Vanessa Rocco - Photofascism

Photofascism

Visual Cultures and German Contexts

Series Editors:

Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)Thomas O. Haakenson (California College of the Arts, USA)

Visual Cultures and German Contextspublishes innovative research into visual culture in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well as in diasporic linguistic and cultural communities outside of these geographic, historical, and political borders.

The series invites scholarship by academics, curators, architects, artists, and designersacross all media forms and time periods. It engages with traditional methods in visual culture analysis as well as inventive interdisciplinary approaches. It seeks to encourage a dialogue amongst scholars in traditional disciplines with those pursuing innovative interdisciplinary and intermedial research. Of particular interest are provocativeperspectives on archival materials, original scholarship on emerging and established creative visual fields, investigations into time-based forms of aesthetic expression, and new readings of history through the lens of visual culture. The series offers a muchneeded venue for expanding how we engage with the field of Visual Culture in general.

Proposals for monographs, edited volumes, and outstanding research studies are welcome, by established as well as emerging writers from a wide range of comparative, theoretical and methodological perspectives.

Advisory Board

Donna West Brett, University of Sydney, Australia

Charlotte Klonk, Humboldt Universitt Berlin, Germany

Nina Lbbren, Anglia Ruskin University, UK

Maria Makela, California College of the Arts, USA

Patrizia C. McBride, Cornell University, USA

Rick McCormick, University of Minnesota, USA

Elizabeth Otto, University at Buffalo SUNY, USA

Kathryn Starkey, Stanford University, USA

Annette F. Timm, University of Calgary, Canada

James A. van Dyke, University of Missouri, USA

Titles in the Series:

Art and Resistance in Germany , edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto

Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernisms Legendary Art School , edited by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rssler

Berlin Contemporary: Architecture and Politics after 1990, by Julia Walker

Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy , by Vanessa Rocco

Single People and Mass Housing in Germany and Beyond, 18501930: (No)Home Away from Home , by Erin Eckhold Sassin

Photofascism

Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy

Vanessa Rocco

Contents

Right at the start, I would like to thank the staff at Bloomsbury Visual Arts, as well as the editors of the Visual Cultures and German Contexts series, Deborah Asher Barnstone and Thomas O. Haakenson. This project simply would not have seen the light of day without them. The foundation of this book project goes all the way back to 2004 when I completed my dissertation (Before Film und Foto: Pictorialism to Modernism in Germany Photography Exhibitions 1909-1929) at the CUNY Graduate Center. Although the bulk of the writing has been done in the last six years, when a project goes on for this long it means there are many people to thank.

I would like to thank my dissertation committee who believed in the importance of the project before many people were writing about exhibition histories: Drs. Rose-Carol Washton Longmy adviserand Rosemarie Bletter were my lead readers. Photography historian Dr. Geoffrey Batchen and Distinguished Professor of History Dr. Richard Wolin added extremely important critiques and context. After many years as a curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP), I returned to the dissertation as a book project, and my colleagues at ICP were extremely supportive of my research, particularly then-director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator Brian Wallis. Christopher Phillips served as my consistent mentor at ICP, both curatorially and with scholarly advice, given that he is one of the pioneers of exhibition culture research. The exhibitions that I installed at ICP introduced me to other key scholars in the fields of photography as well as exhibition studies, namely Drs. Elizabeth Otto, Jordana Mendelson, and Andrs Zervign, to whom I returned repeatedly for advice over the years.

Participating in the book project Public Photographic Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda from Pressa to the Family of Man