Visual History

Fotografien der langen Wende focusses on images of the East German transformation process. The research and exhibition project examines the upheaval of 1989/90 in the context of the late GDR and the early 1990s.

The associated research project examines photographs and visual discourses on significant themes of economic, political and socio-cultural development: work, migration, social ideals and happiness.

The aim of the associated project is to investigate the extent to which the political, economic and social conditions of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era influenced the representation of the self in photography.

The project studies the journalists and entrepreneurs setting up these and similar agencies in order to ask what strategies they used in order to make their new kinds of news convincing to new audiences.

The associated project project puts the (soldier’s) photo album at the center of its investigation and examines the narrativity of this type of source.

Anhand von Fotografien und schriftlichen Quellen zur staatlichen Bildagentur Zentralbild der DDR untersucht das Projekt, unter welchen Bedingungen die DDR staatliche Bildpolitik betrieb und wie sich unter diesen Bedinungen visueller Konformismus, aber auch fotografischer Eigensinn entfalteten.

The project is aiming to capture German-Jewish experiences of the Weimar Republic and National Socialist regime through the lens of private photography.

Private photo albums form an important part of the biographical memory of people from the former GDR. As ego documents and a kind of "retreat into the private sphere", they are contextualized with contemporary events and analyzed for their political content. The associated PhD project is part of the BMBF joint project "Das mediale Erbe der DDR".

The Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste), Berlin, opened the exhibition ‘Fading Memories’ (Verblassende Erinnerung) in 2006, which displays works from one of the most renowned East German photographers, Sybille Bergmann. The title of the exhibition aims to present the radical changes of cities and landscapes since the time of the former GDR.

The online repository visual-history.de, hosted by the ZZF, serves as a platform for historical research on visual sources and phenomena. It provides up-to-date insights into the growing community of visual historians and their activities, and supports the formation of professional networks.

With a diachronic study, the pictorial representation of "guest workers" and "(late) resettlers" in the German print media between 1955 and 1998 is to be analyzed in this project.