How does photography reflect on its own toxicity? To explore this question, this paper considers a series of advertising photographs created by the East German photographer Wolfgang G. Schröter between the mid-1950s and early 1970s. Comprising over one hundred distinct motifs, the series offers a glimpse into the sites, processes, and labour of photoraphic manufacturing at the Filmfabrik Wolfen, carried out by a largely female workforce in dark rooms lit only by safelights. Located at the center of Germany’s chemical triangle, the Wolfen factory was established by Agfa in 1909. By the 1930s, it had become a center for the firm’s colour film production and it would remain so during the postwar period, when the German Democratic Republic re-established the factory as a the VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen. Wolfgang Schröter himself was intimately aware of this history. The son of an Agfa employee, Schröter gained his first professional experience as in the firm’s proofing department, before being sent to study photography and printing at the Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. Upon his return, the photographer found employment in VEB Filmfabrik’s advertising department, where he created images intended to both promote the firm’s colour film and document its production process. Taking full advantage of technical possibilities offered by this privileged position, Schröter’s pictures present the factory as an ur-site of chromatic modernity, in which bright colours are born from hygienic laboratory conditions. Yet the photographs also evince a certain ambivalence towards the materiality of colour, manifested above all in their visual preoccupation with glowing lights and radiant colour—qualities that Schröter would later intensify in a series of collages made from colour-separated transparencies. Placing Schröter’s photographs into conversation with accounts of the factory’s working conditions and ecological footprint, including historical documents, the words of former employees, and the work of contemporary artist-activists, this paper considers Schröter’s pictures of the Filmfabrik Wolfen as an unlikely archive that not only reveals the material conditions of photographic production, but also prompts us to reflect on its toxicity, the environmental consequences of which continue to be felt in the region today.
Keywords: colour, chemistry, labour, ecology, toxicity
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Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose research explores the history of photography through an ecological lens. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, where she is working on her first book, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere. She holds a joint-PhD in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Representations, Photographica, and Transbordeur.
https://katerinakorola.com/
How does photography reflect on its own toxicity? This paper considers a photographic series created by the East German photographer Wolfgang G. Schröter, which together offers a glimpse into the environments and labour of photoraphic manufacturing at the VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen. Bringing the series into conversation with accounts of the factory’s working conditions and ecological footprint, this paper considers Schröter’s pictures of the Filmfabrik Wolfen as an unlikely archive that not only reveals the material conditions of photographic production, but also prompts us to reflect on its toxicity, the environmental consequences of which continue to be felt in the region today.