Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant-Garde, the MIT Press, 2022.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/paper-revolutions

Paper Revolutions explores the practice of a uniquely placed group of artists working in the former East Germany from the 1940s to the end of the 1980s: Hermann Glöckner, Carlfriedrich Claus, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Karla Sachse. Despite the generational differences, the profound diversity in their artistic outputs, and the sharp disparities between their individual experiences of life in the German Democratic Republic, the artists examined in Paper Revolutions shared a radical commitment to the utopian and collective possibilities of art, as well as to Marxist and utopian political thought. They also championed the kinds of ephemeral practices often marginalised by traditional art history: postcards, concrete poetry, maquettes and book illustrations, imaginatively exploiting specific means and media to present and distribute their work such as the portfolio, the album, the artists’ book and the letter.

Up until recently the artists examined in Paper Revolutions have been entirely neglected by Western art history, and are still misunderstood as a result of the Cold War biases and ideological divisions that have continued to shape popular interpretations of ‘unofficial’ art in the former Eastern-Bloc. These artists operated under bureaucratic state socialism and later ‘actually existing socialism’ and largely developed their artistic practices outside of the institutions and markets that simultaneously defined the postwar practices of the capitalist West. This meant pursuing art as a kind of ‘life work’ – living as artists and remaining committed to an artistic practice but often without the expectation of regular exhibitions, publications, public recognition, in some cases without any professional artistic training.     

The book considers their work in terms of the communities, friendships, families, and places within which it emerged and that it sustained - rethinking its relationship to socialism, Marxism, solidarity, collectivity and utopian thinking. As well as situating the work in relation to the interwar avant-garde, Paper Revolutions also re-engages with the alternative socialist futures their work sought, offering new configurations and conceptions regarding the relationship between art practice, collective desire, activism, radical solidarity and socialism in the present.

 Endorsements/Reviews:

“This fascinating study exposes a lifeworld of intimate and sustaining vanguard artistic exchanges that thrived in unofficial corners of the East German regime. Sidestepping tired Cold War narratives of East German art, Sarah James’s poignant account also situates these objects and exchanges within a legacy of Marxist utopianism that surfaced in the German Weimar Republic and continues to resurface in imaginings of a better world today.”
—Barbara McCloskey, Professor of Art History, University of Pittsburgh; author of The Exile of George Grosz: Modernism, America, and the One World Order

“Paper Revolutions brings us a much-needed scholarly account of fiercely original but little known ‘avant-garde’ art made under socialism, including work by Hermann Glöckner and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt.”
—Christine Mehring, Mary L. Block Professor of Art History and the College, University of Chicago; Faculty Adjunct Curator, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art; author of Ellsworth Kelly: Color Panels for a Large Wall

The Militant & the Mainstream: Remaking British Photographic Culture

The book project examines the relationship between photojournalism, Leftist politics, activism, protest and working class culture in Britain from the 1930s to the 1950s. It does so by focusing on the practice of a number of émigrés who played a crucial role in the remaking of British photographic culture from the 1930s to the 1950s, including Stefan Lorant, Edith Tudor-Hart, Bill Brandt, Kurt Hutton, Felix H. Man and Gerti Deutsch. Fleeing due to their anti-fascist beliefs, Leftist, socialist or Marxist politics or Jewish backgrounds, in each case these figures actively adopted new British identities, albeit often with conflicting results. The book argues that the practice of these European refugees radically reconfigured British photo-culture, importing elements of the experimental image-making and visual cultures of the prewar European avant-garde, alongside more mainstream European photographic modernism. Yet in each case the specific context of the UK gave shape to a very distinctive kind of British photographic modernity. By interrogating the politics of image-making in tandem with the production of a photo-literate audience, the book charts the making of a mass British photographic public, capable of reading the often ambivalent and complex meanings produced by serial photography, essays and juxtapositions.

The majority of persuasive art historical accounts since the 1970s have critiqued the instability, precarity and ‘collapse’ of photographic meaning as well as the problematic instrumentalisation of documentary images within the photojournalistic field of this period. In contrast, pivoting on the central idea of the political, aesthetic, ideological, semantic and literal mobility of the photojournalistic image, The Militant & the Mainstream argues that such mobility enabled the image to produce multiple, contradictory and complex meanings, political effects and affects, enabling a potentially radical ambivalence. It proposes that the complex illustrated magazine image culture of these decades produced readers who were trained to habitually decode the double-meanings and conflicting contexts through which images travelled, from the fraught displacements and political exploitation of images in the aftermath of WWII to the new ideological divisions and double-bluffs of a global Cold War visual culture.

The book balances close readings of photo-essays with a broader understanding of how they functioned within the public sphere, and, specifically, in the remaking of both Leftist militant and mainstream Liberal photographic cultures and publics. The editorial agendas and political projects of the newspapers and magazines under discussion are situated in relation to the communist movement in the UK; the postwar reconstruction of Britain from the establishment of the welfare state and national health service, to debates surrounding a minimum wage, child allowances, education, poverty, housing, social injustice and class relations. It will also examine the role of photojournalism in interrogating British genocide abroad, immigration within the UK and the shift in British global politics in relation to decolonization in the 1950s. The role that the left-wing press and photojournalism specifically played in revealing British atrocities abroad and in charting the processes of decolonization in the former British colonies in this period is also examined. Photography is understood in relation to the complex social, cultural, economic and political contexts of postwar Britain. These include the rise of an antifascist popular cultural front; traditions of radicalism; progressivist class coalitions; the erosion of the class-based relationship between Leftist radical intellectuals and their publics. The photographic representation of immigrant communities, ethnic minorities and the Black British experience will be explored. The book will interrogate such developments in relation to the anti-communist cultural turn of the West during the Cold War.