Darkroom Exposures: Colour and Contamination at the Filmfabrik Wolfen

NOMIS Lecture by Katerina Korola

Lecture by NOMIS Fellow Katerina Korola

Darkroom Exposures: Colour and Contamination at the Filmfabrik Wolfen

In the mid-1960s, the industrial photographer Wolfgang G. Schröter turned his camera on the VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen. Located at the center of East Germany’s “Chemical Triangle,” the Filmfabrik was, at the time, Europe’s largest producer of color film, second only to Kodak in the world. Guiding the viewer from the manufacture of celluloid to the packaging of the finished film, Schröter’s photographs present the (gendered) labour of photographic manufacturing as a chromatic spectacle in its own right. In doing so, the series did more than advertise the factory’s product line. It also promoted an ostensibly socialist vision of chemical modernity, to be disseminated within the GDR and abroad.

Taking Schröter’s series as a starting point, this talk explores the intertwined histories of photography, chemistry, and contamination at the socialist film factory. More specifically, it considers how the act of picturing the film factory provokes a confrontation with the material ambivalences of photochemical colour. Though created for the purpose of advertising, Schröter’s series ultimately emerges as an unlikely archive that not only reveals the material conditions of photographic production, but also prompts us to reflect on the medium’s toxic legacy.

Image: Wolfgang G. Schröter, Workers in the Production Hall of the VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen, 1955–1973, colour diapositive. Deutsche Fotothek, Dresden.

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