From Empire to Marketplace

The rapid growth of the Federal Republic of Germany has often been attributed exclusively to the revival of its economy. The result has been to project the image of a country that, until the early 1960s, was overly prosaic and where art, predominantly abstract, was detached from the new state’s political and structural concerns. Yet in the area of photography, the birth of Photokina in Cologne in 1950 attests to the emergence of a close link between industry and photographic practice during the period of reconstruction. After 1945, a unified photography sector emerged in West Germany as a result of the concerted efforts of domestic firms and professional as well as amateur photographers