Double Exposure

Theodor W. Adorno once described his friend Siegfried Kracauer as a ‘curious realist’ whose thinking ‘was always more contemplation than thought’. He ‘thinks with an eye that is astonished almost to the point of helplessness but then suddenly flashes into illumination.’ What Adorno considered a flaw (thinking with one’s eyes) explains Kracauer’s new-found topicality and recognition as a visual thinker and theorist of film and photography. From his early essays on mass culture in Weimar Germany to books on cinema and historiography written in exile in the United States, Kracauer’s works (now back in print in German in a complete edition published by Suhrkamp) are characterized not least by their methodical focus on seemingly insignificant details.

The as-yet-unwritten story of the collaboration between Kracauer (1889–1966) and his wife Lili (née Ehrenreich, 1893–1971) can be reconstructed from seemingly trivial things. In the labyrinthine stacks of the German Literature Archive in Marbach, which holds the contents of the Kracauers’ library – as well as notes, letters and pictures from their estate – one finds previously overlooked photographs, the earliest taken in early-1930s Paris, where the couple first went into exile before fleeing to the US. Each of these pictures has a twin: whenever Kracauer photographed his wife (we see Lili posing as an intellectual garçonne) she took a picture of him in the same place.

They are seen together in strikingly few pictures, almost always photographing each other instead – such as during their stay in Minnewaska, New York, in the summer of 1953. They are both shown in half profile, shaded from the sun by a shelter made of rough timber. The setting contrasts with their formal clothing: white shirts, suits and lightweight leather shoes. In these pictures, the Kracauers present themselves as distinguished city-dwellers, even if the scenery and their distant gazes suggest the motif of the resting rambler. Taking photographs was Lili Kracauer’s speciality; over the years the self-taught photographer took many portraits of her husband (many more than he took of her). Giving up her job as a librarian at Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research after marrying Kracauer in March 1930, Lili became her husband’s collaborator. Her tasks ranged from researching and excerpting material to proofreading and preparing works for print. Her husband praised ‘her faculty of perceiving the essential and penetrating to its core’ and the ‘sureness of her judgement’. In this light, the dedication in his Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), ‘For my wife’, indicates more than just the patience for which scholars usually thank their spouses in such cases.

Kracauer made the initial notes for this book – now considered a seminal work of classic film theory – in 1940–41 in Marseilles, another stop on the couple’s flight. It was 1948 before he was able to continue working on it, and in 1951 Magazine of Art published an early version of the introductory chapter under the title ‘The Photographic Approach’. It contains a summary of photography’s essential properties. Defining what ‘photographic’ meant was funda­mental for Kracauer, who describes the subject of his theory of film precisely as ‘normal black-and-white film, as it grows out of photography’.

Indeed, the seeming casualness with which the couple photographed each other weighs in favour of understanding their pictures in relation to this theoretical background. According to Kracauer, photography has a media-specific affinity to uncontrived reality and the indeterminate; it emphasizes chance and suggests endlessness. Consequently, ‘even the most typical portraits must retain an accidental character – as if they were plucked en route and still quivered with crude existence’. This does not happen of its own accord but paradoxically calls for a focused effort on the part of the photographer, who must ‘follow the realistic tendencies’ of the photographic medium ‘under all circumstances’, although he can and indeed must employ his ‘formative faculties’: ‘For nature is not likely to give itself up to him if he does not absorb it with all his senses strained and with his whole being.’ For Kracauer, the photographer is characterized by a sensitive and imaginative reading of reality.

When one looks at these twin photographs, it’s worth remembering that they were taken in an era when people were not incessantly photographing everything, as they do in our digital times. Cameras were difficult to operate; photographic film and developing were costly. As the films and contact sheets in the estate show, every successful shot was the result of multiple attempts. With no darkroom of her own, Lili Kracauer had her pictures developed and enlarged by commercial laboratories. Her notes to the lab staff, which are among the material in the archive, give the same instructions over and over again: ‘glossy, full good contrast, please don’t crop, print full negative.’
Translated by Nicholas Grindell