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

Abstract

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 theorization. The central argument of this article 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. The reading and reception of prevalent trends in German photography theory has been greatly problematized because German photographic production, its history and surrounding discourses were divided from 1961 onwards, with the partition of Germany and the construction of the Berlin Wall. This German photographic paradigm has been largely ignored because of the historical and political rupture inaugurated by the Cold War. Via the construction of a brief comparative sketch of East and West German theoretical approaches to photography, this essay will maintain that these discourses offer crucial new ways of reconsidering photography in relation to visuality (as opposed to textuality), and, more specifically, in terms of the politics of seeing and the subject-object dialectic. If theories surrounding photography since the 1970s have sought to deconstruct the positivist, epistemological and aesthetic burden of its modernity, the German paradigm reveals that Anglo-American approaches to the medium have been equally encumbered by their postmodernity. In this German paradigm, it will be argued, we are given a model for a valuable dialectical and materialist rethinking of photography at a time when theorizing appears to have reached a critical stalemate.