The Art of Photography

December 4, 2010 - March 7, 2011

When photography became established as an artistic image medium around 1900, the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett played a pioneering role. Photography had been used here for reproduction purposes since 1854, but as early as 1899 this institution became one of the first German art museums to build up a collection of works by leading contemporary Pictorialists. These included the Hofmeister brothers, James Craig Annan, and Heinrich Kühn, for example.

The international Art Photography movement wished to break away from the conventions of studio photography and was seeking new stylistic forms. Atmospheric landscapes, expressive portraits, and contemplative genre studies were created using elaborate alternative photography processes. Photography had advanced to the status of an art form and from this time onwards it was collected as such in the Kupferstich-Kabinett.

 During the 1910s, the early history of the medium was explored retrospectively by revisiting the Daguerreotype and other unique image processes. In the 1920s and ’30s photography, which experimented with the technical possibilities of the apparatus and probed the specific properties of the medium, gradually gained acceptance. This exhibition traces the various stages in the history of this emancipation of photography up to the 1930s, with a group of works specially produced for the Kupferstich-Kabinett by the photographer Claudia Angelmaier providing a contemporary artistic reflection on this development.