Photography and Germany by Andrés Mario Zervigón (review)

Photography and Germany was published as part of the Exposures series of Reaktion Books, which explores the photographic medium through a range of thematic perspectives. Such an approach emphasizes the diversity of photographic practices rather than a coherent and linear history. While Photography and Germany is one of several in the series that explores photography in the context of a specific nation, Zervigón smartly chooses not to define a national photographic style. The inchoate and conflicted nature of German nationhood during most of the medium's history complicates any attempt to identify what is German about German photography. And the breathtaking variety of the ways that photography has permeated modernity challenges the identification of features common to all photographic practices. Both the photographic medium and the German nation are too contested to define a stable relationship between them. Instead of presenting German photography as something consistent and visually recognizable, Zervigón incorporates an impressive range of photographic practices within each chronologically defined chapter—press photography, archival documents, film stills, amateur snapshots, and artistic practices all contribute to Zervigón's complex presentation of Germany's turbulent photographic history.

Zervigón demonstrates the importance of photography to Germany's repeated attempts to define its identity. One might argue that this approach seems safe to apply to any medium and any nation. And as the Exposures series suggests, Germany is just one of many perspectives through which to understand the history of photography. Yet Zervigón convincingly shows that there is something specific about the relationship between this medium and this nation; that is, both are defined by turbulence and inconsistency. At some moments, photographic practices mythologize a burgeoning nation, as in the composite prints of Johann Anselm Heinrich Schnäbeli that claim to document an event at which no cameras were present: the proclamation of the German Empire at the Palace of Versailles in 1871. At other moments, photography enforces the dissolution of a nation, as when photographs of Nazi concentration camps were used to shame and demoralize the German public after World War II. Coherence and unity eluded both photography and Germany for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Zervigón so eloquently puts it, "the history of photography in Germany is the history of the country's troubled encounter with modernity, realized in visual form" (8).

To convey the diversity of photographic practices related to notions of Germany, Zervigón presents a remarkable collection of lesser-known examples. His stated goal is to expand the reader's associations of German photography beyond "pioneering modernist pictures from the Weimar era or colossal digital prints" (7). In the book's first chapter on photography's earliest years, Zervigón provides a wealth of unfamiliar examples of early photographic practices from German-speaking lands. The chapter provides a sort of alternative to more traditional histories of the invention of photography, as activities in France and England usually dominate discussions of the period from 1839 to 1870. But Zervigón's point is not to recuperate the role of German speakers in the development of early photography. Rather, he explores how efforts by artists, scientists, and historians to claim photography as a German invention disclose anxieties about the belatedness of German nationhood. German speakers before national unification in 1871 enthusiastically embraced photography to visually define German identity. However, definitions of German identity were contested and diverse. Participation in rituals of modern citizenship might have motivated members of a developing middle class to capture their likeness in a daguerreotype, but Zervigón admits that there is nothing particularly German about these early portraits. German identity is thus both dependent on and at odds with pan-European notions of the middle class. These early daguerreotypes visualize the complexities of citizenship; they assert some sense of national specificity while also adapting to developing habits of bourgeois standardization.

The complexities of German identity persist long after nationhood is achieved in 1871. In fact, the seriality and reproducibility of...