Psicofotografía : Grete Stern and the Administration of the Unconscious Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00392/1868530/octo_a_00392.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 SUSAN LAxTON Between 1948 and 1951, Grete Stern, a German photographer best known during her lifetime for her geometrically ordered, realist approach to photogra - phy, worked intensively on a heavily manipulated typology of dreams, creating more than 140 photomontages constructed in a style that can only be character - ized as Surrealist: figurative, illusionistic, narrative, and irrational. Stern was living in Buenos Aires by then, so the images have been exhibited repeatedly under the name “ Sueños ” (dreams)—and in spite of their anomalous appearance in her overall range of production, they have become the most frequently examined examples of her work. 1 Visually, they are nothing if not arresting—not least because they seem to indicate a pivot away from both schools of photography to which Stern has been linked: the “New Vision” model associated with Moholy- Nagy’s Bauhaus experiments and, more dramatically, the sober Neue Sachlichkeit, a photographic direction supported in the late Bauhaus by Walter Peterhans, Stern’s teacher, who came on at the school as master of photography in 1929. 2 The Sueños images first appeared as a commission for the fotonovela magazine Idilio , where they illustrated “Psychoanalysis Can Help You,” a weekly advice column written by sociologist Gino Germani and psychoanalyst Enrique Butelman under the 1. Awareness of Stern’s Sueños series came late, when in 1967 the artist reprinted and retitled certain of the photomontages from negatives in her archive, reclaiming them as art. The original prints, considered of little value at the time, had been destroyed by the publisher of Idilio , Editorial Abril. See Luis Priamo, Sueños: Fotomontajes de Grete Stern: Serie completa (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Fundación CEPPA, 2003), p. 103. For the fullest review of the literature on the images since the 1980s, including those authors who have characterized the images as “surreal,” see Paula Bertúa, La cámara en el umbral de lo sensible: Grete Stern y la revista Idilio , 1948–1951 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2012), pp. 77–80. 2. For a characterization of Sachlichkeit as a general term summarizing the cultural sensibility under which the Bauhaus developed, see Herbert Molderings, “Urbanism and Technological Utopianism,” in Germany: The New Photography, 1927–33 , ed. David Mellor (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), pp. 87–94; and Rosalind Krauss, “Jump Over the Bauhaus,” October 15 (Winter 1980), pp. 102–10. For a periodization of the Bauhaus that links masters and directors to shifts in the administrative goals and realized sensibilities of the school, see Leah Dickerman, “Bauhaus Fundaments,” and Adrian Sudhalter, “14 Years Bauhaus: A Chronicle,” in Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity , ed. Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), pp. 15–39; 323–37. OCTOBER 172, Spring 2020, pp. 35 –67. © 2020 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00392 36 OCTOBER pseudonym Richard Rest. 3 The feature offered individual interpretations of dream narratives sent in by the overwhelmingly female readership, and ran from Idilio ’s first issue, published on October 26, 1948, through issue 140 in July 1951. Each install - ment was illustrated prominently with a photomontage by Stern, most depicting young women beset by preposterous circumstances ranging from the mildly hallu - cinogenic (a face multiplied in a mirror, “Mirror Dreams”) to the peculiar (picking Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00392/1868530/octo_a_00392.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 3. Priamo, Sueños , p. 17. Butelman, a Jungian psychoanalyst, made the dream interpretations and developed advice for the readers, which he then communicated to Germani, who worked directly with Stern on the corresponding illustrations. See Hugo Vezzetti, “El psicoanálisis y los sueños en Idilio ,” in Priamo, Sueños , p. 153. Prominent in their respective fields, both men had been forced out of academia by the Peronist regime. For the roles of these two displaced figures in the development of psychoanalysis in Argentina, see Mariano Ben Plotkin, “Tell Me Your Dreams: Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture in Buenos Aires, 1930–1950,” The Americas 55, no. 4 (April 1999), pp. 620–21. Grete Stern. “Dreams about Trains.” Idilio 8. August 23, 1949. Psicofotografía 37 strawberries in a bookcase, “A Dream about Fruit”) to the traumatic (a reptile-headed train bearing down at top speed, “Dreams about Trains”). 4 As almost all critics of the work have pointed out, the photomontages are inventive, often humorous (in spite of the disturbing scenes they depict), and exaggerated enough to read as satire, particu - larly as they were published in proximity to the pictorial melodramas typical of the fotonovela genre. These are all characteristics consistent with Stern’s previous work, yet Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00392/1868530/octo_a_00392.