Faces: The Power of the Human Visage

Between 1918 and 1933, artists in the Weimar Republic reinvented photography. Though photographers to that point had generally aimed at capturing their subjects’ personalities, now they began to understand the face as a vehicle for their own ideas. Through the portrait, artists explored concepts as diverse as Germany’s political transformation, modernist aesthetics, and emerging feminist theory. Battling over the seemingly straightforward composition of the portrait, these artists expanded ...