Margarethe Szeless. Die Kulturzeitschrift "magnum": Photographische Befunde der Moderne. Marburg: Jonas Verlag für Kunst und Literatur, 2007. 188 pp. EUR 25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89445-382-4.
Reviewed by Undine S. Weber (German Studies, School of Languages, Rhodes University [South Africa])
Published on H-German (June, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Karl Pawek Revisited
In this work, Margarethe Szeless analyzes Kulturzeitschrift magnum--die Zeitschrift für das moderne Leben. Magnum was a highly influential magazine on the modern lifestyle published between 1953 and 1966 in Austria and Germany by Karl Pawek, its founder and editor. Pawek coined the term "life photography," which related to the manner in which the American magazine, Life, illustrated its reports. Magnum addressed all aspects of modern postwar life, covering a wide range of topics like the young generation (1955, volume 2), theatre (1957, volume 13), the situation of women (1958, volume 16), art (1959, volume 24), interior decor (1959, volume 25), and Catholicism (1966, volume 58). On the whole, Szeless's book provides a good insight into the workings of Magnum and Pawek's theories, as well as interesting analyses of various images and their context, but it falls short of being an authoritative work.
The book consists of two parts: part 1 covers Pawek's theory of "life photography" and other contemporary theories of photography, while part 2 addresses the actual magazine. In part 1, Szeless attempts to familiarize the reader with the ontological background, drawing on Pawek's theories on culture and photography and contrasting them (and especially his claim to photographic realism) with Pierre Bourdieu's view of photography as an "illegitimate" form of art, André Bazin's ontology of the photographic image (in his Qu'est-ce que le cinéma? [1945]), and especially with Otto Steinert's "subjektive fotografie" of the 1950s. Szeless makes clear the flawed argumentation involved in Pawek's idea of achieving objectivity in a picture. Part 1 tries to lay the foundation for part 2 as if Pawek's theories informed the contents, layout, and choice of pictures in Magnum from the very beginning, but many of Pawek's ideas of what constituted "life photography" were shaped during the time he was working at Magnum. His book, Totale Photographie: Die Optik des Neuen Realismus, was published in 1960; his highly influential Das Optische Zeitalter appeared in 1963; and Das Bild aus der Maschine followed in 1968, two years after the magazine had folded.
Part 2 offers an overview of the magazine's history, concepts, editorial matters, topics, contributors, types of texts, audience, modernism, photography and the placing and grouping of images, and Pawek's theory of culture. The main focus of Szeless's work seems to fall on the photographic images in Magnum and how they are placed within a story; yet, by linking her findings solely to the person of the Catholic Karl Pawek, his past as a Nazi collaborator, and his theories, she is prevented from taking into account the influence other contributors may have had on the magazine's line. She confronts the reader with a somewhat unstructured mix of Pawekabilia and actual analysis of the magazine and often refers to Christian undertones in Magnum without really giving examples. She also deals rather too briefly with the important question of a continued aesthetic modernism and shows that the magazine often returns to the modernist ideas of pre-World War II. She uses the terms modern and modernistisch interchangeably, which is problematic in German because modernistisch, if used at all, refers more commonly to the Anglo-Saxon/American strand of modernism, whereas the Austrian and German Moderne did not always coincide in character and aesthetics with the modernism of the English-speaking world.
While Szeless provides a much-needed and solid analysis of the genesis, style, and structure of the lifestyle magazine Magnum, in the end, the book is simply not detailed enough. Its 154 pages of text and images would have benefited from more extensive referencing and further text examples from the various volumes of Magnum. The reader may also wish that she had elaborated more fully upon her very interesting proposition that Pawek wished to stage a covert revival of the ideology of the Austrian corporate state.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.
Citation:
Undine S. Weber. Review of Szeless, Margarethe, Die Kulturzeitschrift "magnum": Photographische Befunde der Moderne.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24803
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |