ABSTRACT
The introduction of a new technology is typically accompanied by a public discourse that reveals the social attitudes and cultural values that shape the climate of acceptance. Such climate is frequently enough manufactured by those who organize and control the public sphere, who holds, in effect, what C. Wright Mills calls the "power of initiation." This chapter focuses on institutional efforts to construct the role of press photography in a climate of social and cultural ferment that also gave rise to an intellectual response to the emergence of photography as a new form of journalistic or documentary expression. Journalistic photography in the 1920s offered post-war Germany a glimpse of a changing world, and picture stories involving travel abroad were extremely popular features in German magazines. The potential of photography as a documentary and journalistic tool had been demonstrated with the rise of radical aesthetic and political movements, especially in the Soviet Union and Germany.
