Faces

"Starting with helmar Lerski's exemplary photo series Metamorphosis through Light from 1935-1936, this volume presents portraits from the period of the Weimar Republic. During the 1920s and '30s, photographers radically revised conventional notions of the portrait. No longer were photographs intended to show the personality of the subject, rather the face was viewed as material for staging the photographer's ideas and aesthetic agenda, engaging with theories of the avant-garde as well as sociopolitical developments of the time. It was thus that the modernist experiments, the relationship between individual and type, feminist role playing, and political ideologies collided in - and thereby expanded - the general understanding of portrait photography"--Page 4 of cover.