UCLA

The interwar period produced several important aesthetic developments significant to photography, including the New Vision in Germany, and Surrealism in France. Germaine Krull and Eli Lotar, two photographers independently associated with these two movements, converged in Paris in the late 1920s. This study considers the artists' career-defining projects in tandem: Krull's images of fragmented architecture in her series M�tal and Lotar's "Abattoir" photographs of corporeal order in slaughterhouses. I begin with an investigation of the body in the work of Krull in order to assess her hybridization of photographic genres and methods, as seen through Rosalind Krauss's concept of the double in surrealist photography. I then turn to Krull's intimate partnership with Lotar and their shared interest in photographic projects related to the body and the machine. Their relationship, as lovers and collaborators, defies the previously held historiographical separation between the photographers, and in turn, collapses larger art historical categories.