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A new look at the history of photography

This book on the exhibition at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen is a novelty; for the first time, it attempts to leave the traditional approach behind and focus on the respective functional context using historical photographs taken before 1920. In recent years, there has been no serious presentation of photography without reference to its documentary character and to Roland Barthes' "This is how it was". Indeed, a documentary character has even been constructed for art, where the images have long since been digital or subject to manipulation by various image programmes. It was not only here that it became clear that the documentary function of the image is embedded in highly heterogeneous and often surprising areas of application - a photograph, for example, can be used to remember someone or to search for them by the police. Especially now, when the development of contemporary photography seems to have come to a standstill, it seems obvious to simply collate the images according to what they were used for. To do this, the modes of use must of course be described with historical precision and without any dominance of a perspective originating from the present, and typologically analysed and sorted. This voluminous volume does exactly this and shows the sometimes strange, puzzling and even curious aims that have been pursued with photography throughout history. One example of the diverse and changeable relationships that can be created through photography is the photographing of animals. For a long time, photographs of breeding successes played a special role. A mostly male animal - stallion, bull or buck - was presented in a lateral pose in front of a white cloth so that its breed characteristics were particularly clearly legible in profile. The prize-winning animals had to become pictures so that they could become role models for later breeders. The volume provides many examples from the world of nature, the world of man and the world of artefacts for such a gain in knowledge and thus becomes a journey of discovery on which the world of photography seems to emerge anew.

Exhibitions:
Villa Merkel, Esslingen, 15/12/2013 - 16/2/2014
Jena Art Museum, 13/12/2014 - 1/3/2015