Hi. Thanks for coming. Um, this is nice.
Welcome to the Bodleian Library, the home of books.
Um, which is interesting for this talk, I think, um.
I'm Phillip, I'm the photography curator here at the library. I've been here for two years,
and I've been furiously collecting photographs and archives and all kinds of wild things to try and help the
library to acquire what we hope will one day be one of the greatest collections of photographs in the world.
We're getting there. We've got the archive of William Henry Fox Talbot and the archive of Daniel Meadows,
and we're going to get the archival market and look at each other and Harrisonville and etc., etc., etc., which is good.
It's gonna be great. That's nice.
But there is a whole other history of photography that is represented in this library, and that is the history of photo books.
Because history of photography is not only the history of photographs,
it is also the history of printing or finding ways to put photographs in mass produced books without them fading.
There's a whole wild plethora of attempts that happened in the 19th century about this,
and we've got a lot of all these books as well, because we get. We are entitled to every book in the UK and Ireland.
Um. Which means that we've lowkey collected one of the greatest collections of photo books in the world without even trying.
Um, they just all come here. Um, we missed a lot.
Of course, we don't get the American stuff necessarily.
Or the Japanese stuff, or the Sri Lankan stuff and all that juicy good things around the world.
Um. But because we know that this is important, we are trying to collect for the books as well as photographs.
Um, and this is led to a remarkable acquisition that came a couple of years ago that
was donated by a great photo book collector called Sir Charles Chadwick Healey,
who is in the room with us today. Thank you very much.
Um, and he gave us an incredible collection of rare photo books from the middle of the 20th century, great modernist works.
Things by you know you've heard of man rare, right?
You know, people like him working out how to assemble photographs in sequence, to say a things more than a photograph on its own.
Consider. Um, and this great collection of photo books brought us a great photo books researcher, um, Donna Bretz,
who came all the way from the University of Sydney in Australia to see this collection of photo parks.
Um, she's our photography fellow.
Um, she's been here for. I don't even have a. As 7 million.
Nearly seven weeks going through our collections of photo books to find some great works that she's never seen.
Despite being a modernist photo book expert.
There's stuff here that she's never held in her hands before, and she's here to tell us today what she has found, why this stuff is worthwhile.
What do we need to do with it? Well, um, I am delighted to have, uh.
Um. Donna is the chair of the history of art at the University of Sydney.
She's published widely on mid century photography, particularly on, um, German photography.
She's got a really wonderful book on post 45, German photography.
Really good. What's it called? Talk of new place, photography and place.
Yeah, it's a pretty generic name, and it's a long time ago.
Anyway, she's going to walk us through the research that she's been doing in the Bodleian collections.
I am very pleased to have, uh, please put your hands together for Diana Bracks.
Thank you for that. That was such a lovely introduction. You made me sound like.
I know something is really lovely. Thank you. Uh, thanks, everyone for coming.
Um, it's great to see, um, so many people here today.
Uh, so I wanted to start by, um, recognising and paying my respect to the people of the Indian nation on whose
unceded lands I live and work and whose knowledge is embedded in country.
I extend that respect to any First Nations people here today.
I'd also like to extend my sincere gratitude to the Bodleian librarian, Richard Irvington.
Doctor Christopher Fletcher, uh, Keeper of Special Collections here at the board.
Uh, curator of photographs, Philip Roberts. Thank you for that lovely introduction.
Um, the Bodleian Library fellowship program.
Who have made this possible?
And also the donors for the Sloan Fellow in Photography, um, to Doctor Alexander Franklin and Rachel Lane Smith to Trinity College,
and Professor Jeffrey Bateson for hosting me and for my dear friends here and the new and old in Oxford, who have kept me fed and watered.
So thank you very much and welcome.
Um, most particularly, I'd like to thank Sir Charles Jeffrey Healey for donating this extraordinary collection of photo books,
which, yes, took me all the way here from Sydney. Um, and he's here today.
But as Philip said, there is a there are so many books that, of course, there's no way we could actually access them in Australia.
So it's been quite a remarkable, um, six and a half weeks so far.
So this is a photograph of books by one of the earliest proponents of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot, titled A scene in a library.
It may be a photograph of books, but it's not a photo book.
It did, however, feature in Fox Talbot's first photo book series, titled The Pencil of Nature, issued in six fascicles between 1844 and 1846.
