| In the last years of the Weimar Republic, photographers and publishers produced books that consisted almost entirely of sequenced images. These books covered a wide variety of subjects: from plants and nature to the modern metropolis, from exotic cultures to the German Volk, from anonymous workers to historical figures. While scholars have focused on the content of photographic books, my approach addresses how the display and sequencing of photographs relate to contemporary debates on modern visual experiences. Through close analyses of photographic books by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Karl Blossfeldt, Helmar Lerski, and August Sander, this dissertation explores the contemporary issues of perception and the complex relationships between reading and seeing, photography and film, that these books invoke.;As part of its analysis of Weimar photographic books, this study recasts the photographic medium as a product of dialogues and relations between disparate formats. It focuses on intersections of diverse and often contradictory aspects of photographic meaning---image and text, stillness and motion---thereby emphasizing the incoherency of the medium. The accumulation of images within books reinforced photography's promise to represent the world in an efficient and thorough way that suited the hectic pace of modern life. Photographic books ultimately staged dialectics of unity and fragmentation, coherence and discord that were at the heart of visual experiences in the Weimar Republic. They contributed to debates on the shifting boundaries between image and text, the human capacity for attention and distraction, changing conceptions of knowledge and history, and the revival of physiognomic studies. |
