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Throughout Germany’s tumultuous twentieth century, photography was an indispensable form of documentation. Whether acting as artists, witnesses, or reformers, both professional and amateur photographers chronicled social worlds through successive periods of radical upheaval. The Ethics of Seeing brings together an international group of scholars to explore the complex relationship between the visual and the historic in German history. Emphasizing the transformation of the visual arena and the ways in which ordinary people made sense of world events, these revealing case studies illustrate photography’s multilayered role as a new form of representation, a means to subjective experience, and a fresh mode of narrating the past.
“The contributions of the volume are almost invariably subtle, insightful and illuminating…What [they] demonstrate, with exceptional clarity, is that no German history is complete without photography—and that geographical boundaries and chronological sub-divisions of this history we have come to take for granted are often challenged by the way images and ways of seeing moved across them.” • German History
“Asking what photographs ‘do’ to history is a deceivingly simple question with pressing and increasingly complex answers for historians working in the digital age. As such, this book is both essential reding for scholars delving into visual history as well as a helpful guide for historians considering the ethical implications of photography and its uses in the modern era.” • German Studies Review
“In the work’s epilogue, Julia Adeney Thomas reminds readers that photography is fraught with moral questions, and photographers and viewers alike need to develop an ethics for the medium. This is a welcome conclusion to a volume, the premise of which is in many ways fundamentally moral.” • Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
“…traditionally, photographs have been treated as a kind of secondary or tertiary source with which apprentice historians should engage only after they master the ‘real’ or ‘more important’ meat and potatoes of the historical profession: the traditional archival document.…The contributors to The Ethics of Seeing do a tremendous service by challenging this orthodoxy. The issue this volume raises, then, is not only ‘What can the scholarly methods of history tell us about photographs?’ but also ‘What can photographs tell us about historical method?’” • The German Quarterly
“The Ethics of Seeing gathers together very useful and highly readable contributions to the history of German photography. These stimulating essays give a broad perspective on the German twentieth century, and in many cases address important gaps in the historical record.” • Simon Ward, Durham University
“This is a profoundly important contribution to the field. It analyzes an impressively wide range of photographic materials—including artistic, scientific, vernacular, queer, colonial, institutional, and journalistic sources—in a way that enriches art history while also addressing the specific concerns of historians working in visual culture.” • Donna West Brett, The University of Sydney
Jennifer Evans is Professor of Modern European History at Carleton University in Ottawa Canada. She has co-edited several books on same-sex desire in twentieth-century Europe, including Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945 (2014) and Was ist Homosexualität? (2014), in addition to her monograph Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (2011). She recently edited a special issue of German History entitled “Queering German History.”
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Photography as an Ethics of Seeing
Jennifer Evans
Chapter 1. Thoughts on Photography and the Practice of History
Elizabeth Edwards
Chapter 2. Seeing the ‘Savage’ and the Suspension of Time: Photography, War and Concentration Camps in South West Africa, 1904-1908
Claudia Siebrecht
Chapter 3. The “Face of War” in Weimar Visual Culture
Annelie Ramsbrock
Chapter 4. Documenting Heimkehr: Photography, Displacement and “Homecoming” in the Nazi Resettlement of Ethnic Germans, 1939-1940
Elizabeth Harvey
Chapter 5. Visible Trophies of War: German Occupiers’ Photographic Perceptions of France, 1940-44
Julia Torrie
Chapter 6. Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual Experience
Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann
Chapter 7. Edmund Kesting’s Polyphonic Portraits and the Abstract Face of the Socialist Self in East Germany
Sarah E. James
Chapter 8. Seeing Subjectivity: Erotic Photography and the Optics of Desire
Jennifer Evans
Chapter 9. Photographing Reurbanization in West Berlin, 1977-84
Anna Ross
Chapter 10. The Diversification of East Germany’s Visual Culture
Candice M. Hamelin
Chapter 11. The Intimacy of Revolution: 1989 in Pictures
Paul Betts
Epilogue: Hope Flies, Death Dances: Moving Toward an Ethics of Seeing
Julia Adeney Thomas
Index