Dr. Andrés Zervigon, a photo historian from Rutgers University, will give a talk at the Center for Creative Photography titled, “The Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, Forensic Antifascism, and the Visual Culture of the Popular Front.”
School of Art Associate Professor Jeehey Kim helped organize the free talk with with the support of a grant from the College of Fine Arts Bank One Visiting Artist Professorship Awards. No RSVP is required.
Lecture Abstract
The Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (The Worker’s Illustrated Magazine) was a radical-left periodical published in Central Europe through the interwar years. Though founded in Berlin and published there for most of its run, the National Socialist regime forced the magazine into Prague exile in March 1933. There, it became one of the few unrestrained illustrated voices against German fascism. Key to its provocative protest was bracing photographs and stunning documents disgorged directly from the belly of the Nazi beast, all presented in attention-grabbing layouts.
As this talk will show, the magazine staff, who were themselves victims of early Nazi persecution, adapted photography and document reproduction from a means to illustrate into another to condemn. They had devised, that is, a mode of forensic antifascism that put the German regime on trial. In the process, the A-I-Z staff also learned to imbue their photographs with a highly emotional resonance that appealed to multiple antifascist constituencies, doing so with the apparent neutrality of judicial evidence. They had devised a non-partisan antifascist rhetoric that became the visual grammar of the Popular Front, a pictorial language adopted by the USSR, France, Spain, and Mexico soon thereafter.
