How does photography reflect on its own toxicity? To answer this question, Katerina Korola’s lecture considers a photographic series created by the industrial photographer Wolfgang G. Schröter in the mid-1960s, which offers a glimpse behind-the-scenes at the VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen. Located at the center of East Germany’s so-called “Chemical Triangle,” the factory was once the largest photographic factory in Europe. Foregrounding the atmospheric dimensions of Schröter’s photographs, the lecture approaches his series as an unlikely archive that not only reveals the material conditions of photographic production, but also prompts us to reflect on its toxicity, the consequences of which continue to shape life in the region today.

Katerina Korola is an Assistant Professor of German Media at the University of Minnesota and a NOMIS Fellow at the eikones Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel. She is completing her first monograph, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere, which tells a history of air pollution as a photographic problem. Concurrently, she has also begun work on a second book project, Heliotropic Media: Botanical Experiments in Photography, which examines the intersections of botany, photochemistry, and energy from the nineteenth century to the present. For more information, see her personal website.

Moderation: Dr. Steffen Hven, Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF

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A ZeM – Brandenburg Center for Media Studies event in cooperation mit CATNEMI – Cinematic Atmospheres: Towards a New Ecology of the Moving Image