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 and optical experimentations of "New Vision" photography had defined an avant-garde agenda that united many artists and nations. Steinert named his new movement "Subjective Photography," stressing that the medium was not beholden to its "objective" capacities. The artist 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 World’s Fair in Paris—a fitting emblem for his vision of a new era.