Worker Photography as an Iconographic Exhibition Concept. Recontextualizing its Material and Artistic Traditions

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Manfred Bernhard Seifert
• Subject Area: Art History ; Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2013 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 234284081

The project >The Eye of the Worker< has produced fundamental research towards a media history of mentalities in early modern time, regarding the perspectives and self-presentation of the non-bourgeois classes. In this research, however, some aspects could only be touched, like the interaction between amateurs and professional artist, the role of women as performers and producers, or the significance of press sketches and other expressions of public sign formation with their reference to advertising, in the context of the development of modern propaganda methods. In addition, the popular culture of >worker photography< has, so far, neither been included into the historiography of art or of daily life nor into museum practice in any appreciable way.In cooperation with our partners, we therefore intend to extend our research focus in order to achieve a new perspective on the significance of the visual during the Weimar Republic. As an archeology of the media, the planned transfer project aims to develop new elaborated academic approaches to visual cultures. At the same time, it could also provide an enlightened view into a predominantly visual present. The iconographic concept of the exhibition will take into account the collection profiles and knowledge bases of the institutes involved. In the same way, the traditions of art and history museums will be included discerningly, and gender aspects will be considered in regard to the producers and the motives of images as well as their circles of recipients. Research into museological praxis and an analysis of the results of knowledge transfer will accompany the process.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants (Transfer Project)
• Participating Institution: Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln; Stadtmuseum Dresden; Städtische Museen Zwickau ; Kunstsammlungen
• Participating Person: Professor Dr. Markus Walz