Chromatic Apparitions: Colour and Chemical Intimacy at the Socialist Film Factory
Guest Speaker: Katerina KorolaThursday, January 30, 2025
5 PM
142 Dwinelle Hall
Presented by the Department of Rhetoric, Film and New Media, and History of Art
How does photography reflect on its own toxicity? To respond to this question, this talk 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 “Chemical Triangle,” the factory was, at the time, the largest manufacturer of colour film in Europe, second only to Kodak in the world. Guiding the viewer from the manufacture of celluloid to the packaging of the finished film, Schröter’s series presents the gendered labour of film 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 German Democratic Republic and abroad.
This talk takes Schröter’s series as an opportunity to probe the intertwined histories of photography, labour, and chemical exposure at the socialist film factory. More specifically, it considers how the act of picturing the film factory—and the labour underway within—provokes a confrontation with the ambivalences of film colour. As I argue, colour, in these images, functions as both visual spectacle and material witness, manifesting the dangerous chemical intimacy behind the manufacture of photosensitive materials. Though created for the purpose of advertising, Schröter’s series ultimately emerges as an unlikely archive, one that not only reveals the material conditions of film manufacturing, but also prompts us to reflect on the medium’s unruly chemical ecology, which continues to shape life in the region today.
Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose work explores the history of photography, film, and moving image media through an ecological lens. She is currently Assistant Professor of German Media at the University of Minnesota, where she is completing her first book, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere. Her research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and, most recently, the eikones Center for the Theory and History of the Image at the University of Basel, and has appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, Representations, Photographica, Transbordeur, and Feminist Media Histories. In addition to her academic writing, she is also curator of the recent exhibition Unsettled Ground at the Smart Museum of Art and has programmed screenings at venues across Minneapolis, Chicago, and Princeton.
For more information please contact Miryam Sas at mbsas@berkeley.edu.
