Faces : The Power of the Human Visage

The radical re-invention of portrait photography in the Weimar Republic

Between 1918 and 1933, artists in the Weimar Republic reinvented photography. Though photographers to that point had generally aimed at capturing their subjects’ personalities, now they began to understand the face as a vehicle for their own ideas. Through the portrait, artists explored concepts as diverse as Germany’s political transformation, modernist aesthetics, and emerging feminist theory. Battling over the seemingly straightforward composition of the portrait, these artists expanded the aesthetic capacity of photography for all time. Beginning with Helmar Lerski’s groundbreaking series “Metamorphosis Through Light,” Faces features more than two hundred photographs from a variety of well-known and overlooked artists in this radical period.

Featured artists include Gertrud Arndt, Marta Astfalck-Vietz,Herbert Bayer, Irene Bayer, Aenne Biermann, Erwin Blumenfeld, Max Burchartz, Suse Byk, Paul Citroen, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Andreas Feininger, Werner David Feist, Trude Fleischmann, Jozef Glogowski, Paul Edmund Hahn, Lotte Jacobi, Grit Kallin-Fischer, Edmund Kesting, Rudolf Koppitz, Kurt Kranz, Anneliese Kretschmer, Germaine Krull, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Helmar Lerski, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Oskar Nerlinger, Erich Retzlaff, Hans Richter,  Leni Riefenstahl, Franz Roh, Werner Rohde, Ilse Salberg, August Sander, Franz Xaver Setzer, Robert Siodmak, Anton Stankowski, Edgar G. Ulmer, Umbo, Robert Wiene, and Willy Zielke.