ABSTRACT
The author has written widely on photography in Germany, where she is curator at the Folkwang Museum in Essen. In this chapter the author focuses on a survey of the wide-ranging developments that took place in photography during the Weimar Republic documents a key phase in photography’s history; a coalescence of technical advance and aesthetic exploration with social and political ferment. The end of Kaiser Wilhelm’s empire dealt a sharp blow to the structure of German society. The new republican government had introduced universal suffrage. The new photographers refused to mask the technical nature of their means of expression any longer; they also rejected all the romantic imagery that had been popular hitherto. The Cologne group of the ‘progressive artists’ included a rather marginal photographer whose methods of operation were not representative of the avant-garde. His name was August Sander. New newspapers and magazines were founded in Germany both immediately after the First World War and also in the mid-twenties.
