Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover: Aenne Biermann’s 60 Photos
Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover: Aenne Biermann’s 60 Photos

Summary/Abstract: “A child’s hands” was chosen as the cover image for a monograph by photographer Aenne Biermann (1898–1933), published in Weimar Germany (1930) as part of a small series of paperback publications edited by Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold. Volume 1 of the same series, also published in 1930, was dedicated to photography by László Moholy-Nagy, who in a different context had advocated for photographic literacy. Even though Biermann was published amongst the forerunners of the New Vision, as evidenced by her photobook 60 Photos, she had been forgotten for a long time. By calling attention to her photographic oeuvre, my essay poses questions about the mechanisms of writing photobook history (and which books are omitted from it). In the discourse surrounding the photobook, the child’s hand as depicted on the cover is viewed as a symbol of the activity that the photobook unleashes, both as a tangible object and as a thinking device. Biermann’s photo-constellations oscillate between training manual and atlas for seeing, between perception primer and picture book; they offer a surprisingly humorous complexity, taking full advantage of the photobook as a medium of artistic expression.

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