Camera Workers (Worker Photography and Photo League) (original) (raw)

History of Photography Der Kuckuck and the problem of workers' photography in Austria

History of Photography, 2005

In 1929, a group of editors affiliated with the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SDAP) established Der Kuckuck, a magazine modelled in content and format on mainstream boulevard weeklies, but directed specifically at a working-class public. Der Kuckuck was one of the few SDAP publications that attempted to collaborate with its audience, introducing within its first year a photography contest open to all readers. The photography contest became a signature feature of the magazine and was described by the editors as a means to cultivate ‘Arbeiterfotographie’ or workers' photography, a term usually associated with the pioneering activities of the German communist magazines Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung and Arbeiterfotograf. This study explores the political and aesthetic contours of ‘Arbeiterfotographie’ in an Austrian social democratic context.

Photography and the Western Worker: Organizing Farm Labor in Early 1930s California

Southern California Quarterly, 2018

This essay argues that the Western Worker, a West Coast newspaper published by the Communist Party U.S.A., and social-justice photographers employed emergent photographic strategies during the 1930s farm labor conflicts that both influenced uses of photography in mainstream newspapers, and shifted public sympathies to the side of embattled food workers.

Activist Photo Spaces: ‘Situation Awareness’ and the Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions

Journal of Curatorial Studies, 2014

This article aims to demonstrate how the exhibition form and content created a powerful dialectic in the Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions (Berlin, 1931). Interactive display techniques designed by Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius supported messages advocating the crucial societal and economic role played by construction-sector labour unions. Designed to promote the system of free trade unions in Germany, the show demonstrated the potential effectiveness of photography as an integral part of a didactic system, choreographed into various displays that combined images with dynamic graphics and informative texts. To foster interest in the material, the artists used audience-involving strategies including startling viewpoints, photo-strips mounted on moving laths, and touch stations that would beckon the viewer. Taken together, the techniques constituted one of the boldest inter-war attempts to stimulate viewers through multi-sensory empowerment, and incite collective awareness at a time of immense political stakes.