‘A Strange Tissue of Space and Time:’ Modernist Photobooks and Reproductive Value

German Studies Conference, Atlanta, October 2024, Session: Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Reconsidered

August Sander, Brick Layer, 1928

Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ coincided with the centrality of photographs to the illustrated press, to magazines and journalism, led by advances in printing technologies, progressive publishing houses and innovations in avant-garde modernism. At the same time, photobooks provided an unprecedented means for photographers to disseminate their work beyond the studio or exhibitionary models, directly to an enthusiastic audience. The same benefits of mass-reproduction were recognised as a means to reach the wider public to disseminate social, cultural or political material. Suffice to say the photobook was central to the development of modernist practice and thought across the literary and visual arts (Parr and Badger, 2004). 

This paper considers the rise of modernist photobooks as a reliable means of reproductive technology, and as a radical format for the widespread dissemination of modernist aesthetics. From August Sander and Germaine Krull to Heinrich Hoffmann, modernist photobooks portrayed both the ‘everyday’ and the visual languages of politics and propaganda.