A Foreign Eye: Photography, Women, and Global Encounters in the Twentieth Century

Affiliated Society or Committee Name: Historians of German, Scandinavian, and Central European Art and Architecture
In the decades after the First World War, shaped by changing conceptions of gender and by the institutions and discourses of interwar photography, women such as Lotte Errell, Anne Fischer, Lucia Moholy, and Annemarie Schwarzenbach traveled and worked around the world, producing travel reportages for illustrated magazines, experiencing emigration and exile, and responding to political upheavals. This session seeks papers that employ the methods of feminism and critical race studies to examine how the subject position of these and other remarkable German and Central European women shaped their work outside Europe as their careers in journalism, publishing, advertising, and studio photography unfolded in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Papers might address techniques of picturing difference, the relationship between representations of race and ethnicity abroad and struggles with discrimination and marginalization at home, the move beyond the exoticism of travel reportages and tourist photography, and the capacity of the visual languages of the New Objectivity and the New Vision to speak to the possibilities and problems of the new global era after the Second World War. In considering such questions, we wish to extend the history of modern European photography geographically and to illuminate its role in shaping discourses of race, ethnicity, gender, and cultural difference.

Field of Study:
Africa
Asia
Northern Europe
Soviet Union
South America

Chairs:
Jordan Troeller,University of Graz, Austria - jordantroeller@gmail.com and Hyewon Yoon,University of New Hampshire - hyewon.hyewon@gmail.com

Alice Schalek: Finding the Neue Frau in 1920s Japan
Kara Charles Felt, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
The Making of a Zionist City: Ellen Auerbach’s Short Film Tel Aviv, 1933-36
Alyssa Bralower, PhD Candidate, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign