National socialism : Heinz von Perckhammer, photographer of the Uncanny

Paris in the morning. In front of the portico of the Palais de Chaillot, a handful of people to run, on the horizon looms out of the mist of the Eiffel tower. The romantic city-Idyll, however, is only apparent. At the second glance shows that three of the dark people are silhouettes of soldiers of the Wehrmacht. It is the year 1940. And Heinz von Perckhammer photographed in the order of the national socialists.

How closely the Aesthetics and politics are entangled, is currently in the berlinische Galerie to study. There is a room presentation of the Collection is dedicated to the hardly researched photographers Perckhammer, whose work was lit in the Wake of the Thomas-Friedrich-scholarship for photography research by Kathrin Schönegg. The exhibition presents photographs from all phases and allows a glimpse into the aesthetic and political development of the photographer.

From the New See national socialism

Perckhammer, 1895 born in Merano in the South Tyrolean Alps, where his father was operating a Studio, had actually don't want to be a photographer. The prisoner of war made him. As a control a sailor, he came in the First world war, on Board of the cruiser "SMS Kaiserin Elisabeth" to Qingdao and fell into Japanese captivity. After 1918 he remained in China and was commissioned by the Chinese government; until 1927 he returned to Europe. His pictures from the Asian Emperor fluctuate between documentary curiosity and mythologizing of Orientalization. If a little Boy looks up with surprised eyes wide in the camera, blur it in a mystifying blur, reminiscent of the style of the piktoria lists. Other Times, there are snapshots of street scenes, the show about the status of a food stall.

in 1928, opened Perckhammer on the Kurfürstendamm, a photo Studio, and published three books with his images of China, including such certificates of stereotypical Fetishization of Asian women as "Edle nacktheit in China". The images, the designs Perckhammer during the Weimar period as a Reportage and Illustration, photography, still appear quite in the style of the modernist photography of the New vision: strong contrasts, a fragmented cut-outs, unusual perspectives. Once, he photographed a gallery of Mannequin heads that appear in their oscillation between the Animate and the Inanimate, as a pattern example of the Uncanny.

at Least as scary to the aesthetic change, the Perckhammers photography draws after that. In the thirties, he travels as a photo reporter by the German Empire. His recordings are now in the service of national socialism. Even more clearly than in the images of Hitler youth marches in those Works, the transport, the NS-ideology. For example, when he positioned a woman in costume in front of a windmill in a Cornfield and shy, with a smile Ear-down look. The difference compared to the photos taken by Perckhammer in the decade prior to that – including many Nudes – could hardly be greater.

Show the propaganda effect of photography

of All the issued recordings, the photography is as a Medium for political Propaganda so important. Unlike the word the photo is wearing a graphic picture of the effect of the evidence: that what it shows has been so once. And it is this evidence is effect, not just on the purely Visible, but the photo Implied. In other words, the ideological content can be conveyed with immediate effect visually. This is the point at which politics and Aesthetics in one fall. This congruence can be Perckhammers photos from the Nazi era. About on that out of the reverence of the sub view of the recorded image on the front of a dramatic high-contrast clouds in the sky, the black silhouettes of two Wehrmacht soldiers in the same angle of the sky dome as their anti-aircraft gun. Or those shots of Joseph Goebbels, the father, to stage him as an approachable family. Perckhammer portrayed a politician of the Nazi party and worked as a war reporter in Europe.

the small exhibition – beyond the question of political Involvement Perckhammers allowed – just because of the aesthetic opportunism of the photographs an insight into the processes in which history is crystallized in the images of their time.

crisis in 1930, the beginning of The end of the Weimar Republic

berlinische Galerie, Alte jakobstraße 124-128, to 11. March, Wed–mon 10-18 clock