Chromatic Apparitions: Colour and Toxicity at the VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen
Katerina Korola, Assistant Professor of German Media, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
How does photography reflect on its own toxicity? To answer this question, this paper considers a photographic series created by the East German photographer Wolfgang G. Schröter in the mid-1960s, which offers a glimpse behind-the-scenes at the VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen. Located at the center of East Germany’s so-called “Chemical Triangle,” the factory was, at the time, the largest manufacturer of photosensitive film in continental Europe. Placing Schröter’s series into conversation with accounts of the factory’s working conditions and ecological footprint, this paper approaches his photographs as an unlikely archive that not only reveals the material conditions of photochemical production, but also prompts us to reflect on the histories of exposure embedded in the photographic image.
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This seminar provides a forum for scholarship-in-progress in the area of German studies. The seminar is particularly interested in papers that cross disciplinary boundaries and that reconceptualize the materials and conventions of German Studies as a field, including beyond the frames of the German language and nation state. The seminar is generously sponsored by Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University, and the Department of History at Northwestern University.