During the modernist media revolution of the 1920s, workers photographically recorded their cramped environments, the battles of the labor movement and their consciously theatrical every-day lives for the first time.

In a three-year DFG-funded project at the Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde (the Institute for Saxon History and Ethnology), over 5.000 photographs from Saxon collections (Dresden, Zwickau, Leipzig) were assessed—in the most extensive and detailed research into this topic to date. The contributions in the book discuss this new image culture and compare the photographs to then contemporary graphic design and painting. “Das Auge des Arbeiters” (The Worker’s Eye) accompanies the eponymous exhibition at the Kunstsammlungen Zwickau, the Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne, and the Stadtmuseum Dresden. An inventory of the 400 photographs taken by Leipzig construction worker and Bauhaus student Albert Henning from the Kunstsammlungen Zwickau forms part of the publication. The exhibition will travel to Zwickau (May – August 2014), Cologne (August – October 2014), and Dresden (March – June 2015).