In 2014/2015, the City Museum was involved as a project partner of the Institute for Saxon History and Folklore (ISGV) in the conception and organisation of an exhibition to mark the conclusion of the DFG research project »The Worker's Eye« at the ISGV. After stops in Zwickau and Cologne, it was presented on 21 March 2015 under the title »Das Auge des Arbeiters. Memory Photography and Image Propaganda around 1930« in Dresden. The associated conference »Labour | Culture | History«, jointly organised by Wolfgang Hesse and Holger Starke, focused on the historical-political and media-historical aspects of the topic as well as the implications for museum work: What do the photographs of proletarian amateurs from the Weimar period show as »history«? How do they relate to other visual media? How does the context of the collection shape the possibilities of cognition?
Representatives from the fields of history, art, film and photography history, museology and European ethnology gave lectures on these key questions. Supplemented by additional essays, the contributions published in the conference publication, which has been available since the beginning of November 2017, develop approaches to reconstructing this lost everyday culture in the context of regional history. In addition, the analysis of the surviving objects in their peculiar appearance as well as in their modes of use opens up exemplary photographs as complex sources of the social and mental history of media modernity. The volume thus offers a wide range of stimuli for discussing the theory and practice of culturally and historically orientated museum work with pictorial traditions – not least with regard to the state exhibition on industrial culture in Saxony planned for 2020.
Three conference papers in particular reflect on this: Andreas Ludwig's presentation of museum policy in the GDR, the comparative review of the three exhibitions by Philipp Freytag and the museological discussion of the exhibition project by Karl Klemm and Markus Walz. The two-part, comprehensive essay by the editors, which analyses the conditions under which a photograph from 1927 was created and how it was received, right through to its use as a »document« in the Dresden City Museum from the 1950s to the 1980s, is an independent research contribution from the field of museum work.
