Title: Caught
First published: 1997
Description: Behind the Iron Curtain, against all odds, photography flourished as an art in the German Democratic Republic. The many images in this volume amply demonstrate that fact while also providing an illustrated social history of a people "caught" in the conflicting dictates of ideology, artistic oppression, a troubled national past, and basic human desires. Karl Gernot Kuehn writes eloquently of East Germany from 1945 - four years before the socialist nation was officially carved out of the former German Reich - to 1989, when the government fell and forty years of isolation ended.

The rulers of the new nation, well aware of the power of photography and the extent to which it had served Hitler's regime, determined to use it in molding the paradigmatic socialist state. Although they could never agree on precisely how to use it, Kuehn says, they unanimously believed the decision was not one that people could make for themselves. Consequently, Walter Ulbricht, and Erich Honecker after him, decreed that the medium should shape and reflect the visual expression of Marxism. Censorship was ruthless, not only dictating what was acceptable in photography but also preventing serious research on East German work until 1989.

Caught offers the first in-depth look at the artistic and sociopolitical evolution of the GDR as seen through the eyes of the photographers who participated in it. In the 1980s, according to Kuehn, photography helped foment the "silent revolution." He gives special attention to some of the artists who illustrate the process of growing awareness and resulting social transformation that resulted in the final breakdown of collective concerns. What the cameras "caught" was intended all along to be evidence of socialism's success, but in the end this evidence exposed socialism as a myth.
Subjects: Photography, Pictorial works, History, Photography, history, Germany (east), history, Photographie, Histoire
Places: Germany (East)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: TR73.1 .K84 1997