Lothar Brieger’s Das Frauengesicht der Gegenwart (1930): a twofold perspective on women’s photography in the Weimar Republic

Abstract

Historians have now commonly acknowledged how the photographic atlas, in its many forms – perhaps the most celebrated being Aby Warbug’s Atlas Mnemosyne – had been employed in Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic as an extraordinary epistemological device to conduct historical, political, psychological and more broadly culturological investigations. And yet, some declinations of the device-atlas still remain singularly unstudied. This is the case with Das Frauengesicht der Gegenwart (The Face of the Women of the Present). The subject of the proposed contribution. Published in 1930 by the art historian Lothar Brieger, shortly before racial laws forced him to leave Germany, this photographic book (71 pages out of 135 are photographic plates) was realized with the aim of celebrating female self-affirmation against the conservative tendencies that were beginning to spread in the ascendant National Socialist society, constituting perhaps the most intense, and the last, representation of the Neue Frau in the German context. In the article, a dual perspective will be adopted. On the one hand, Brieger’s thought will be analyzed in dialogue with the main theories of photography of his time (above all, that of his friend Walter Benjamin, whose wife, Dora Kellner, is included in the portraits). On the other hand, the photographs in the book themselves will also be considered separately from their theoretical framework, investigating the view of the “modern woman” proposed by their material authors, the – long forgotten – female photographers Nini and Carry Hess.