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Germaine Krull. Métal . 1928. Plates 36–39. All images © Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen. From Material to Infrastructure: Germaine Krull’s Métal * Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

MAX BOERSMA

A railway junction, an iron construction, a harbor crane, and a whirling machine: Four images by German-born photographer Germaine Krull present key features of industrial modernity. Taken in the 1920s and reproduced as ink-based col - lotype prints, these photographs manifest their technical objects in ways largely unprecedented in the history of photography before Krull’s time. In part, their novel - ty lies in the very divergences within their modes of picturing: The delicate textures and streamlined composition of the steel tracks contrast sharply with the confusion of floating iron elements; the crane’s excised silhouette—appearing as if pasted on the bare matte paper—likewise opposes the mesmerizing gleam of spinning gears within some unnamed factory. Considered as a group, the images oscillate between rich tonality and graphic abstraction, physical embeddedness and spatial dislocation, the banal and the sublime. One might fail to recognize the tangled iron construction as the iconic ; deprived of its famed profile, it becomes difficult to identify. This particular photograph, layered with cascading lettering, also adorns the cover of the book that links these discordant frames into a sequence. Published in 1928, Métal is among the most celebrated and influential mod - ern photo books. 1 It is the most defining object of Krull’s wide-ranging, ever-itiner - ant career as a photographer and photojournalist, traced by art historian Kim Sichel in her groundbreaking and indispensable monograph. 2 Yet despite its repu - tation, the specificity of Krull’s project has evaded definition, lost amid its apparent

* This article was first developed in consultation with Benjamin Buchloh, whose feedback and support were essential for its growth, and it benefited greatly from a seminar taught by Stephen Kingsley Scott. My sincere thanks to Maria Gough, Robin Kelsey, Madeleine Morley, Jennifer Roberts, and Christopher Williams-Wynn for crucial advice and generous conversations along the way. An earli - er version of the text was presented at the 2017 UCLA symposium “Art on the Edge: Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries, Challenging Conventions”; I would also like to thank the event’s organizers and participants for their insightful comments. 1. Germaine Krull, Métal , ed. A. Calavas (: Librairie des Arts Décoratifs, 1928), unpaginat - ed. Translations from German and French sources are my own, unless noted. 2. Kim Sichel, Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). Recently published, Sichel’s book Making Strange includes a new chapter on Métal , situating Krull’s pub - lication more extensively within the field of French, German, and American photographic books. See Kim Sichel, “Montage: Germaine Krull’s Métal ,” in Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), pp. 15–47.

OCTOBER 173, Summer 2020, pp. 118 –142. © 2020 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00405 120 OCTOBER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Krull. Métal . 1928. Cover and title page.

heterogeneity of strategies and objects, her frequent relocations among artistic cir - cles, and the discursive prominence of male contemporaries. Within the overlap - ping fields of New Vision, New Objectivity, and industrial photography, Métal is peculiar in many respects. Lacking captions, image titles, and an index, the book embodies a strange hybrid of the photographic travel album and the industrial cat - alogue; Krull’s images largely minimize or exclude geographic markers, signage and other text, human subjects, and urban or environmental settings. They system - atically refuse stylistic consistency and convention as well, with no two adjacent plates offering the same configurations of site, scale, composition, or point of view. What stands as the counterpart to this mutable pictorial agenda is metal itself, the shared constitutive material of all depicted objects. Across the book’s sixty-four numbered but unbound sheets, a calculated movement of associations and inver - sions emerges in which metal—namely, iron and steel—rises to the foreground in ever-shifting configurations. In short, Krull’s book is structured by a speculative analogy drawn between metal and photography, a linking of material and medium. While little known, this pairing has a history, one that begins in architectural discourses of the nineteenth century and reaches a climax in the writings of Swiss historian Sigfried Giedion, who finds his own use for Krull’s photography. Against this context, Métal ’s interplay of attunement and estrangement nonetheless stands apart. The formal malleability and From Material to Infrastructure 121

spatial mobility of photography become Krull’s tools to investigate the many dis - parate functions of metal in her surroundings, encompassing those roles unseen, habitualized, technically obscure, and overpowering. Krull’s focus on metal eludes the two competing poles of her work’s reception, framed as either a critique or cele - bration of industry. Instead, her project manifests the peculiar and fraught experi - ence of living amid large-scale technical systems, mobilizing its analogy to invoke— Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 and, moreover, to theorize in photography—the infrastructures organizing Western European modernity. 3 With the increasing concern for studying and historicizing such systems across a wide range of disciplinary fields in recent years, Krull’s venture should be viewed as an early attempt to find photographic counterparts for these distributed networks and for an emergent sense of entanglement in their multiple scales and intersecting processes.

The Iron Was Alive Like those of many definitive works, the origins of Métal appear retrospec - tively as a series of revelatory moments, dispersed within the writings and recol - lections of its maker with fuzzy dates and a certain rhetorical inflation. The pub - lication, which developed slowly over a number of years, marked a considerable shift for the photographer. Trained in the pictorialist tradition at Munich’s Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie, Krull produced primarily somber nudes and portraits in the 1910s and early 1920s, operating her own commercial studio in the city. Following several years of fervent political engagement—lead - ing Krull, as Sichel concisely recounts, to be “expelled from the Communist Party, tried for treason in Germany, and first jailed and then deported from both Bavaria and the Soviet Union”—she transferred to Weimar-era Berlin in 1922. 4 There Krull would meet the young filmmaker , and working closely alongside each other, the pair quickly found themselves at the nexus of Russian, Dutch, French, and German avant-garde developments. After a first visit to Holland with Ivens in the fall of 1924, Krull relocated to Amsterdam in 1925, where she made her first industrial images simultaneous with the international emergence of New Vision photography. While not entirely discarding her prior interest in muted atmospheres, Krull embraced with great enthusiasm a new emphasis on abstraction and pictorial sequencing.

3. Sichel writes that Métal offers “a cool but subtly biting critique of both the power and the dis - orientation of industry.” Ibid., p. 69. By contrast, Mark Antliff reads Krull’s images as predominantly celebratory and argues—with regard to those published by Philippe Lamour in the journal Grand’Route: Revue Mensuelle —that they “expressed the dynamism of collective consciousness and the industrial revo - lution.” Mark Antliff, “Machine Primitives: Philippe Lamour, Germaine Krull, and the Fascist Cult of Youth,” Qui Parle 13, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2001), p. 93. I allude here to Leah Dickerman’s claim that Aleksandr Rodchenko “theorized in pictures” prior to his important written statements on photogra - phy. Leah Dickerman, “The Radical Oblique: Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Camera-Eye,” Documents 12 (Spring 1998), p. 24. 4. Sichel, Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity , p. 18. 122 OCTOBER

Krull’s turn to industrial subjects, according to her later recollections, origi - nated from a walk through the port of Amsterdam. Observing steel cranes as they loaded and unloaded cargo from docked ships, she later described the experience in deeply ambiguous terms. “Perhaps these metal giants,” Krull wrote in 1976, in whose proximity I felt very small and unremarkable, frightened me. . . .

