object represented and the careful, often contrasting or thematic juxtaposition of these images said more than any underlying politics that influenced them. However, by using Michael Jennings text on photo-books in the Wiemar Republic, we can see how these objective and aesthetic images can have a more politically charged meaning when they are synthesised into a photo-book.

Looking at August Sander's The Face of Our Time from 1929, a selection of full age single and group portraits show a range of classes in their normal environments, starting with agriculture workers and moving thematic and systematically through urban workers, revolutionaries and capital workers. Sander's book ultimately has a focus on the population of the city, and this line of movement is symbolic of the changes that are occurring in Weimar Germany, where the city and industry are expanding. For Jennings, The Face of Our Time is both synchronic and diachronic, meaning that it is both of its time as well as charting social and historical development. Taken out of context of the photo book, the photographs are objective depictions of the everyday lives, clothes and environments of those pictured, whether it be a butcher, farmer or tycoon. When seen together in this format however, they images take on a diachronic aspect, where they track social and historical changes throughout time, starting with the dependence on the land and moving towards a higher dependence on industry and the city. 'Photography is a mosaic that becomes a synthesis only when it is presented en masse' is a way that Sander's describes the importance of the photo book, and the way that it mobilises become a diachronic piece with the ability to encapsulate society.

Straying away from people completely and focusing an interest more on the tensions of nature and industry, Renger-Patzsch's infamous photo-book The World is Beautiful from 1928 has an array of photographs that range from extreme close-ups of flowers to industrial tools and architecture. The focus on industrial photography is for Walter Benjamin and subversion of the human labour that created the commodities that Renger-Patzsch photographs, and for this reason he is emphatically against The World is Beautiful. Even the name, for Benjamin, removes all of these social relations that have come to create the commodity, however it was at the discretion of the publisher Kurt Wolff to call the photo book The World is Beautiful rather that Things which was Renger-Patzsch original vision. However, if we use Nietzsch's 'chaos theory' we can make some interesting conclusions with regards to The World is Beautiful. In chaos theory, seemingly meaningless and random events can create an enormous result when considered in retrospect. Are Renger-Patzsch's selection of images and juxtaposition of natural and synthetic images making a statement about Weimar Germany's focus on industrialisation when viewed as a synthesis of images in retrospect, or are they merely grouped due to their formal similarities, with little underlying political statement?

An irony that occurs in Benjamin's reception of the photo book occurs when we see the praise that Art Forms in Nature by Bloosfeldt received. The book which consists of close up, detail photographs of flowers and plants against a white or grey background was seen by Benjamin as hosting a great amount of artistic licence, as the photographs use tonal depth to create forms that seem almost sculptural and architectural. Ironic because the similar photographs of enlarged flowers seen by Renger-Patzsch didn't warrant the same reaction despite their similarities. The viewing of these images is described by Renger-Patzsch as 'joy before the object', where we have a strong aesthetic reaction to these uncanny objects due to the formal photographic techniques of visceral surface detail and depth of shadowing. These close-ups offer the viewer a perspective that they are not used to seeing, and gives us a sense of the camera being an extension of the human eye.

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