Grand Palais I,

1955

Postwar German artists faced a challenge: as a functioning society rose from the ruins of the Third Reich, where was the soil in which progressive culture could take root? Photographers, in a movement led by educator Otto Steinert, found a hopeful precedent by looking back to the Weimar era, when the technical innovations of the "New Vision" had defined an avant-garde agenda uniting many media and nations. Steinert named his new movement Subjective Photography, thus stressing that the medium was not beholden to its "objective" capacities. When tested, it could express even the most elaborate and abstract formal conceits — the more minutely, as equipment and materials grew in sophistication. Steinert created this montage in the darkroom by combining negative and positive views of the staircase and dome of the ironwork Grand Palais, built for the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris, a fitting emblem for his vision of a ­(re)constructive new era.