Did these metal structures actually appeal to me? I cannot say, I merely Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 wanted to photograph them and was then enamored by my images. At the time, I was not yet interested in photography, but these steel giants provoked something in me that brought me to make it into my medium. I began to see things as the unspoiled, neutral, impartial eye sees them, and from this moment on, I had discovered photography for myself. 5 A shift in agency is central to Krull’s story: It was the “metal giants” that imposed themselves upon her body, her vision, and her photography. Fear and perplexity accompanied revelation and excitement. Exploring the site with her portable Zeiss Icarette camera, Krull appears to have experienced what anthropol - ogist Brian Larkin describes as “a sensing of modernity, a process by which the body, as much as the mind, apprehends what it is to be modern, mutable, and pro - gressive.” 6 In Amsterdam’s harbor, and shortly after in Rotterdam’s, among the most trafficked in Europe, Krull began a practice of examining the embedded machinery and structures. While her description of an “unspoiled, neutral, impar - tial eye” may imply something like an objective form of vision, these experiences in no way occasioned a fixed photographic agenda. Instead, her approach sought to break down and estrange habits of seeing, aligning itself in crucial ways with her chosen objects. A brief 1926 article by Krull, entitled “Paths of Modern Photography,” attests to the aims of these initial studies in Amsterdam’s port. Photography, she argues, had not yet grasped the technical conditions of the time, as had other media and design objects (she alludes to Cubism, Russian Constructivism, and related movements). Taking the imposing harbor structures as “characteristic” of her period, Krull defines her goal as emulating “how the workers see the iron scaffoldings when they operate the cranes high up in the air.” 7 This implied perspective suggests both a familiarity with such massive machines and a privileged view upon the disarticulation of phenomenological space amidst their systems and flows. Crucially, Krull’s images

5. Germaine Krull, “Einstellungen: Autobiographische Erinnerungen einer Fotografin aus der Zeit zwischen den Kriegen,” in Germaine Krull: Fotografien 1922–1966 , ed. Klaus Honnef et al. (Cologne: Rheinland-Verlag, 1977), p. 120. Krull gives the date of “1922 or 1923” for this walk, but Sichel’s dating suggests fall 1924 at the earliest. 6. Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013), p. 337. 7. Germaine Krull, “Wege der modernen Photographie,” Photographie für alle: Zeitschrift für alle Zweige der Photographie 20 (1926), p. 315. The article includes four early examples of her images, three of which eventually feature in Métal as Plates 17, 49, and 63, the last in cropped and reversed form. Two years after Krull, Aleksandr Rodchenko published an essay with a nearly identical title. See Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Puti sovremennoi fotografii [Paths of Modern Photography],” Novyi lef 9 (1928), pp. 31–39. From Material to Infrastructure 123

thematize only this second aspect, never imparting a sense of control or stability. This stands in marked contrast to what her partner Ivens produced from their shared investigations: His 1928 film De Brug (The Bridge) , completed the same year as Métal , centers upon Rotterdam’s prominent Koningshaven railway bridge and par - takes in comparable spatial disorientations and montage strategies. It ultimately recuperates narrative continuity, however, by focusing upon the structure’s role in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 urban life, piecing together the many facets of its technical operation and demon - strating the calm supervision of the male operators. Krull’s images—and her project overall—lack an explicitly illustrative agen - da, as well as active protagonists. Her Holland photographs frequently isolate metal frameworks starkly against the cloudless sky, collapsing built forms into shal - low geometric patterns that directly engage the camera’s frame. By emphasizing photography’s cropping of the world and suppressing firm grounding, such images often impart to viewers—as Rosalind Krauss described of Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents series—a sense of “something ripped away,” withholding the ability to imagine “our own physical occupation” of the photographic space. 8 This refusal of bodily projection generates a distinctly dizzying, unsettled feeling. In the process, the “impartial eye” of her photography forges a key relationship with its objects: By coupling the generic, unadorned metal frameworks with photography’s own era - sure of conventional stylistic signifiers, Krull’s images blur differences between sites and objects, an effect amplified by her publication’s lack of identificatory cap - tions. Her material abstractions float free from context and location.

8. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Stieglitz/Equivalents,” October 11 (Winter 1979), p. 135.

Krull. Métal . 1928. Plates 17 and 43. 124 OCTOBER

In her later reflections, Krull also claims to have discovered a specific form of defamiliarization in watching such harbor infrastructure at work. “If one observes a large crane slowly lifting its bales through the air,” she explains, the eye cannot make out precisely where the metal arm will set down its load, whether on one of the ships or on one of the quay-side

trucks. One has to lift one’s head, and what the eye sees then is no Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 longer a unified entity, which the name “crane” denotes, but rather a jumble of iron girders and rollers. This phenomenon had apparently remained unknown until now and had not been noted by anyone. In my opinion, this way of seeing things, which my eye and my lens had discovered, was the impetus for a whole range of possibilities of see - ing, observing, and perceiving. 9 Krull’s observation suggests a specific update to the assertion, frequently attributed to Paul Valéry, that “to see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.” In attempting to track these operations—to follow the apparatus that undergirds the movement of commercial goods and raw materials—she found herself disori - ented by scale, complexity, and perspective. Unable to grasp such processes as uni - fied, her gaze refracted onto discrete parts of the crane; in turn, her images often perform this disorientation by putting pressure on photographic denotation, gen - erating an ambiguity that connotes a failure to comprehend the observed object. 10 The numerous Eiffel Tower views in Métal likewise estrange the once-con - troversial structure, redirecting attention to ancillary mechanisms and elements such as joints, elevators, and wires. After roughly a year in Amsterdam, Krull set - tled in Paris in 1926; upon sharing her Holland images, she received a commis - sion to photograph the French icon for the magazine Vu .11 The task apparently held little interest for her at first, and she recalls exploring “the lifeless black monster of iron” to no avail until stumbling upon a small utility passageway. Krull then describes how she “climbed up and down and suddenly the mighty wheels that kept the elevator running, the heavy iron constructions, and the smaller, merely decorative struts took on the form of giant spiders observed against the light. Everything had become animated and had nothing to do with the Eiffel Tower as we know it: the iron was alive!” 12 Captivated by these hidden energies and supports, Krull probed their functions with her camera, departing from the structure’s lauded engineering. In the sequencing of the final publica -

