Wanderings

Grenzmark Posen-West Prussia in Photographs, 1925

Walther Apel, Werner Köhler, Bruno Stephan

A series of sixty-five collodion prints is the subject of an exhibition about taking photographs as a practice of regional history in the 1920s. The photos were created during walking tours that the amateur photographers Bruno Stephan, Werner Köhler and Walther Apel took in German province of Posen-West Prussia, now a part of Poland. Their densely atmospheric pictures depict villages and their inhabitants, historic buildings, cemeteries and natural scenery. The photos can be read as a rebuttal to the reality of metropolitan life recorded by Berlin photographers. At the same time, the photos reveal patterns of representation that have shaped the view of East Central Europe since the nineteenth century and that create a hierarchy of cultural traditions. The circumstances of the creation and publication of these long neglected photographs were established only recently. The situation in today’s united Europe makes it possible to appreciate the rare collection from a joint German and Polish perspective.