But what is a photo book, you might ask? Since I started this project, so many people have asked me.
There are different opinions, with some commentators discounting Anna Atkins talk of Siena talks from 1843,
arguing that it might be a book and they might be images.
It's not a photo book because they don't consider the cyanotype to be photographs.
These questions and differences point to the inherent challenges of photographic ontology,
but also to definitions in general about what is and what isn't a particular medium.
And I'm not going to go into that because that is like a huge subject on its own.
Putting that aside. My talk today will focus on modernist books from the 1920s and 30s that predominantly feature
photographs by either a single or a small number of photographers or artists working with photography,
where the image is actually the primary concern.
Most contain text to varying degrees, but even within these very small descriptive, the range of material is vastly diverse.
Photo books are a radical format that enabled the widespread dissemination of
modernist aesthetics through either bespoke or commercial publishers and printers.
So today's lecture is concerned with photo books produced by largely artists photographers, a term loosely applied that portray the everyday,
the familiar, the practical, the ordinary via either objective or surrealist aesthetics, and its intersection with the visual languages of propaganda.
So the burgeoning of photographic books in this period coincided with the centrality of photography to the illustrated press,
to magazines and journalism led by several different publishing houses.
Such progress was also enabled by advances in printing technology like the illustrated press.
Photo books provided unprecedented means for photographers to disseminate their work beyond the studio or even exhibition remodels,
and simultaneously and the same benefits were recognised as a means to reach the wider public to disseminate social,
cultural or political material which will see.
Suffice to say that the book was central to the development of modernist practice and thought across the literary and also the visual arts.
So the first photo book published by volt was by, um, Albert Ring.
A patch titled Developed Oestrogen or The World is Beautiful.
In 1928, he despised the title Ring of Patches.
Original title for this book more clearly designates the concept that he desired,
or the things things in um as a singular as well as a collective and everyday collection of plants, objects, animals, people and places.
Each is treated in an object of manner, with the photograph acting as a descriptor of things.
No one else I can think of can make trails look so beguiling.
The approach comes from an object of view to photography that reduces the thing to an image,
and in so doing we say the object in a very different way.
The object nurse is emphasised by the framing of the subject and the placement on the page.
It is a visual concept common in what was known as New Objective or New objectivity and New vision photography.
Uh, a bit later on, as coined by the Ballhaus Laszlo Mahoney nage.
And we also see it made strange by the Surrealists, um, in the 1930s.
Here, ring a patch groups various things together across the book so that the viewer encounters not just the singular images,
both in and of themselves, but also as a collective narrative of visual connections across works of art for the viewer.
But here the photographer designates our seeing.
It is purposeful. The choice of images across the book and how they flow is directed to the viewer, an outcome that is not uncommon in such media.
Proving it's not too late to make a photobook, Car Blossom produce the best selling author in the Kunst,
translated as archetypes of art, but also sometimes by the very dull title Art forms in the Plant World.
In 1929, four years before his early death, aged 67, the book features 120 plates of the remarkable nature of plants such as winter horsetail.
The detail is extraordinary in these images, um, which they reportedly numbered about 6000 in total.
Many of them are now lost, and they were originally taken to personally reference images for his work as a sculptor and also a teacher.
The German writer and critic Walter Benjamin wrote in his 1931 essay A Small History of Photography,
quote loss felt brought out the forms of ancient columns in horse tales the bishop's staff in a bunch of flowers,
totem poles in chestnut, an acorn sprouts in large ten times, Gothic tracery in tasteful.
Even today. These photographs challenge how we see and how we understand the form of plants,
which have been transcribed as extraordinary objects made strange by the camera I.
A cornerstone for the noise that when you objectivity movement in Germany we see both lost skilled and also
Alvis Sanders lens and approach employed in the aesthetics of the powerhouse much later and in contemporary art,
such as with Bert and Liberty's Aiming Magic photographs of structural types from the 1970s.
And you can see some correlations in which I won't go into.
But it is this kind of approach to, um, a collectively taught and collecting types of things.
So in this same essay, Benjamin wrote of the photographs of Alexander.
As being what he referred to as beyond portraits.
But what was it that made it so? He asked. Benjamin conceded that Sander took the viewer through all levels and professions,
up on one hand to the highest representations of civilisation, and down on the other to idiots.