9. Krull, “Einstellungen,” p. 126. 10 . Analyzing the containerized flows of global commodities roughly seven decades later, Allan Sekula encapsulated the problem as follows: “What one sees in a harbor is the concrete movement of goods. This movement can be explained in its totality only through recourse to abstraction.” Allan Sekula, “Fish Story,” in Fish Story (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 1995), p. 12. 11 . Krull contributed to around sixty subsequent issues of Vu , totaling nearly three hundred photographs. Michel Frizot and Cédric de Veigy, Vu: The Story of a Magazine (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), p. 307. 12 . Krull, “Einstellungen,” p. 123. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Krull. Métal . 1928. Plates 11, 12, 5, and 6. 126 OCTOBER

tion, the airy structure is also made to rhyme with other forms, such as the micro-scale meshing of gears, just as elsewhere a towering bridge follows an open expanse of suspended steel cables, reversing positive and negative space. It is perhaps through the viewer’s occasional, hesitant identification of the tower within the book that Krull’s strategies of geographic dislocation become acutely felt; across eleven interspersed plates, the celebrated monument-turned- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 radio-antenna becomes nearly indistinguishable from other iron constructions. While these preliminary examples share strategies of defamiliarization and spatial confusion, Métal reveals a contrasting set of approaches for its interior settings and smaller objects. In addition to her Vu commissions, Krull incorpo - rated images stemming from commercial work for car and gear manufacturer André Citroën as well as the Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’Électricité, a major Parisian electrical supplier. Shifting away from standard - ized elements, this second broad grouping is attuned to particulars, evoking spaces and systems that fall outside of daily view. In one example, Krull captures the dark luster of snaking pipes against a power-plant wall, an eerily unpeopled scene of work; for others, she presents carefully framed micro-views of various instruments and mechanisms, divulging little of their origin or function. Surprisingly, eight of these photographs were shot in the Musée des arts et

Krull. Métal . 1928. Plates 23 and 29. From Material to Infrastructure 127

métiers in Paris, a fact only subtly hinted at within the book itself. 13 Likely deci - pherable only to specialist viewers, several such oblique images examine signifi - cant transportation and electrical devices of the nineteenth century, including the first combustion-engine design of Belgian engineer Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir, a prototype steam-powered airplane engine by French aviator Clément Ader, and an early electromagnetic device by the German inventor Heinrich Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Daniel Ruhmkorff, popularizer of the induction coil. 14 Exploiting both museum and factory as sites for experimentation, Krull repurposes these objects, giving them over to a projective play of associations and an alternating sense of visibili - ty and obscurity. The book’s only interpretative guidance is provided by a preface by French writer and editor Florent Fels. The hyperbolic text attributes a remarkable force to industrial objects, describing their power as at once terrifying and quasi-divine. Bemoaning the outdatedness of European urban environments, Fels’s words carry a contradictory political tone, condemning the failures and violence of technologi - cal development while nonetheless championing its new forms with exuberant optimism. “Ten years after the war, steel will finally serve a noble cause and per - haps regain its good name,” he speculates. 15 His preface resonates with a broader interwar optimism linking industry and international politics, a belief that institu - tions such as the League of Nations and transnational systems like railways might contribute to a lasting peace in Europe. 16 In France, the year 1928 saw the années folles in full force, a period of rapid expansion in the domains of electric power, entertainment, and transportation. Tramway ridership within Paris reached its peak that year (with approximately 700 million annual rides, or 1.9 million per day), and electricity was increasingly replacing gas in the private home, powering a broadening range of household appliances. 17 In marked contrast to Fels’s enthusi - asm, Krull’s own thinking appears rather tentative, despite the obvious enthusiasm for her own photographic findings.

13 . A small acknowledgment note in Métal provides some clues to her sites: “The Eiffel Tower, the cranes and transporter bridges of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Marseille and Saint-Malo have provided me the material for a number of the plates from which this album is formed. I am indebted to others for the extreme kindness with which the Director of the Conservatory of Arts-et-Métiers welcomed me in his muse - um, the Director of the CPDE at the Saint-Ouen Power Station, M. André Citroën in his factories.” 14 . This list, established by way of the museum’s published and online collection catalogues, refers to the objects in Plates 15, 61, and 29, respectively. 15 . Florent Fels, “Preface to Métal by Germaine Krull,” in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940 , ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), p. 14. 16 . Irene Anastasiadou observes that, following WWI and the formation of the League of Nations, “for the first time, internationalization of railways became part of a discussion about the con - struction of an international society.” Irene Anastasiadou, Constructing Iron Europe: Internationalism and Railways in the Interbellum (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), p. 23. 17 . Peter S. Soppelsa, “Urban Railways, Industrial Infrastructure, and the Paris Cityscape, 1870– 1914,” in Trains, Culture, Mobility: Riding the Rails , ed. Benjamin Fraser and Steven D. Spalding (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), p. 139 n. 72. 128 OCTOBER

Interlacing divergent images and strategies, Métal ultimately confronts the reader with a wholly disorienting montage. In so doing, the publication presents a distinctive solution to a core tension of the newly ascendant media format of the photo book: the conflict between photographic iconicity and syntagmatic distribu - tion. Its portfolio form heightens—rather than reconciles—these competing forces; by offering its plates as numbered but unbound and untitled, it both Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 inscribes order and invites dispersion. 18 Métal ’s idiosyncratic subject matter like - wise scrambled the geographic and thematic distinctions that defined most pro - jects of its publisher, Librairie des Arts Décoratifs. Known primarily for volumes on national architectures and landscapes, decorative arts and ornamental patterns, and art reproductions, the high-end bookmaker released relatively few mono - graphic photo books, and none that made such distinctive use of its method of printing. The choice of collotype is essential to Métal ’s visual allure and particular strangeness. Utilizing a glass or metal support covered by light-sensitive gelatin, this inked-based technique—first developed in the mid-nineteenth century—per - mitted a precise registration of continuous tonalities and exacting sharpness; it fre - quently employed uncoated matte paper as well, opening up the possibility of bare, non-inked passages within the printed area. From its conspicuous contrasts to extraordinarily subtle shadows and sheens, Krull’s publication exhibits the strik - ing breadth of collotype’s capacities for photographic reproduction, a fact nowhere more evident than in the numerous seemingly cut-and-pasted forms. With the exception of Eadweard Muybridge, whose monumental Animal Locomotion of 1887 encompassed 781 distinct collotype plates, few photographers made serious or extensive use of the labor-intensive process. Collotype itself bore little—if any—claim to either technological or aesthetic radicality. Métal clearly locates itself outside of broadly legible conventions of reading and picturing. It is in no way immediately apparent how to grasp its overall pro - ject, and its effects likely exceed any prior intentions. In her own way, Krull comes to resemble Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s expansive notion of the artisan and metallurgist, roles defined by the determination “to follow the flow of matter” guided by “intuition in action.” 19 From her accounts of formative encounters with particular sites and structures, detailing only a few moments in an extended inves - tigation, the motivation for the book’s title comes into better focus. Her publica - tion presents an open-ended cataloging of the material’s various affordances—its roles as a means of spatial extension and elevation, a conduit for energy, an agent of movement and physical force, and a rigid support for precise, regularized, and often intricate forms. It is apparent that, for Krull, metal “imposed upon and raised to consciousness something that is only hidden or buried in the other mat -

