Abstract
The traveling exhibition Film und Foto, inaugurated in 1929 by the famous German Werkbund association, stands as a critical landmark in the exhibition of modernist photography and film. Yet walking through its inaugural venue, in Stuttgart, was as much like flipping through an instructional photo essay as navigating an exhibition space. The first of the show's thirteen rooms, for example, offered a large number of prints that recapitulated the history of photography, or more specifically the history of its practical use. Displayed on sleek scaffolds that efficiently expanded the available exhibition surface, these prints hung in what may best be described as modernist salon style meets the printed page. A lower register seems strung near thigh level while a second row pushed toward the ceiling. The left-page/right-page and vertical/horizontal dialogues this arrangement afforded encouraged viewers to compare photographs taken from the spheres of science and industry to avant-garde prints inspired by the former. Above this series of exchanges ran a prominent sans-serif caption, a punning query that framed the entire show: “Where is photography's development headed?”