His words, something that we might see in common with the photographer Bill Brandt, who photographed the differing British social classes.
Benjamin quotes Alexander Doblin in the essay who wrote this photographer pursues comparative
photography and thereby achieves a scientific standpoint above and beyond that of photographic details.
In other words, Sander saw beyond the surface of social structures.
And fizzy anomic features and categorise people by social type and occupation by a painter,
farmer, not a painter or farmer a it is just painter farmer.
It is an object. The person is reduced to an object and an image, and therefore forms a document of the individual in the context of social hierarchy,
as Skilton describes it, it is his observation that got Sandy into trouble.
On seeing Saunders work, the Nazis declared it unfit.
Here was a photographer capturing non desirable people,
revealing the diversity of the German folk in a compelling portrait of real German people and seen as too acute in its analysis of society and class.
Strangely ironic, given that Hitler's own features did not comply with the desired Aryan purity,
a weakness he recognised and made efforts to overcome. In 1936, the Ministry of Culture confiscated the published edition of Athletes Gunsight.
This book here faces of our time and destroy the printing plates.
Relocating to Cologne. Much as Sanders, over 10,000 negatives at that time were destroyed in Allied bombing.
Yet many other photographers took up the objective lens to record the world around them, including the rising industrialisation of Europe,
manufacturing, advertising and design, many of whom later faced the same adversity with rising fascism throughout Europe.
Books can be dangerous. And I also don't behave.
They don't lie flat. This surfaces reflect light and they're often fragile, reminding us that these objects have been made,
bought, handled, caressed, sold, collected, categorised or archived.
In other words,
they have a life and the books as objects tell us as much about themselves as I do about the images they hold and those that made them.
The haptic materiality of a book is therefore often unexpected,
and I've had some moments looking at the books in this collection where I have
had quite a few surprises in gingerly opening the first book here in January.
Germaine Kroll's Mittal I encountered firstly, its weight, its size, the quality, thickness and texture of the cover and pages inside.
The book comprises a portfolio of images, meaning each work is printed on a separate thick piece of card,
and you can see one of them here, which you can actually lift, um, by itself as an object.
So the images can be individually observed as unique items that nevertheless remain as part of a sequence of images.
The Chadwick Heeley copy in the collection is made even more special by the fact that the book is intact.
Many volumes are often marred by missing pages, which are either sold as individual prints, framed, or even lost.
Studying this extraordinary book of images by Krall.
You can see the eyes, the artist's eye,
reflecting on the marvel of modern engineering through the lens of new vision photography with its sharp angles,
cinematic framing, and poetic sensibility. The haptic experiences are unique, personal and intimate.
It's just you in the book.
This experience with photographic images that are either individual components, such as crowds at home or encountered as a viewer or reader turns.
Each page is directed by the artist and also the reader.
While some commentators assert the ability to rearrange the order of such images, Kroll's photographic sequence is purposeful.
Please don't do that. The photographer determines certain relationships and meanings that read across the book,
but it also is the reader who touches, caresses, and turns pages.
And this is in stark contrast to what we're allowed to do in an exhibition.
Don't try and touch something in an exhibition. You will find out pretty quickly it's not allowed.
But photographing things may at times seem pretty dull.
But surely with a title such as matchmaking being some glances at the British matchmaking industry in the factories of branch and May.
This book from 1931 has its own surprises.
I didn't expect any. Alongside what one might expect from a publication focusing on the exciting industrial progress of making matches.
British artist Paul Nash on the writing your left, uh, Paul Nash designed the cover,
and the American photographer Francis Perugia inflicted an avant garde aesthetic of doubling and reflections into the images.
So you have very standard photographs of mill manufacturing.
Uh, but then you get to these. Boucher was known for his experimentations as early as 1912, with multiple exposure,
solar ization and abstraction across photography, film, and stage design.
The opening text of the book, written in a chipper tone, asks the reader how lost you feel without a match.
You cannot carry on at home. Have you a match by chance?
Oh, no, I'm afraid I haven't. Good gracious. Very soon.
However, someone there is usually someone at hand.
Yes. Pleasure. They say handing over a match and all is well again.
But supposing there was not. Imagine England waking up one morning.
Matchless picture the awful mental and physical repercussions from so gargantuan a catastrophe, a grim spectacle it does not bear thinking about.