18 . Krull continued to work without captions for her similarly unbound book Études de nu and her photographic novel Histoire , both of 1930. In her memoirs, Krull claims that it was only in 1929 (after Métal ) that she first thought of producing books without captions, referring to Histoire . Germaine Krull, La vie mène la danse (Paris: Éditions Textuel, 2015), p. 205. See also: Krull, “Einstellungen,” p. 139. 19 . Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , trans. Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury, 1987/2017), p. 477. From Material to Infrastructure 129

ters and operations,” a power that Deleuze and Guattari attribute foremost to its potential for transformation between material states. 20 Rather than emphasizing this type of variability, Krull focused her camera upon what the theorists would call metal’s “second-order itinerancies,” the flows and processes that moved via its means. 21 Across its spatial leaps and inversions of pictorial modes, Métal establishes the relationship of metal to photography as an animating concern. Grasping this analogy in Krull’s time requires a brief detour, one that starts in the mid-nine - Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 teenth century.

Material and Medium As early as 1857, the French architect Charles Garnier observed a remarkable parallelism between the newly developed technologies of photographic depiction and iron construction. “ Photography ,” he argued in an article of that year, “which otherwise renders precious services, tries every day to replace drawing and engrav - ing—that is, to replace art by science and sentiment by exactitude; and so too iron , which is much more preferable than wood in almost all parts of construction, comes to encroach on architecture, to change its characteristic forms, and finally to substitute industry for art in the same way.” 22 The emergence of iron as a con - struction material in the nineteenth century generated considerable disagreement and anxiety within architecture discourse. While advocates foresaw a new style and potential break from classical principles, many influential voices—Garnier includ - ed—sought to restrict the use of iron to internal, structural roles in building, where it could be concealed by stone and ornament. While acknowledging its suit - ability for commercial and utilitarian structures, Garnier held that the metal alone could not achieve the fundamental requirements for monumental architecture of civic, religious, or national importance, namely, “grandeur, nobility, calm, and confidence.” 23 His own Parisian Opéra house—the so-called Palais Garnier, com - pleted in 1875—is a telling compromise, hiding industrial iron beneath its neo- Baroque abundance. And while the architect made extensive documentary use of photography, as recent work by Peter Sealy and Martin Bressani shows, Garnier’s article denounces the medium for its anonymized mechanical and chemical processes, an argument foreshadowing Charles Baudelaire’s infamous Salon cri - tique of two years later. 24

20 . Ibid., p. 478. 21 . Deleuze and Guattari state that “there are second-order itinerancies where it is no longer a flow of matter that one prospects and follows, but, for example, a market. Nevertheless, it is always a flow that is followed, even if the flow is not always that of matter.” Ibid., p. 477. 22 . Emphasis mine. Charles Garnier, “L’architecture en fer,” Le Musée des Sciences 1 (1857), pp. 321–22. 23 . Ibid., p. 322. For a concise history of iron and steel’s adoption in architecture and the corre - sponding debates, see Sokratis Georgiadis, “Introduction,” in Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete , trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1928/1995), pp. 1–57. 24 . Martin Bressani and Peter Sealy, “The Opéra Disseminated: Charles Garnier’s Le Nouvel Opéra de Paris (1875–1881),” Studies in the History of Art 77 (2011), pp. 195–219. 130 OCTOBER

By linking photography and iron, Garnier established a parallel “latent in all the subsequent debates,” Henri Loyrette suggests. 25 In 1865, English architect William White reiterated the analogy, emphasizing photography’s reproducibility and elimination of manual craft. Recognizing that only iron that was cast or rolled—rather than hand-forged—would be of structural use in building, White asserted firmly that the material was incompatible with architecture’s elevated sta - Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 tion: The stern multiplying process of machinery never can be applied to art as a fine art . . . . Its class must ever remain that of a lower order, more nearly analogous with such works, for instance, as those of photogra - phy and lithography in connection with pictorial art. There is great room for the exercise of the power of the artist who produces the negative or the block; but the print from either of them is not and cannot be equal to the enduring touch of the artist’s own hand upon the panel or the paper. 26 While Garnier’s formulation placed photography against print media such as engraving, White groups all reproductive media together. They both agreed, how - ever, that iron construction and photography encroached upon hierarchies of taste and mastery. Seen as embodying the vulgar regimes of science and industry, their formal precision and efficient reproducibility disturbed aesthetic orders, above all notions of individual and national style. Roughly sixty years later, Sigfried Giedion affirmed precisely what Garnier and White had feared. By the mid-1920s, the Swiss critic and historian saw new developments in modern architecture as actualizing potentials latent in nine - teenth-century iron construction; his landmark book Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete appeared in 1928, the same year as Krull’s own publi - cation. As much a manifesto as a historical account, Giedion’s influential project sought explicitly to delineate the future of architectural practice, based on a singu - lar reading of the recent past. Most major discoveries of the previous century, in his view, lay hidden behind “historicizing masks,” whether in science, industry, or architecture. Yet Giedion argues that the divisions and conventions structuring society and daily life were beginning to break down with technological advance - ments, making way for a new age of interconnectivity and openness. Crucially, the historian found this new modern experience already crystallized in built forms of the previous century, above all in Gustave Eiffel’s Tower and Ferdinand Arnodin’s Transporter Bridge in Marseille. This pair serve as Giedion’s primary precursors to the future of modern building, prefiguring the possibilities of iron liberated from adornment and monumentality. Rejecting stone’s opacity, mass, and permanence,

