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Common Ground: German Photographic Cultures Across the Iron Curtain

Common Ground is the first English-language study of German postwar photography. James examines a range of postwar documentary projects in both East and West Germany from the 1950s to the 1990s, with a particular focus on the ‘social forms’ of photography, understood in terms of the experiential models anchored in their different uses of seriality, repetition and sameness. Each project is contextualised in relation to Soviet, American and European photographic developments, and in relation to the various conceptions of agency and selfhood prevalent in postwar German culture, and which emerged in dialogue with the specific political, cultural and economic events which defined the Cold War period. Based on ten years of close archival research, it is the first book to look comparatively at East and West German photography, and to explore the legacies of Weimar photographic culture in the two Germanies of the postwar Cold War period.