How to Photograph the Air: Photography, Cinema, and the Problem of Atmosphere in German Modernism, 1893-1933

This dissertation investigates the aesthetic and material problems that the air of industrial modernity posed for photographers, filmmakers, and critics active in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany (ca. 1893-1933). During this period, which followed the nation’s rapid industrialization in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the steadily worsening air quality of urban and industrial centers brought the question of atmosphere to the forefront of public debate, implicating architects, urbanists, physicians, hygiene engineers, cultural commentators, and members of societies for smoke abatement. Even as the so-called smoke plague (Rauchplage) emerged as an urgent problem of public health, the manifest visibility of the air at once intrigued, repulsed, and inconvenienced photographers, filmmakers, and critics, challenging established aesthetic frameworks and the materiality of photosensitive media. Placing the visual and discursive production of these figures into conversation with the physical environments in which they worked, this dissertation considers how the industrial atmosphere seeped into aesthetic discourse and material practices, as well as the discursive and technical inventions developed by photographers and filmmakers in an effort to grapple with this strange, modern air. Ultimately, it argues that early twentieth-century media aesthetics were not only informed by the contaminated air of industrial modernity, but also took on an active role in attempts to regulating the changing relationship between the human subject and a technologically altered world