25 . Henri Loyrette, Gustave Eiffel , trans. Susan Gomme and Rachel Gomme (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), p. 172. 26 . William White, “Ironwork: Its Legitimate Uses and Proper Treatment,” in Sessional Papers of the Royal Institute of British Architects (London: Royal Institute of British Architects, 1865), p. 18. From Material to Infrastructure 131

he outlines a path towards transparency, weightlessness, and movement, made pos - sible specifically by iron: We are beginning to transform the surface of the earth. We thrust beneath, above, and over the surface. Architecture is only part of this process, even if a special one. Hence there is no “style,” no proper

building style . . . . By their design, all buildings today are as open as pos - Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 sible. They blur their arbitrary boundaries. Seek connection and inter - penetration. In the air-flooded stairs of the Eiffel Tower, better yet, in the steel limbs of a transporter bridge, we confront the basic aesthetic experience of today’s building: through the delicate iron net suspend - ed in midair stream things, ships, sea, houses, masts, landscape, and harbor. They lose their delimited form: as one descends, they circle into each other and intermingle simultaneously. 27 Adopting these guiding aesthetic ambitions, Giedion’s project moves toward a powerful defense of a new international architecture, represented above all by Le Corbusier. Giedion, in short, foresaw iron construction as enabling a placeless “non-style” in modern building and urbanism, transcending national boundaries and heralding a spatial experience free of past enclosures. For this he is well known. Lesser known are Giedion’s contributions to modernist photography, and here he recognized comparable unrealized potentials. While developing Building in France , the historian himself ventured into photographic practice, inspired in part by his close friendship with László Moholy-Nagy. Giedion’s images appear throughout his final book (itself designed by the Bauhaus master), making up almost half of the total illustrations. His enthusiasm for the medium dovetailed with the much-lauded Film und Foto (Fifo ) exhibition of 1929, which benefited from Giedion’s own recommendations and was later reviewed by him in its Zurich iteration. 28 Remarkably, the Garnier analogy between iron and photography reap - pears in Giedion’s writings, albeit with its meaning precisely inverted. “The ‘new’ building has its origins in the time of industrial development,” he explains in his Fifo review, “but only now are we becoming aware of the meaning and expressive potential of the new materials (iron, reinforced concrete) . . . . It is quite similar, for example, with photography.” 29 For Giedion, both iron construction and photogra -

27 . Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete , p. 91. Translation modi - fied for consistency. 28 . For Giedion’s involvement in Fifo , see Olivier Lugon, “Neues Sehen, Neue Geschichte: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Sigfried Giedion und die Ausstellung Film und Foto ,” in Sigfried Giedion und die Fotografie: Bildinszenierungen der Moderne , ed. Werner Oechslin and Gregor Harbusch (Zürich: gta, 2010), pp. 88–105. 29 . Sigfried Giedion, “Film und Foto: Zur Wanderaustellung des Deutsches Werkbundes im Zürcher Kunstgewerbemuseum,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung , September 1, 1929, p. 9. Giedion reiterates the analogy in an unpublished manuscript from the period: “That photography would be discovered as a means of reporting, as a tool for every kind of propagandistic circulation in its direct expressive and advertising power, is a matter of the last twenty years. Just like the new construction methods (iron 132 OCTOBER

phy had introduced novel technical possibilities recognized by only a few early practitioners, and “decay” had set in when subsequent adopters did not take up these new challenges, leaving figures of the “artist-architect” and “artist-photogra - pher” wedded to outdated aesthetic conventions. Rejecting such pictorialist approaches, Giedion asserts that recent photographers had finally freed their medium from painterly models and grasped its unique capacity: “It is not the task Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 of photography to be the poor imitation of a great art. Its appeal and its impor - tance lie in the possibility to capture all things in a flash and, under certain cir - cumstances, to grasp them further and to record them in greater detail than the human eye.” 30 In tandem with iron construction, he held the medium capable of advancing a transformation of modern experience with boundless consequences for social life. Giedion’s modernist vision, while made possible by iron, anticipated a future state of liberated transparency, an urban existence destined for ever-greater dema - terialization. Building in France claims that the traditional boundaries of architec - tural structures had already started to give way; in their place, the modern subject confronts a fluid network of relationships. Again evoking the Eiffel Tower and Transporter Bridge, Giedion encapsulates this condition in a succession of brief statements: Walls no longer rigidly define streets. The street has been transformed into a stream of movement. Rail lines and trains, together with the rail - road station, form a single whole. Suspended elevators in glazed shafts belong to it just as much as the insulating filling between the supports. The antenna has coalesced with the structure, just as the limbs of a tow - ering steel frame enter into a relationship with city and harbor. Tall buildings are bisected by rail lines. The fluctuating element becomes a part of building. 31 Iron afforded this form of experience, and photography and film were most suited to express it: In addition to sharing many objects of fascination, Giedion and Moholy-Nagy stood largely united on these assumptions. 32 The historian’s the - ses would prove highly influential for the photographer’s own 1929 treatise From Material to Architecture , in which a desire for such fluid spatial relations is likewise forcefully expressed. For Moholy-Nagy, Sokratis Georgiadis speculates, an ideal

skeleton), it has existed for around one hundred years. However, the emotive value of these things has only been discovered in the last twenty years.” Sigfried Giedion, “Fotografie und Kunstgewerbeschule,” in Wege in die Öffentlichkeit: Aufsätze und unveröffentlichte Schriften aus den Jahren 1926–1956 , ed. Dorothee Huber (Zürich: Amman, 1987), pp. 16–17. 30 . Giedion, “Film und Foto,” p. 9. 31 . Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete , pp. 90–91. 32 . For a compelling study of Giedion and Moholy-Nagy’s relationship, framed by way of the Transporter Bridge in Marseille, see Olivier Lugon, “The Old Bridge, the Historian, and the New Photographer,” in Moholy-Nagy: Future Present , ed. Matthew S. Witkovsky, Carol S. Eliel, and Karole P. B. Vail (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2016), pp. 105–16. From Material to Infrastructure 133

architecture would realize “a complete lack of any relationship to material. Architecture would dissolve into nothing.” 33 The two writer-photographers were among the most visible advocates for a technologically driven teleology of demate - rialization within 1920s modernism. Giedion’s words seem to map remarkably well onto Krull’s project. Nearly all of the structures the former championed as defining the “basic experience” of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 modern construction appear in the latter’s pursuit: rail lines, harbor machines, iron cables, ships, elevators, and—of course—iron constructions. 34 In her spatial handling and sequential presentation, metal forms and structures likewise, in Giedion’s words, “lose their delimited form,” “intermingle simultaneously,” and “seek connection and interpenetration.” 35 But a more concrete connection also exists. In 1929, the historian wrote a review of the Züricher Kunsthaus exhibition Abstrakte und Surrealistische Malerei und Plastik , an international survey of modernist painting and sculpture from Cubism to the late 1920s. Running shortly after the city’s presentation of Fifo , the exhibition is framed by Giedion as promoting the same emergent conception of space that he had found in iron constructions. “Twentieth-century painting requires a new culture of vision,” Giedion writes. “Only today, after our eyes have been trained by abstract painters of all types, do we fully recognize the charm that lay unseen in, for example, the abstract struc - tures of iron bridges, the Eiffel Tower, and high-voltage pylons.” 36 Previously misidentified, one of Krull’s Eiffel Tower photographs from Métal in fact features in Giedion’s article. 37 Lacking any attribution, her image appears directly beneath Pablo Picasso’s Ma Jolie (1911–1912), eliciting a com - parison of their angular forms and tonal contrasts. This inclusion of Krull’s pho - tograph, which itself did not feature in the exhibition, places the photographer squarely within Giedion’s interpretative field. In its caption, he argues that her