The book is continuously along these lines as a company booklet distributed to employees and shareholders,
with details on its profit sharing scheme and pension data published share value and company capital of £2 million at the time.
It would be easy to overlook it as a purely commercial venture.
And an egalitarian company. But.
The cheery rhetoric and employee sentiment is indeed a far cry from the company's 19th
century reputation for employing their 5000 workers under the so-called switching system,
which meant workers were not covered by the British factory acts.
In a market that sold nearly 28 million boxes of matches a year by 1860, staff were poorly paid and often fined for workplace inefficiencies.
In 1888, the infamous London Mexico strike was held, partly in response to such poor treatment,
but also due to the horrendous working conditions of using white phosphorus in the manufacturing
process that led to Fossey jaw and ailment described by Charles Dickens as early as 1852.
And this is a very gentle image, believe me. On complaining of toothache.
Many workers were fired on the spot. It's not difficult to think of.
This book then produced a mere 21 years after the use of white phosphorus was banned
as an exercise in soft propaganda for a company attempting to re-establish its brand.
As we look at Russia's doubled women,
their faces partially obscured by the machinery and matchmaking processes that had once disfigured and killed them.
A haunting presence is felt within these images that build a narrative across the pages.
Engaging with doubling through multiple exposure.
Sandwich negatives or montage in photographs lends multiple readings, often subversive, subliminal, and intentional.
Doubling therefore produces a form or rhythm of spacing.
According to American art critic Rosalind Krauss,
and is listen to the notion that when an original is accompanied by its copy, it forms a simulacrum, or indeed a visual echo.
And this is how I've read these images. Did Perugia intend for this interpretation?
I don't know. But nevertheless, this seems to be a subversive intent, even if it is merely aesthetic,
with the images seeming to build a narrative against the grain of the text.
And interestingly enough, this image on the right here, um, even though it doesn't have, uh, doubling it,
is a composite image with the landscape bereft of trees at the front, with the matches at the top in a negative.
So he's obviously, I think, trying to convey, um, purposefully various meanings.
In another book from the Chadwick Haley collection from 1929, bridges collaborated with the British radio drama writer Lancey Wickham,
in which can only be described as a new media extravaganza with experiments in abstract photography, photo montage, and multiple exposure.
In beyond this point. Which is rather strange, but I have to say,
the viewer is directed in the first instance as to how to read the book with a handy diagram and textual directions.
And you can see that on that middle image. And it is in this flow of energy that you start.
You get to a point, you come back and then you go again. So the text is also written in this very strange rhythmic way.
So the text or directions are very explicit, as the authors say.
This book is an example of absolute collaboration.
The text, which has been written by Siva King, is inseparable from the photographs which have been designed by you in each section of the book.
The photograph and the texts are integral parts of each other.
So the best that is igniting to us how we need to read this book.
The text therefore. Works um, with rather than against the images.
Unlike appreciates other book that I was just discussing.
Um, and it's written in a non-linear way.
It bleeds across pages to purposefully emphasise tensions of desire and loss, and I don't know if you can see it, but there are.
The text basically runs from one page and bleeds onto the other across to emphasise something within the image itself.
It. Yeah. So it brings out these tensions of desire and loss and confusion.
And more, as the book heralds three different crises that could affect modern society.
One. The near approach of death. Two urgings of jealousy and three sexual rhythm.
And it's quite extraordinary. And I think this is the book that you've got, Jeff.
Collaborations such as this are not uncommon with the avant garde modernists.
And in the same year as Beyond This Point was published, Franz wrote and John G.
Showed combined efforts to produce what's called Photo Alga or Photo eye 76 photos of the time.
Democratising the medium, therefore, photo I included images by both professional and commercial photographers,
journalists and press agencies reflecting the multitude of styles and producers at the time.
Although published around the same time as the very famous exhibition Film and Photo,
and often associated with it, this book was actually a separate enterprise.
It was, however, in response to this exhibition and its very poorly illustrated catalogue that wrote And Child saw an opportunity.
So now, despite its iconic status, largely because of this incredible image on the front by L, as it's called the constructor.
Um, and also being voted the one of the 50 most beautiful books in 1929.
Sales revenues were dire, with barely enough salt bar curry first impacted by the world financial crisis at the time.
The two went on to set up a series titled called Photo Take, and you can see some of the images before I go on here,
which, uh, press photos and asks photos and of course, photo montage.
