The coal mines, processing plants, and factories of the Ruhr industrial region of Germany constituted an enduring preoccupation for Albert Renger-Patzsch, one of the leading representatives of the "New Objectivity" tendency of German art and photography in the 1920s. In keeping with modernist photographic values of clarity and precision, Renger-Patzsch offered a distinctly hygienic vision of the Ruhr's industrial landscape, one that suppressed the smoke, dust, and smog that plagued the region. This talk revisits Renger-Patzsch's work in the Ruhr in order to reconsider modernist photography through an ecological lens. It argues for an extractive impulse in Renger-Patzsch's approach, framing it as an operation analogous to that of mining itself—one that extracts form and pictorial clarity from a compromised environment. In doing so, it offers an ecocritical account of photographic modernism’s fraught relations with extractive modernity.
Katerina Korola (Assistant Professor of German, UMN Twin Cities) is an art historian and media scholar whose research and teaching explore the history of photography, cinema, and art from the nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on the intersection of media and the environment in modern Germany. She is currently working on her first book, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere, a history of air pollution as a photographic problem. Other research interests include the visual culture of science, ecocriticism, and environmental art. In 2022, Katerina curated the exhibition Unsettled Ground: Art and Environment from the Smart Museum Collection as a Humanities Teaching Fellow in Art History at the University of Chicago. In fall 2024, she is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.
Zoom link: https://umn.zoom.us/j/94919441049