33 . Sokratis Georgiadis, Sigfried Giedion: An Intellectual Biography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 44. See also László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (Mainz: Florian Kupferberg, 1929/1968), pp. 211–36. 34 . Lugon notes that Krull traveled to the bridge in 1926, before the site gained widespread pop - ularity within avant-garde circles (Giedion would visit in January 1927, Moholy-Nagy in the summer of 1929). Lugon, “The Old Bridge, the Historian, and the New Photographer,” pp. 108–09. 35 . Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete , p. 91. 36 . Giedion, “Neue Optik im Zürcher Kunsthaus,” Zürcher Illustrierte , October 25, 1929, p. 7. Giedion’s article reflects the exhibition’s preliminary title; he had advised the exhibition and put this title forward himself. 37 . Listing the photograph’s maker as “unknown,” Martin Gasser speculated that the image was likely by a Parisian commercial photographer; it is Plate 11 from Métal . Based on his archival research, Gasser also suggested the photograph was not chosen by Giedion himself, but instead by an editor; it is nonetheless apparent that the historian wrote the caption. Martin Gasser, “‘Giedion, der selbst viel photographierte und damit überraschende Dinge entschleierte . . . ’: Der Beitrag Sigfried Giedions zur Neuen Fotografie in der Schweiz und seine eigene fotografische Praxis,” in Oechslin and Harbusch , Sigfried Giedion und die Fotografie: Bildinszenierungen der Moderne , p. 64 n. 29. Thank you to Kim Sichel for supporting my attribution. 134 OCTOBER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Sigfried Giedion. “Neue Optik im Zürcher Kunsthaus.” 1929.

picture’s view was “in itself nothing new,” having been seen by innumerable visi - tors to the tower, but concludes that “it remained reserved for our time to dis - cover a new beauty in it.” 38 In his 1941 tome Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion would maintain this connection between Cubism and the Eiffel Tower, writing that its upper stairways were “among the earliest architectural expression of the continuous interpenetration of outer and inner space.” 39 For the historian, Krull’s photograph accorded perfectly with his modernist inversion of the analo - gy drawn by Garnier. It is difficult to imagine that Giedion knew nothing of Krull’s work at the time of his article. He certainly encountered her photographs at Fifo ; in Stuttgart, for instance, Krull exhibited twenty prints, including one of the Eiffel Tower. 40 That her image lacks attribution in Giedion’s article speaks to both the perceived

38 . Giedion, “Neue Optik im Zürcher Kunsthaus,” p. 7. 39 . Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941/1959), p. 432. 40 . Gustaf Stotz, ed. Internationale Ausstellung des Deutschen Werkbunds: Film und Foto (Stuttgart: Deutscher Werkbund, 1929), p. 66. From Material to Infrastructure 135

authorial status of photography—despite the historian’s own admiration of the medium—as well as the period’s deeply gendered distribution of recognition and critical praise (neighboring illustrations of painting and sculpture by men include the full names of the makers). Neither Giedion nor Krull, to the best of this author’s knowledge, referred to the other in writing, leaving this article as their most direct contact. Developed in direct contemporaneity to Giedion’s theoriza - Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 tions, Métal manifests a parallel attempt to think photography and metal together, probing visually their analogous operations. Krull achieved, however, something quite different from what Giedion envisioned.

From Material to Infrastructure As one leafs through its many sheets, Métal provides no bounded sense of geographic space, no consistent photographic approach, nor any explicit and overarching organizational logic. The cumulative effect of its plates nonetheless retains a sense of continuity, generated in large part by the material focus. Krull’s project, akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on metal, dwells on “a life proper to matter,” one at times “hidden or covered, rendered unrecognizable,” although its interests are more systemic than metallurgical. 41 Rather than the dematerializ - ing passage “from material to architecture” championed by Giedion and Moholy- Nagy, Krull’s concern for metal engenders a reflection on infrastructures; even further, Métal can be read as a nascent theory of infrastructure in photography. 42 Such a reading necessitates close attention to the oppositions and sympathies drawn by Krull’s prints, namely, how her pictured forms alternate between stark dissimilarity and near formal equivalence, between the particular and the stan - dardized, and between the awe-inspiring and the affectless. Infrastructure is a term only seldom encountered in Krull’s reception. 43 It is neither directly employed by the photographer nor is it foreign to her context: By the late nineteenth century, the word had entered circulation in French railway discourse and engineering manuals. 44 However, Métal requires a broader framing of the term, one drawn from a recent body of scholarship in anthropology and the

41 . Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus , p. 479. 42 . My thinking here is indebted to Maria Gough, who describes Rodchenko’s “nascent theory of deductive structure” by adapting terms from Gerald Holton and Michael Fried. See Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 47–50. 43 . Michael Jennings recently proposed a new understanding of “infrastructural space” in Weimar photography, arguing that negative space took on a dimension of positive connectivity and relationality; he includes Krull within this model, alongside Moholy-Nagy and Albert Renger-Patzsch. See Michael W. Jennings, “The Agency of Things: Infrastructural Space in Weimar Industrial Photography,” Monatshefte 109, no. 2 (Summer 2017), pp. 282–91. 44 . An 1892 French railway-construction handbook, for instance, explicitly separates “infrastruc - ture” (bridges, viaducts, embankments, and the like) from “superstructure” (the railway line itself, its stations, and signals). Adolphe Schoeller, Les chemins de fer et les tramways: Construction, exploitation, trac - tion (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et Fils, 1892), p. 11. 136 OCTOBER

fields of information, science, and technology studies. Larkin succinctly describes the curious ontology possessed by infrastructures: They are things and also the relation between things. As things they are present to the senses, yet they are also displaced in the focus on the matter they move around. . . . What distinguishes infrastructures from

