Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer.

Abstract

A respected journalist and film critic for Frankfurt Zeitung during the Weimar period, Siegfried Kracauer worked with a more comprehensive concept of cultural modernity than did his friends Bloch, Adorno and Benjamin. Sensitive to the postwar experience of rapid technological advances and profound cultural transformation, he emphasized the contemporary significance of the documentary imagimation. Though he acknowledged that reality is a construction, its modern pluralism suggested to him modalities of objectivity rather than despair of it. In Critical Realism Dagmar Barnouw explores the connections that Kracauer stated in his last book, History, between the representational modes of photography and historiography, both of them characteristically composite and unstable. Drawing on recent developments in the history and theory of photography and historiography, she argues the contemporaneity of Kracauer's thought to late 20th century cultural modernity.

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