The lecture will elaborate Rudolf Pöch’s photographic practices applied during his anthropological in Austrian and German prisoner of war camps during the First World War. He and his assistant Josef Weninger not only systematically took pictures of the prisoners they measured – among them colonial soldiers from the “Half Moon Camp” near Berlin. They modified and optimized their photographic system in terms of techniques and procedures introducing a standardized system and a third obligatory photograph – which was stilled used in World War II and the post-War era.

Extending the perspective beyond the camps which served as an experimental field for the photographic registration, the lecture will tackle first attempts of mass passport photography during the First World War – of forced labourers and people in the “occupied territories”. It seeks to trace in how far “otherness”, inferiority or adverseness, and registration photography were linked.

VORTRAG

BRIGITTA LANGE

Anthropological registration:

Photographic techniques during the First World War

27 October 2016, 4 p.m.

INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
AUSTRIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
APOSTELGASSE 23
1030 VIENNA, AUSTRIA

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Britta Lange is a lecturer at the Institute of the History and Theory of Culture at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She received her PHD in cultural science from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2005, where she also completed her Habilitation in 2012. She was post-doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2005-07) and a Lise Meitner research fellow at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna (2008-2010). Her research focus is on cultural history and cultural techniques, colonialism and postcolonial approaches, early photo, film and sound documents. Selected publication: Die Wiener Forschungen an Kriegsgefangenen 1915-1918. Anthropologische und ethnografische Verfahren im Lager, Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2013.