the magazine’s bias was alienating advertisers as France was turning more
vociferously toward the right. Owing to diminishing capital, Vogel was
forced to sell the magazine to a right-wing businessman who kept
Liberman on as managing editor for a year. Ultimately Liberman could not
tolerate VU’s new political orientation. After his departure, the quality of
VU’s photographic essays declined.
Photography as both information and propaganda medium did
not go unnoticed by manipulators of thought and mind. Throughout
Europe, and especially in Germany, the picture magazine was used to win
the hearts and minds of certain constituencies. Among the most influential
of these was the socialist/communist-inspired Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung
(Worker’s Illustrated News), which began in 1921 as an offshoot of Sowjet
Russland im Bild(Soviet Russia in Pictures), designed to propagate a
positive image of the Bolshevik workers’ paradise.AIZwas edited by Willi
Münzenberg, who was a fervent supporter of the Russian Revolution and
saw the picture magazine as a vehicle for aiding German workers in their
struggle against capitalism.
When AIZbegan, obtaining photographs that addressed workers’
concerns from the leading picture agencies was difficult. Münzenberg
developed a strategy to encourage societies of amateur photographers who
would, in turn, become photo correspondents. In Hamburg, in 1926 ,he
established the first Worker Photographer group, which grew into a
network of viable shooters throughout Germany and the Soviet Union.
He further founded a magazine called Der Arbeiter Fotograf(The Worker
Photographer), which offered technical and ideological assistance.
Bertolt Brecht once wrote Münzenberg that “the camera can lie just
like the typesetting machine. The task of AIZto serve truth and reproduce
real facts is of immense importance, and, it seems to me, has been achieved
splendidly.” Actually, while the photographs in AIZwere objective accounts
of workers’ triumphs, the layouts often served to heroicize (and therefore
politicize) the activities covered. Except for its ideological orientation,AIZ
was really no different than the Nazi counterpart, the Illustrierte Beobachter
(founded in 1926 ), which employed similar photojournalistic conventions.
But when the Nazis assumed power in 1933 ,AIZwas deemed contraband.
Three years earlier ( 1930 ), John Heartfield, who was then art
director and copublisher of the Malik Verlag, had begun doing satiric
photomontages (a marriage of dada and caricature) that graphically ripped
the façade off Nazi leaders and functionaries. Montage was key to AIZin
the years of the Nazi ascendancy because, with the Worker Photographer
Movement in Germany officially crushed, obtaining usable (socialist)
imagery was impossible. Only through photomontage—the ironic
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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