The book is quite extraordinary in its range of, of, uh, photographic medium.
But they set up this company or a publishing house called Photo Tech, uh, with a desire to expand their publishing,
um, efforts, and only published two issues, one on Moholy-Nagy and the other on npm.
But you can see here with her uncanny visual relationships that feature throughout.
And this is common throughout the entire book. There's a shape in one image which is then reflected in the others.
So you read the images across these double page spreads in this extraordinary way.
It's quite an incredible tool. But I couldn't resist including the extraordinary book by Marcia for a vote for uh, by chick uh,
commonly known as Moya Fair uh title Paris 80 photographs from 1931, with an introduction by Fernand Léger.
This is quite an extraordinary book. Moravia was a photographer, graphic artist and painter at the forefront of the 1920s European avant garde,
and he was also a graduate of the powerhouse.
The multiple exposures throughout present a compression of space and time, such as the juxtaposition of a man and cart,
which you can see here with the latest in automobile manufacturing and also design.
It combines the surfaces of the metropolis, roads, posters, buildings and cars with the well-dressed and also the worker,
but most importantly along the lines of Boucher and others.
Moravia used photo montage as a means to exploit the possibilities offered by free association.
By bringing these images together, they reflect the workings of the unconscious mind, often seen, as you might know, in data and surrealism.
But there are two strange images that I want to concentrate on today that work
across the double page spread to create a certain slipperiness of meaning.
That is unfortunately one of my bad photographs. But as I said, these books don't behave before you.
There are two images on this double page spread of well-dressed women in street in the street,
and they are photo montages with other images behind them.
And these images are off street posters. On the left.
The figure is actually superimposed on a poster designed by the Ministry of Hygiene in France,
instructing the public as to how to defend yourself from the horrors of syphilis.
On the right, the underlying image is of a poster for the film land, which, as I knew or The Night is ours.
This poster here, in which an injured girl is rescued by a stranger who also happens to be a married man.
On the poster, the two lovers are entwined, perhaps would be targets for the hygiene ministry messaging.
This these very clearly intentional associations being multiple,
possibly penalties for meanings to the visual language of photography that were exploited by the avant garde and also by fascists alike.
Um, and I was quite excited to actually find the the posters.
That took a bit of time, but it was worth it. So too did man Ray and also Paul L Bard collaborate in a spectacular book called facil in 1935.
This is unbound copy number 2122 from the edition, which is designed in such a way that the text and images work together across the loose pages,
as if the poems caress the body of Paul, once wife knew as the subject of the text.
It's quite, um, an extraordinary book. The Solarise program.
Photographs. Tend to create a shimmer or a sense of movement adding to the allure.
Summarisation, as many of you will know,
is a form of inversion where tonal qualities are primarily reversed by subjecting the print or the negative to light during the development process.
This results in an image that is both positive and negative in its registers, that sometimes conflicts enough to destroy the latent image.
The Sabatier effect, as it's also known, caused by the solar ization technique,
is an interstitial rendering that disrupts the plane of the surface and our in visual
engagement to such an extent that it creates what Krauss thinks of as a cleavage in reality.
The added bonus of doing this for this book was actually discovering, which I didn't know about the unique print of man Ray.
Oh, by a man right inserted into the book picture.
And Charles Pinion, who was the subject of the dedication on the title page.
That is also my very average video. Um, such discoveries.
And this is the photograph here, which is also, again a separate piece of paper, uh, or mounted on a separate card in the book.
Um, and I was talking to Charles earlier and he mentioned that's how he purchased it.
Uh, which is really lovely. It's such a beautiful surprise, I think, for all of us.
Um, yeah. Um, so that's such discoveries, though.
And this is the dedication to pin you on the right, uh,
the goals of archival research and highlight the centrality of collections such as this to new research.
It's quite a beautiful image, which is really hard to see here.
So, as several commentators have noted, these modernist aesthetics were both derided and mimicked by various right wing regimes,
including that of the National Socialist Party. In the collection is a superb example.
In a promotional brochure from Leni Riefenstahl's triumph this friedan's a propaganda extravaganza made for the NSDAP.
This is an eight page brochure and incorporates photo montage as a means to convey multiple narratives across the images,
finishing in a visual crescendo of the masses on the last page, released in 1935.
