Camera Work

The magazine Camera Work, published in New York from 1903–1917 and dedicated to the advancement of photography as art, enjoys the status of a modern icon in the history of photography and the history of art writ large. Still, the quarterly has never been properly investigated with advanced methodological and technological approaches. For the first time, this project analyzes Camera Work in its entirety as total work of art, including imagery across various media, the specifically photographic interplay between original and reproduction, interrelations of image and text, and international networks of people and discourses. In a first major step, Camera Work Pilot Project: Digitalization of an International Medium of Photography and Art, all fifty regular and three special issues of Camera Work are digitized to the highest standards in collaboration with the University Library Heidelberg. On the basis of the technically and structurally sophisticated tool thus produced, the group of researchers embarks on further in-depth research. The next stage of the project, Camera Work—Inside/Out: Past, Present, and Future of an International Medium of Art and Photography takes an innovative position to question the conventional categorization of the magazine between the poles of Pictorialism and modernism and analyzes the journal with particular focus on its internationality which manifests itself in the pages of the journal, its sphere of influence, and its history of collecting. The shared interest in interlinked referentiality connects both stages of the project and points back to the object of analysis itself. A series of public talks and workshops (Camera Work Colloquium) complements the project which is also extended over a range of Teaching Activities.