Catalogue | Faces

The Power of the Human Visage.

Starting with Helmar Lerski’s outstanding photo series Metamorphosis through Light from 1935/36, this volume presents portraits from the period of the Weimar Republic. During the 1920s and ’30s, photographers radically revised the conventional understanding of the portrait. No longer were photographs intended to show the personality of the subject, rather the face was viewed as material for staging the photographer’s ideas and aesthetic agenda, and so negotiate considerations of the avant-garde as well as socio-political developments of the time. It was thus that modernist experiments, the relationship between individual and type, feminist role playing, and political ideologies collided in—and thereby expanded—the general understanding of portrait photography.