technologies is that they are objects that create the grounds on which Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 other objects operate, and when they do so they operate as systems. 45 Infrastructures constitute the sociotechnical background conditions within which daily life unfolds; when working effectively, they can elicit radically opposed states of visibility—appearing at times spectacular, while at others fading from con - scious awareness. Because infrastructures comprise networks of channeling and circulation often across wide expanses of geographic space (think of trains and their tracks, signals, stations, and bridges), they entwine local, national, interna - tional, and corporate interests and encompass more than merely physical objects. Requiring “amalgam[s] of technical, administrative, and financial techniques,” in Larkin’s words, the materiality of these systems is always already enmeshed in regimes of capital, practices of governmentality, and structures of inequality. 46 In contrast to other framings of large-scale systems, the lens of infrastructure analy - sis—as outlined influentially by Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder—retains dis - tinct positions for the users or beneficiaries of these operations, as well as for those who maintain, service, and design them. 47 Infrastructures have the peculiar ability to waver in one’s experience between non-presence, transparent use, interruption, and scalar excess. “To be modern,” Paul Edwards claims, “is to live within and by means of infrastructures, and therefore to inhabit, uneasily, the intersection of these multiple scales.” 48 One cannot infer from an illuminated light bulb or a sub - way car all of the things, processes, money, and legislation required for their oper - ation; within certain economically and socially privileged conditions, one might

45 . Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” p. 329. 46 . Ibid., p. 330. 47 . Asking “when”—rather than “what”—is an infrastructure, Star and Ruhleder were the first to systematically outline a set of key dimensions, among them “embeddedness,” “transparency,” “reach or scope,” and “visible upon breakdown.” Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder, “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces,” Information Systems Research 7, no. 1 (March 1996), pp. 111–34. Infrastructures share certain important aspects with what Timothy Morton classifies as “hyperobjects” (namely, massive scale, nonlocality, interobjectivity, and temporal undulation), as well as with notions of “assemblage” as advanced by Deleuze and Guattari, N. Katherine Hayles, Jane Bennett, and many others. See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 48 . Paul N. Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems,” in Modernity and Technology , ed. Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 186. In his use of this vexed appellation, Edwards follows Bruno Latour, who writes elsewhere that “the adjective modern does not describe an increased distance between society and technology or their alienation, but a deepened intimacy, a more intricate mesh, between the two.” Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 195–96. From Material to Infrastructure 137

not think about their func - tioning at all—at least, not until a technical problem, labor strike, or power outage. The images in Métal demonstrate a remarkably Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 consistent focus on such sup - porting systems and objects: Krull pictures not architec - ture as such but bridges and cranes, not commodities but pipes and power generators, not the train’s emblematic locomotive but its embedded tracks and suspended wires. In documenting and compil - Krull. Métal . 1928. Plate 55. ing these metallic forms, Krull performs a photographic mode of “infrastructural inversion,” a systematic foregrounding and reframing of the background systems that enabled modern urban life across Western Europe. 49 Alternatively attuning and estranging percep - tion, Krull’s camera attends to each object with pointed reflexivity; placed in sequence, constant interchanges between skyward gazes and close-up views, hori - zonless perspectives and obscure utility spaces, double exposures and solarizations prompt the continual redirection of attention, a search for repeated patterns and visual rhymes without definitive conclusion. While emphasizing the formal vari - ability of both her medium and chosen material, Krull productively exploits their shared failure to disclose function, context, and location. Both photography and iron construction are implicated in this ambiguity and opacity, made manifest in her method and assembly. 50

49 . Geoffrey C. Bowker introduced the methodological principle of “infrastructural inversion” in his work of the 1990s, encouraging a focus on the seemingly “passive backdrop against which the his - torical drama is played out.” Geoffrey C. Bowker, “The History of Information Infrastructures: The Case of the International Classification of Diseases,” Information Processing and Management 32, no. 1 (1996), p. 59. 50 . For this reason, Krull’s project seems incompatible in crucial ways with Walter Benjamin’s positions on photography, despite his inclusion of two of her Atget-like Parisian storefront images in his “Little History of Photography.” Métal appears to align with what he derides as a fashion-driven “cre - ative” photography of “interesting juxtapositions,” condemned by way of the oft-reproduced quote by Bertolt Brecht: “A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG reveals nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations—the factory, say— means that they are no longer explicit.” Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media , ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), p. 293. Most of all, Benjamin ends “Little History” by suggesting the necessity of the caption, arguing in later writings that this is pre - cisely what gives photography its political force. Métal clearly has none. 138 OCTOBER

Krull’s interest in infrastructure is thus made manifest not simply by way of her choice of objects but also by how her book prompts an imaginative web of relations across vastly different scales. At least one perceptive critic of Krull’s moment—writer Daniel Rops—noted these strategies, highlighting her book’s remarkable sequencing:

In one, chimneys of factories take flight in an exaggerated perspective: Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 in another, the Eiffel Tower, seen in one of its details, delivers its secrets to us, just like an x-ray of the human skeleton. In another, the overhead bridge (is it Rotterdam or another such port?), the crane, the machine in all its metallic forms reveals itself to us with an intensity that photography, far from fixing, emphasizes. The same movement expresses itself: the photographed dynamo seems to recreate the myste - rious halo with which it surrounds its vertiginous rotation. 51 With fascination and bewilderment, Rops notes both how Krull overlays an object with its imagined operation or effect as well as the sense of movement unfolding across the plates. Clearly responsive to Russian montage experimenta - tion, Métal diverges from the ambitions of these practices, most notably the work of Dziga Vertov, who endeavored to overcome the USSR’s vast space by aligning the camera’s eye with things, matter, and production and enacting “a film bond between peoples.” 52 Only thanks to a retrospective 1978 index is it possible at times to pair Krull’s plates with their sites and objects, spanning four cities in France, two in the Netherlands, and one in both Belgium and Germany. 53 Linked by her portfolio, these metallic forms seem to coexist and interrelate across dis - persed, unnamed sites. They forge connections, channel energies and forces, and record circulation, albeit with a pervading sense of dislocation for the viewer. What finally makes Métal so distinctive as a publication is how it implicates photography and collotype within this logic. Krull’s montage underlines specific infrastructural dimensions of the photographic medium itself, such as its opera - tive capacity to visually and analogically link images within the photo-book form and its frequently subordinated perceptual position in relation to that which it pictures. Her varied strategies interrupt the latter by persistently calling atten - tion to their differences, and the attendant manner of printing amplifies these distinctions even further, rerouting awareness routinely to the image support.

