From Science to Fashion: Photography and the Production of a Surrogate Colony in Weimar Germany

Abstract

This article examines German colonial cultures in the post-World War I period following Germany’s loss of a colonial empire. Photography had long been embedded in both the practical and ideological production of empire, but after 1918 took on an especially significant role in constructing a ‘surrogate colony’ that kept the colonial idea alive in the absence of direct colonial rule. The dynamics of this surrogate colony are especially evident in the publications of the organised colonial movement. Drawing on these publications, I argue that the colonial movement produced a surrogate colony that was as much about the management of gendered and racialised German populations as it was about propagandising for a return to colonial rule. Photography played a key role in bringing together two areas that underlay this gendered and racialised dynamic: science and commercial culture. I thus begin by tracing the way in which photographic scientific cultures, in particular in the fields of medicine, anthropology, and racial science, shaped the contours of the surrogate colony. These scientific cultures emerged in an unstable relationship with mass commercial photographic cultures, with the article then turning to an exploration of ‘colonial fashion photography’. The foregrounding of clothing and bodies in this photography highlights the complex relationship between scientific and commercial photography, which is shown to be deeply implicated in the production of racialised and gendered forms of embodiment.