The film incorporated modernist aesthetics of distortion with a revolutionary use of music and also cinematography,
as it chronicled the 1934 Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by over 700,000 Nazi supporters.
But handling and rating these objects carries a certain weight of historical perspective.
Who owned these books? How did they acquire them?
Read them, share them, and what meanings and narratives transpired?
Take, for example, the various books here, with photographs by Heinrich Hoffmann, published for the German National Socialist Party.
Hoffman himself came from a family of photographers,
and during his temporary relocation to London he worked for the emigre photographer Emil Otto Hoppe.
Hofmann's pedigree was well established then. By the time he met Adolf Hitler in and around 1923.
And after much cajoling, he finally convinced the camera shy Hitler of the propaganda opportunities of the photographic medium,
and he became Hitler's official personal photographer.
Hofmann's photographs were largely taken as a record of Führer's achievements and used as propaganda,
manipulating the power of photography to create a public image of the thousand year rush and the superiority of Germany.
But despite Hitler's acquiescence to his image being captured by the camera lens,
each photograph was personally vetted by him before it was distributed.
Hence, images of him wearing layers and glasses, using a magnifying glass, etc. were largely censored, and as is well known,
Hofmann also took photographs of Hitler while he practised his speeches,
capturing him while he determined his preferred hand movements and stances ahead of speeches.
And apparently Hitler wanted these to be destroyed. But they weren't in effect, as we can see.
Hitler controlled his image and exactly how it would be seen.
So it comes as no surprise that the photo book is a cheap, mass produced and disseminated object could serve the Führer's political ambitions.
Hoffman published at least seven books on Hitler, and his photographs served to function in many others.
In 1933, a photo album title, battle for the Third Reich, A historical sequence of Images come from Street Trash,
was published by The Cigarette and Beat It builder Dienst, reportedly.
This was published um up to. About a million copies or so.
And they sold for one right mark each. So they were purposefully designed to be accessible to the general public.
The book's text and images chronicle the National Socialist Party's rise to power,
culminating in the Reichstag fire and the appointment of Hitler as chancellor.
So it's quite this big, engrossing story.
Um, it features Hitler as a leader and Hitler at home.
Rather, though, than being published as images in a photo book.
Hofmann's photographs were printed a six by five inch cigarette cards.
Many of them were coloured and distributed to the masses in cigarette packs.
They were either in the cigarette packets or there were.
They were little, I think, um, pieces of paper that you could then trade in for the cigarettes, um,
cigarette cards so that you didn't miss out on any collectors would amass these
cards and stick them into the corresponding numbered spaces throughout the book.
And there are 273 in total. There were two editions, with the second edition omitting the paramilitary ringleader,
Ernst Rome, who posed a threat to the Führer's ultimate power and was executed.
Photos of Rome were removed from all publications, and this is not uncommon.
The Russians did it. Everyone did it. Despite the book being banned also in Austria in 1934.
Others were produced in 1936 on the Berlin Olympics.
Pictures of German history and specialist books on Hitler himself.
Of the very few words Hoffman ever wrote about photography, he remarked.
Is there anything more impartial in the world than a camera?
And yet, when one studies these photo books, we see Hoffman incorporating methods of subterfuge through montage and image manipulation.
Take Hofmann's book Use Around Hitler from 1934, in which montage features on the cover,
and it brings together a this wreath of youthful, adoring faces around the Führer.
On the first page and also throughout the entire book. There are some very strange images, and you can see some of them here,
where Hoffman has clearly manipulated and retouched the images to make children smile.
So I'm not quite sure whether they weren't smiling or whether the image was blurry without seeing the original image.
It's impossible to tell, but they are extraordinarily weird and very much in the vein of I that can't quite get faces right.
They're sort of reminiscent of that. Um, and it's obviously not a very good painter.
Uh, but they just look, um, quite extraordinary, very poorly manipulated.
But we can see this type of manipulation across other photobooks by Hoffman, including Hitler,
like no one else knows him, uh, which gives an intimate view into the Führer's life.
Here, the images are manipulated through the camera, such as Hitler in the German mountains, which,
of course, is the Teutonic natural home of the German folk, um, and his favourite dog, Blondie.
Features. Throughout there are rallies of adoring public,
or the happenstance of a cross appearing above Hitler's head as he departs the Marianne Kirsch in Wilhelmshaven,
which, as the text reinforces, is a photographic coincidence which becomes a symbol and you can see the cross just above his head.