51 . From a review by Daniel Rops in Europe on November 27, 1929; quoted in Pierre Mac Orlan, Germaine Krull (Paris: Gallimard, 1931), p. 15. 52 . Devin Fore, “Dziga Vertov, The First Shoemaker of Russian Cinema,” Configurations 18, no. 3 (Fall 2010), p. 376. 53 . The index, produced with Krull’s assistance in 1978 and published within the 2003 facsimile edition of Métal , mistakenly lists Plate 30 as Le Havre; it was taken in Hamburg. It also erroneously lists only seven plates as picturing objects from the Musée des arts et métiers; at least one other instance— number 61—should also be included. Germaine Krull, Métal , facsimile ed. (Cologne: A. und J. Wilde, 2003), unpaginated. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021

Krull. Métal . 1928. Plate 53. 140 OCTOBER

This shift occurs as much in the book’s most spectacular moments as in the most seemingly banal, such as a steep downward view upon an automated bucket ele - vator. Emerging from a blackened space, the structure’s serialized containers appear empty and still, drawing the eye close to the page; in the process, the bare ground of the matte paper shines out from within the regimented forms and shadows change into dark pools of ink, evincing an uneven absorption into Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 the page. To overlook such moments and refer to the prints only as images would be to suggest, as Robin Kelsey writes, that “the particular materiality of the pho - tograph—in all its instances—does not in fact matter.” 54 Krull’s publication makes such an oversight distinctively difficult. Contrary to White’s denigration of the mechanized print, her deployment of collotype achieves something altogeth - er distinct from the human hand. In short, Krull’s pairing of material and medi - um is palpably estranged by way of this mode of printing, turning attention again to a background condition. “Infrastructures are not, in any positivist sense, simply ‘out there,’” Larkin maintains. “The act of defining an infrastructure is a categorizing moment. Taken thoughtfully, it comprises a cultural analytic that highlights the epistemological and political commitments involved in selecting what one sees as infrastructural (and thus causal) and what one leaves out.” 55 The appeal of metal in Métal derives, paradoxically, from its ink-and-paper sub - strate; one arrives, in this last instance, at the infrastructure of photography, the publication’s own material preconditions. In the end, Krull’s project presents a circumspect attempt to grasp the sys - tems that underlie and overlook modern urban life, recognizing their constitution across divergent scales and distributed spaces. Her book is hardly an affirmative document along the lines imagined by Giedion, for whom such forms foreshad - owed future liberated conditions of modern experience. “Construction in the nineteenth century,” Giedion famously claimed, “plays the role of the subcon - scious. Outwardly, construction still boasts the old pathos: underneath, concealed behind facades, the basis of our present existence is taking shape.” 56 Both Giedion and Krull recognized a startling transformation of built space, but her work sug - gests little sense of freedom. Markedly devoid of human actors, Krull’s metallic assemblage appears to act on and reshape human experience rather than serve its will. Echoing the ambiguity of her first walk in Amsterdam’s port, the project should be viewed as an endeavor, following Edwards, “to know one’s place in gigantic systems that both enable and constrain us .” 57 Toward this aim, Krull’s photo - graphic means are as diverse as the lives of the metal she documents, and Métal ultimately foregrounds several vital aspects of such systems—their simultaneous

54 . Robin Kelsey, “Notes from the Field: Materiality,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 1 (2013), p. 21. 55 . Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” p. 330. 56 . Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete , p. 87. 57 . Edwards, “Infrastructure and Modernity,” p. 191. From Material to Infrastructure 141

materiality and abstraction, physical embeddedness and geographic dislocation, visibility and invisibility, micro and macro scales, and deterritorialization and reconfiguration of spatial boundaries. Against Giedion’s belief in iron’s latent capacities and his positivist aim for modern photography, Krull probes the metal - lic supporting systems of everyday life and arrives at no stable set of approaches or affects, forgoing claims to mastery or prophecies of a condition to come. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 Subsequent books by the photographer differ considerably from Métal : In 1929, Krull released 100 x Paris , a far more constrained and pragmatic compila - tion of notable Parisian sites and views of city life; two collaborative efforts of 1931— La route de Paris à Biarritz (with Claude Farrère) and Route de Paris à la Méditerranée (with )—narrated automotive journeys from the French metropolis to the coasts via pairings of image and text. The latter’s cover is partic - ularly revealing of Krull’s montaged sense of spatial and geographic progression, explicitly aligning the movement between plates with that of the automobile (for the book, Krull recounts taking photographs while lying on the hood of a car as it drove at full speed, although the final selection is more staid). 58 During this same year, the prominent French writer Pierre Mac Orlan edited a small monograph on her work, placing Krull among the very top of her profession. In another publication of 1931, Mac Orlan also wrote suggestive descriptions of an infrastructural future, accompanied by a suite of photographs attributed in part to Krull. Now largely forgotten, the book Comfort —organized by the industrial conglomerate Société Générale de Fonderie—included an essay in which Mac Orlan describes human history as driven toward ever more perfected states of worldly ease through the control of the natural elements. In so doing, he evokes— with astonishing clarity—both the creeping power of modern infrastructures as well as the historical and environmental violence that underpins them. “No one could foresee,” he writes, the reign of brass wire and nickel-plated tubing, which are to our com - fort what the nerves and veins are to the functioning of our body. Heat and light circulate within tubes or follow copper wire networks. Of the four quarrelsome, despotic, and cruel elements, at least two—water and fire—are at the command of a button that one presses or a faucet that one opens or closes. Behind this faucet, there lies all the age-old drama that our ancestors experienced while howling war cries and writing sen - timental poems. 59 If the conflicts and poetry of the past, according to Mac Orlan, found them - selves materialized in the systems of his present, then the future pointed toward an

58 . Krull, La vie mène la danse , pp. 210–11. 59 . Pierre Mac Orlan, “Confort 1931,” in Confort , ed. SOC (Paris: Société Générale de Fonderie, 1931), unpaginated. Several of the book’s accompanying images are often credited to Krull, although they have never been definitively attributed. 142 OCTOBER

ever-deepening entanglement in such networks. “Increasingly,” he conjectures, “the collaboration of the great elements of nature will penetrate into our existence in more and more discreet ways. . . . One day, or one evening, in the sky of a melancholic civilization, the earth will appear encircled by an inconceivable sys - tem of nickel pipes.” 60 What Mac Orlan seemingly had in mind with this global conduit was a kind of geothermal heating system; his words now readily conjure Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00405/1868493/octo_a_00405.pdf by guest on 01 October 2021 the image of undersea fiberoptic cables, the material connections of a networked present beset with unseen data centers, mass surveillance, and ecological crisis. Contrary to the beauty and charm that Giedion found in Krull’s photograph, it perhaps remained reserved for the current time of false dematerializations to rec - ognize something both more profound and unsettling in her project.

60 . Ibid.