Eine Radikale Tradition : A Radical Tradition : Heimat Photography in the Third Reich
- Submitting institution
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Aberystwyth University / Prifysgol Aberystwyth
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 6851510
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Manchester
- Open access status
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- Month of first exhibition
- March
- Year of first exhibition
- 2019
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Building on Webster’s extended research into ‘forgotten’ German photographers, this touring exhibition and book project explored the practice of three photographers– Hans Saebens (1895-1969), Hans Retzlaff (1902-1965) and Erich Retzlaff (1899-1993)– whose work became part of the visual narrative and the aesthetics of National Socialism through Selbstgleichschaltung, a self-co-ordination with the regime.
Research involved sourcing, assessing and printing historic negatives of rarely disclosed photographs, some of which are held in difficult-to-access family archives in Germany. Their interpretation and contexualisation was achieved in public exhibitions that introduced contemporary audiences to key exponents of Heimat photography. In Nazi Germany, these images were disseminated through handsomely produced large-format ‘coffee table’ books with full-page half-tone plates, high-quality copperplate photogravures and, from the late 1930s, including full-colour photo-lithographic plates. Issued in large print runs, some of them in editions of tens of thousands, they played a key role in the ideology formation of the Third Reich. Webster scrutinised hundreds of these volumes to identify subjects that appear in the prints and negatives in the Retzlaff and Saebens collections.
Unlike documentary studies made in the Weimar Republic during the Depression-era, the Heimat or Volk photography produced under National Socialism celebrated the vitality and resilience of the German people in settings removed from urban centres and free from the perceived deleterious effects of cosmopolitanism to extol the virtues of simplicity, unity and purity that conformed to and confirmed the notion of a German national community.
This overtly propagandistic purpose resulted in a critical neglect of these photographs as tainted objects of material culture that A Radical Tradition contests by arguing for a necessary engagement with these works and by making a case for a self-conscious visual literacy, an informed understanding of the influence that a sustained exposure to the photographic image can effect to this day.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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