Volksgesichter

Who are we? What is our identity? What relates us, binds us to one group and not another? What makes us who we are? The question of identity has, in the ever intensifying neo-globalist ‘adventure’ of the twenty-first century, emerged once more as the most significant metapolitical question of our times. In the early twentieth century the German photographers discussed here were asking themselves, and, by extension those for whom their work was intended, their fellow-countrymen and women, this same question. The work that they made was a manifestation of a unique time when in the wake of the cataclysm of the First World War, new ideas were struggling to assert themselves and achieve the ascendancy. For the76se sympathetically nationalist photographers, their interpretation of physiognomy was coloured by a völkisch interpretation particularly in their photographs of the Bauer [peasant].