Output details

Photography’s Theoretical Blind Spots: Looking at the German Paradigm

Research imperative and process: This article offers the first English-language introduction to postwar German photographic theory. In the last few decades, German photographic thought has remained neglected by the majority of Anglo-American scholars, who have instead pursued poststructuralist or postmodern approaches to photography’s theorisation. James makes available a range of previously untranslated material which was uncovered during several years of close archival research. The article’s central argument is that, largely because of the absence of postmodernism and poststructuralism in the German context, a very different “photographic paradigm” may be understood to have developed in Germany; one which instead of debunking such modernist values as objectivity, autonomy, and aesthetics, has instead reinvested them with dialectical and political possibilities. Based largely on doctoral and postdoctoral research carried out whilst a Humboldt scholar in Berlin, the article argues that this German photographic paradigm has been largely ignored because of the historical and political rupture inaugurated by the Cold War. The material in the article is entirely independent from the contents of her book Common Ground.