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 their appearance in this context has been treated as, on the one hand, a critical response to the repressive ideology of the Perón dictatorship, particularly with regard to the regime’s subordination of women; and, on the other, as symptomatic of the general rise of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires, a movement that would utterly satu - rate Argentina over the next decade. 5 Still, Stern’s radical shift in style and facture is the most striking aspect of the images; oddly, this change has gone unremarked. Given the circumstances, it would seem that Stern, galvanized by her politi - cal situation and pledged to a new alliance with psychoanalysis, was finally able to break with past allegiances to achieve an unprecedented level of creative free - dom—precisely the kind of imaginative liberation advocated by the Surrealist movement. But if we look beyond the surface of these images to recover the structures that both inform their content and direct their effects, it is clear that Stern’s commercial background, rather than her new psychoanalytic connec - tions, was operating in telling ways. The consistent organizational label “ Sueños ,” which was applied to each image as it appeared —“Dreams about Animals,” “Dreams about Reminiscence,” etc.—speaks to the generic, archival structure the series evokes when taken as a whole. It is this quality, which looks back to the great photographic typologies of the Neue Sachlichkeit period, that provides his - torical grounding for the Sueños images and indicates their importance as a turn - ing point for avant-garde production in the face of the postwar shift in represen - tational power from the material to the symbolic in the early days of the informa - tion age. 6 The very appearance of Stern’s Sueños in the mass-media apparatus of 4. “Mirror Dreams” appeared in Idilio 2, no. 17, March 15, 1949, p. 2; “A Dream about Fruit,” in Idilio 1, no. 8, December 14, 1948, p. 2; and “Dreams about Trains,” in Idilio 2, no. 8, August 23, 1949, p. 2. 5. The anti-Peronist attribution, widely accepted in the literature on the Sueños , flows from Stern’s personal politics and those of the figures around her (including Arte Madí, the psychoanalytic community, and the editorship of Idilio and its parent company Editorial Abril), as opposed to any overtly propagandist iconography in the photomontages. See especially Bertúa, La cámara en el umbral de lo sensible, pp. 27–29 and 135–43; and Jodi Roberts, Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern: Defining the Modern in Argentine Photography, 1930–1956 (PhD diss., New York University, 2015), p. 261. Complicating this characterization of the Sueños as a “counter-public” is the fact that while fulfilling the Idilio commis - sion, Stern also worked as the official photographer for Estudio del Plan de Buenos Aires, a govern - ment-supported housing initiative. Roberts, Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern, pp. 267–71. 6. “The principle of accumulation in the form of sequence is one of the standard procedures of the photography of New Objectivity . [an] aesthetic preparation of objects for advertising purposes.” Udo Hartmann, “The Eye of Herbert Bayer,” in Photography at the Bauhaus , ed. Jeannine Fiedler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 65. The only exceptions to this labeling system are the first two installments in the series, which were both entitled “The Mysterious World of Dreams.” See Idilio 1, no. 1 (October 26, 1948) and 1, no. 2 (November 2, 1948). For an account that places the Sueños pho - tomontages in the context of “sexology” and a rising technical imagination promulgated by mass media, see Plotkin, “Tell Me Your Dreams,” pp. 608–11. 38 OCTOBER the late 1940s demonstrates how classifying systems—which for photographers of the 1920s and ’30s had been legitimate forms of response to the chaos of mod - ern urban life and the sudden loss of long-standing traditions embedded in the very material of everyday life (records of actual people and things)—became in the postwar context a means of generic classification and authoritative didactic imagery (information posing as facts) that collapsed formerly distinct economies Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00392/1868530/octo_a_00392.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 of desire. The shift both affirms and exceeds the historically specific boundaries of Peronist nation-building to portend the sub rosa forms of surveillance and self- administration that now pervade contemporary culture. Tabular Training Stern’s colleague at Idilio Gino Germani confirmed Stern’s full participation in the construction of this new bureaucracy when he dubbed her work “ psicofo - tografía ,” or “psychophotography,” a technique located, as he put it, at the intersec - tion of science and art. 7 Yet there is little in Stern’s background to indicate that she would have been interested in photomontage as a technique for the illustra - tion of dreams, however “scientific” its basis.