There's also strange images where the text changes the meaning, or makes the reader see the photograph in a specific way.
Some of these include, for instance, this image where the Führer, the sleeping Führer in a car,
is not pictured as being weak, but rather as continuing through the night despite exhaustion.
Um, a he still makes it, you know, to this, you know, from this huge rally, he still makes it again to the next day to see his beloved German people.
So these images, um, uh, either manipulated through text, through the camera,
or the images are retouched to obscure something particularly undesirable, potentially.
I'm not quite sure. But these images for here, for instance, you can actually see that these have the legs of the child and also,
um, of the soldier standing by him have been painted in, and I'm not quite sure why they've.
Oh, very obvious. And also this hat seems to float somewhere is no one is actually holding it.
So I'm not quite sure what's going on there. If only I could see again the original image, but they've been clearly manipulated,
so I wasn't sure whether they was something wrong with the child's foot or what was going on there, but it's rather strange.
Other images, uh, composite image is quite clearly or have been manipulated or, um,
retouched to extent where they actually look like the entire image has been, um, manipulated from his hands right through to the face, etc.
So it's it's kind of strange and I need to spend more time with this material.
So, uh, other books of course, we might think about in terms of propaganda is Lee Miller's book,
uh, Rings in Canberra or Eyes on Russia by Margaret Bourke White.
This gorgeous book is actually dedicated to Charlie Chaplin, which was a really lovely touch,
but we can see even with what we might think of as industrial type images,
the aesthetics of modernism coming through in these extraordinary images, such as the new vision, aesthetics, etc. I'm conscious of the time.
And lastly, I just want to touch on this extraordinary book.
I struggled to carry this to the reading room.
It is. It must weigh like 12kg. The Industry of Socialism features a photograph by Anatoly Shuriken on the cover shuriken,
and also throughout there are photographs of him by him and also photographs by other very famous Russian photographers at the time.
And there's also this beautiful little print in the front, which I think is trying to designate the framing for the cover.
According to the Soviet Photo Journal at the time, the book is, above all,
a significant piece of creative labour expounded in the most expressive language of photographic or photographic art.
Each album, of which there is seven, is a separate chapter snatched directly from our living reality, says the review.
And this is largely because it was designed by enlisted skin from engineering marvels.
Peasants on tractors, pig farming, heavy industry to life at home.
The books read as if they are a filmic translation of the photographic record.
And indeed, Lissitzky tells us as much. Segments of the book are experienced through cut outs, framing the viewer's vision,
and there are cut outs throughout of both of the Lenin and Stalin um, which act as a cinema screen or a viewfinder as one turns the pages.
There are also extraordinary layers of transparent paper with graphs, um, and expounding the growth of industry,
etc. and coloured metal, pieces of paper and all sorts of extraordinary, um, um, elements that he has incorporated into these books.
They include multiple methods of printing and material which were available at the time.
Paper. Film. Fabric. Metal. Plastic.
Um, there is one series. I think they printed about 10,000 of these, and one particular fine, um, uh, separate series actually has metal on the front,
so they differ only slightly, but one is actually much more expensive to produce than the other, obviously.
Um it. The printing took place over nine printing works in Moscow in a very short space of time, which was a remarkable feat.
But what I wanted to point out, which was absolutely extraordinary, are these fold outs that come out from many,
many of the different pages so that they can get this whole long view of trains, of industry, of maps, of cities?
So every page you turn in the book,
there is something where you actually have to look again and to physically interact with the book to see it is quite extraordinary.
This is where I'm going to finish this beautiful image in the section about home life and motherhood.
Is this beautiful picture of this woman looking into the mirror.
Whereas you turn the page, there is a cut-out, but on the next page there is actually a piece of real fabric, uh, which is sitting on top of the page.
So it's a very textural kind of sense to the entire book.
It's one of those things you have to go back to over several days because it's extremely exhausting, I have to say.
But as you can see, these photobooks are really diverse, but they're also really challenging.
And I've barely scratched the surface of this remarkable collection here with the Bodleian published close to 100 years ago.
These books still surprise us and remind us of the power of photography and visual culture in our image set world and how important archives,
libraries, scholars and artists are in reminding us of this very fact.
Thank you.