Reading Montage: German and American Photo-Books and the Construction of Historical Memory.

Reading Montage: German and American Photo-Books and the Construction of Historical Memory ; Andrea Nelson ; PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota, Department of Art History ; email: nels1646@umn.edu ; Through an examination of photo-books-projects that employ a sequence of images to construct visual arguments-my paper will critically examine the logic of montage in order to articulate its effects on visual culture and historical memory. Montage was not simply the practice of combining, overlapping, and repeating photographic fragments in order to produce a discontinuous and shocking image, but was a newly emerging cultural model which included archival projects that collected and structured photographic narratives. The logic of montage involves the suspension of contradictions: montage both disrupts and assembles; it is both critically subversive and ideological; it is neither pure integrity nor pure rupture. Montage proceeds via its interstices, its gaps; the sites of its meanings are the places 'between' the elements of which it is comprised. As a model of visual culture, montage produces doubt about representational truth, especially photography's direct relationship with reality. Therefore through rupture, satire, and sequencing, montage reveals the constructedness of all visual representations. Yet at the same time, it has a deep association with the visual mastery associated with commodification and capitalism. As a model of history, montage offers a non-linear "anti-narrative" characterized by disjuncture and discontinuity. Yet, it also offers an image of the historical narrative constructed out of the fragments of events, and in this sense it is characterized by building, collecting, and engineering. Thus, on one hand it disrupts temporality, but on the other, it has the capacity to show events over time, to suggest duration and development in a more visual and spatial manner. I will argue that photo-books were critical in the development of a complex visual literacy established by the widespread use of mechanically reproduced imagery produced for and received by a mass audience from 1920-1940. The development of photo-magazines and the illustrated press in Germany had a visible effect on mass media in the US. My paper will examine German and American photo-books such as Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield's Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles (1929), Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold, ed. Foto-Auge (1929), M. Lincoln Schuster, ed. Eyes on the World: A Photographic Record of History in the Making (1935), and Walker Evans' American Photographs (1938). These examples reveal the conflicting relationship between image and text as the most effective means of communicating knowledge and history. Many photo-books were understood to be self-explanatory, but what exactly were they saying? In order to analyze these projects, I will examine the writings of Walter Benjamin, who proposes that the process of history is recollection, a space of remembrance, and that memory disrupts historical continuity with political interpretation. According to Benjamin, history is understood in spatial terms, bound into images, not stories, and the task of the historian as technician is to collect, scrutinize, and assemble fragmentary images and insights into a powerful montage that would be read collectively. The role of mass culture in the construction of historical memory is discussed not only by Benjamin but also by other contemporary writers such as Siegfried Kracauer, who argues that widespread photographic production actually devastates the memory image. In general, scholars have looked at montage incompletely, often focusing on its stylistic effects and debating its exact definition via materials and processes rather than examining montage as a broader cultural phenomenon. In addition, the photo-book has not been established in the critical literature of the history of photography nor art history. An examination into the logic of montage is not only important for the history of modernism, but is also relevant to today's experience
mass media and photographic imagery. Montage is now always everywhere. The use of the internet in knowledge consumption and production is one example of how today we think in montage as hyperlink text leads us to new information sources in an overlapping and serial manner. In mass media, montage still balances precariously between political efficacy and superficial appropriation.


Citaten:
Tucholsky, Kurt: Deutschland (1929)
Roh, F. / Tschichold, J.: Foto-Auge: 76 Fotos der Zeit (1929)
Evans, W.: American Photographs (1938)
Schuster, M. Lincoln ( ed.): Eyes on the World: A Photographic Record of History in the Making (1935)