HAMBURG.- ReVision. Photography at the MKG is the first exhibition to offer an overview of the exceptional holdings of the Photography and New Media Collection at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, which spans the period from the early days of photography to the present and currently comprises around 75,000 exhibits. As far back as the late nineteenth century, the MKG was the first museum in Germany to open its doors to the medium of photography. In doing so, it helped break new ground: it purchased photographs as a medium in their own right, established photography as a focus of the collection, and began presenting it in exhibitions in 1911. Since those days, the MKG has been the only museum in Germany to add continually to its photo collection. ReVision is the result of a review of the holdings and a readjustment of perspective. In the exhibition, the MKG takes another look – and in some cases the first look ever – at its photographic works, with a special emphasis on the collection’s diversity and heterogeneity as well as the various functions of the medium, both artistic and non-artistic. It spotlights the canonical, unknown and rediscovered, incuding photography as historical document, scientific aid and artistic work. Divided into five sections, the exhibition approaches photography from different perspectives and sheds light on individual focuses of the collection: on identity-establishing portraits, supposedly objective reproductions, dedicated photojournalistic reports for the press, a style known as pictorialism that sought to compete with painting, and abstract photography conceived as an autonomous art form. Emerging from the nineteenth century onward, all these many facets of photography join to document how changes in the medium have influenced human communication while at the same time contemplating and evaluating the images that surround us on an everyday basis. More than 200 exhibits are on show, among them albumin prints, c-prints, daguerreotypes, photochromic prints, glass negatives, rubber prints, heliographic prints, kalotypes, oil, pigment, platinic and gelatine silver prints. An extensive collection catalogue accompanies the exhibition providing insights into one of Germany’s most prominent museum photography collections.

Portraits: Photography as likeness or staged vignette
The portraits of the actor Friedrich Haase and the photographs taken by August Sander mark opposite extremes of possible approaches to portrait photography. In the first case, the staging suggests that the persona of the sitter is changeable, showing him assuming different roles, while the latter case manifests the belief that an individual’s face invariably expresses certain immutable character traits. The portfolio of likenesses of Haase the actor shows him as Hamlet, a French musician, or Narcissus. He is acting here of course, but what about the Bavarian Worker, the Painter, the Shorthand Typist, and the Young Fruit Vendor whom Helmar Lerski shows and names in his Everyday Faces? Are their occupations written on their faces? And what of the portraits by August Sander, who, in the “Portfolio of Archetypes” that introduces his People of the Twentieth Century, shows us twelve farmers and farm workers as individuals to whom he ascribes archetypal attributes: The Fighter or Revolutionary, The Philosopher or The Earthbound Man? Many photographers trust in the use of the close-up to suggest intimacy with the subject, while others show people in their everyday surroundings as members of a trade or profession, a social class, or a family, or as societal outsiders. Who are we and who do we aspire to be? Photography plays a vital role in our self-definition and how we find an identity for ourselves within society.

Reportage: Photography as printed image
Technical advances that enabled photographs to appear on the printed page led in the 1910s to illustrated magazines and thus to photojournalism as a new photographic genre. Photo stories were designed to both entertain and inform. In the 1960s, photographers used political reportage to comment on the ills of society and denounce social injustice. Such reports were associated with hopes to change the world. A reportage photographer works in a collective, sharing the decision on what statement is to be made with an image with the author of the accompanying text and the magazine’s art director and graphic artists. Nevertheless, the printed magazine page remained the vehicle of choice for many photographers until well into the 1970s, because nowhere else could they reach such a large audience. The photographic prints that serve as working material for editors later find their way into museums, where they are collected under aesthetic aspects as autonomous images. In our exhibition, the reportage photographs are exhibited in their original publication context in order to reverse the museological reinterpretation of the images as independent works of art and focus instead on their function as a medium for reporting on pertinent issues. When television rose to become the dominant medium in the 1970s, photo spreads in magazines shrank at the same time as skepticism was growing regarding the commercial use of photography as a massmedia product. In theoretical circles as well, humanistic photography underwent a crisis: despite all good intentions, it was accused of photographically exploiting the victims shown and thus mirroring the hierarchy of a world dominated by white men.

