ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the photographic conditions of the Weimar era arose under the shadow of agit-prop, and what those circumstances meant about the constitution and experience of photographic publics at this key moment of modernity in crisis. As photography flooded the public sphere after the close of the First World War, politically minded editors of illustrated magazines grasped the new mass medium as a mode of witness that could persuade audiences with hidden, overlooked truths, even force accountability among the powerful. As photography increasingly flooded the public sphere during the Weimar era’s early years, Stossinger reached for some of the most powerful pictures to inflect their meaning and, in turn, employ their power to both propagandize and agitate. His goal was to shift the dynamics at play in mass public culture in which photography served more to occlude and numb, rather than reveal and shock.