Pictorialism: Photography as the desire to create art
Is photography art? This question was answered towards the end of the 19th century by the art photography movement known as Pictorialism with a resounding “yes.” Fine art photographers strove to free photography from the shackles of objective documentation while setting it on a par with painting. The members of the Hamburg School in the orbit of the Hofmeister brothers were key players in the movement. During the same period, centers also formed in London, Paris, and Edinburgh, along with the Wiener Kleeblatt (Vienna Trefoil) co-founded by Heinrich Kühn, and in New York the PhotoSecession inaugurated by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. As early as 1916, the MKG already acquired a unique inventory of Pictorialist works from Hamburg collector Ernst Wilhelm Juhl, today one of the highlights of the collection. Fine art photographers such as Alvin Langdon Coburn and James Craig Annan made new prints from negatives by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, the “old masters” of artistic photography, who were already making salt prints in the 1840s. For art photography around 1900, a perfectly executed gelatin silver, pigment, or gum bichromate print was just as relevant as questions of sharpness of focus, tonal values, and lighting effects. In numerous studies, the Pictorialists tried to imbue their images with the desired mood by using different printing techniques and thus to create a perfect work of art. The size of the picture also expresses the will to create art: the larger the format, the more the photograph resembles a painting and becomes an object with the status of an artwork. Original frames emphasize this effect and identify the works as decorative art. These works attest to fact that size does matter!

Reproduction: Photography as a mere tool?
Photographic reproductions of sculptures and decorative objects were produced in the second half of the 19th century and successfully marketed as accurate documents of the object. They helped art history to advance as an academic discipline, putting illustrative material on scholars’ desks. At the same time, photographs of still lifes or plants, such as Constant Alexandre Famin’s Études d’après nature provided templates for painting and decorative arts. Today, these early photographs fascinate us due to their special aura. But they also give us insights into past art reproduction practices. The various backgrounds chosen for the photographs – brighter or darker, monochrome or with a color gradient—along with the viewpoint selected indicate varying standards in reproduction technology. In the early days of photography, sculptures were photographed in order to provide exact duplicates for the contemporary viewer, with the photographer seeking to capture one “correct” angle. In the 1920s by contrast, photographers such as Walter Hege walked around the object and photographically interpreted it from various viewpoints – thus blurring the boundaries between pure reproduction and work of art. Museum collections were also catalogued photographically at an early date. Wilhelm Weimar, an employee of Justus Brinckmann, the founding director of the MKG, photographed the museum’s holdings around 1900 for storage on glass negatives. These images enable an archival ordering system to be implemented by acting as proxies for the objects. For contemporary artists, the various facets of photographic reproducibility have themselves become the subject of artworks.

Abstraction: Photographs as autonomous works of art
In the 1920s, photographers began to insist on the autonomous character of photography. What is photographic about photography? By what means is it created? The goal was to free photography from the constraint of representing reality. Artists such as Christian Schad and László Moholy-Nagy experimented in the darkroom with the tools of the medium— light and form—to create non-objective images, thus expanding the realm of photography. The resulting Schadographs and photograms, made without a camera using light-sensitive paper, pushed the boundaries of the medium. In the 1950s, the protagonists of Subjective Photography around Otto Steinert drew on the experiments of the 1920s to demonstrate that photography was a variable medium true only unto itself. Experiments were carried out with negative prints and the materiality of films and photographic paper, images were doused with glue, or abstract graphics were created with the help of light and chemistry. Other photographers took the opposite tack: they sought their motifs in the world around them and then abstracted its forms and structures by looking at them from new angles or framing them in unusual ways. Classic motifs such as the sea and clouds were joined here by new subjects including anti-aircraft fire, shadow games, and serial patterns.