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Home > Faculty > Full-time Faculty > Andrés Mario Zervigón Assistant Professor History of Photography Ph.D, Harvard University, 2000 Biographical Information: Professor Zervigón received his doctorate in art history from Harvard University in 2000. He specializes in the history of photography and concentrates his scholarship on the interaction between photographs, film, and fine art. His work generally focuses upon moments in history when these media prove inadequate to their task of representing the visual. Zervigón’s forthcoming book, The Agitated Image. John Heartfield and German Photomontage 1914-1929, situates the famous artist’s images at just such a moment. The book uses the case of Heartfield to propose that photography’s sudden ubiquity in illustrated magazines, postcards, and posters produced a tremendous disquiet to which artists felt compelled to respond. Zervigón’s aim is to challenge existing histories of Germany’s inter-war avant-garde that describe the response to mass-photography as an enthusiastic embrace. His study, by contrast, argues that artists like Heartfield turned to the medium specifically because they wished to understand its dangerous capacity to stultify and mislead. Photomontage, “New Vision” photography, and the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) as a whole, Zervigón argues, were essentially strategies devised by Germany’s young artists to salvage, reclaim, and reinvent a medium whose validity had been deeply impugned by its inability to accommodate the multifaceted complexity of modernity. Heartfield’s photomontage exposes the anxieties behind these avant-garde recovery efforts by continually stressing photography’s misuse in the hands of his opponents, or the medium’s very inability to represent Weimar-era Germany’s overlooked problems. “You can fool people with photos,” Heartfield would continually admonish, signaling that even his own work could not be entirely trusted. Zervigón’s second book project Objectivity. Photography in Germany’s Weimar-Era expands this discussion beyond Heartfield to a series of test cases ranging from the photo-besotted Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (The Worker’s Illustrated Magazine) to right-wing photographer Erna Lendvai-Dircksen. Zervigón’s recently concluded projects have unfolded similar themes. The exhibition he guest-curated at the Getty Research Institute (Agitated Images. John Heartfield and German Photomontage, 1920 – 1938, February - June, 2006) [http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/heartfield/] located Heartfield’s art within the larger and often intense battle of mass-produced photographs rattling interwar Germany. The exhibition subsequently traveled to the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach (September 2007 – February 2008)[http://www.wolfsonian.org/visitus/press/03.26.07.html]. Zervigón’s forthcoming publications concentrate on specific salvos in this battle of images. His essay “’A Political Struwwelpeter?’ John Heartfield’s Early Film Animation and the Crisis of Photographic Representation” appeared in issue 107 of the New German Critique (Summer 2009), and his book chapter “Postcards to the Front: John Heartfield, George Grosz and the Birth of Avant-Garde Photomontage,” will appear in the anthology Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity in Spring 2010 (Penn State Press). His article on a later problem in German visual culture, “A Magnificent Distraction? The Drag Cult for Nazi-era Film Diva Zarah Leander,” was published in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Art, Volume 6, Number 1, 2005. At Rutgers, Zervigón concentrates his teaching on the history of photography. With his Art History Department colleague Prof. Tanya Sheehan he recently co-founded "The Developing Room: Photography Working Group” at the Center for Cultural Analysis. This group promotes interdisciplinary dialogue among members of the Rutgers community whose research and/or teaching engages with the histories, theories, and practices of photography. Exhibitions: Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage, 1920 – 1938. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, February 21 – June 25, 2006, and Wolfsonian Museum, Miami Beach, September 20, 2007 – February 10, 2008. Recent Publications: The Agitated Image. John Heartfield and German Photomontage 1914-1929. Forthcoming. “’ A Political Struwwelpeter?’ John Heartfield’s Early Film Animation and the Crisis of Photographic Representation,” New German Critique, No. 107 (Summer 2009). “Die Buchumschläge John Heartfields,” essay for the exhibition catalogue John Heartfield: Zeitausschnitte. Fotomontagen 1918-1938, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (May 28 – August 31, 2009). Catalogue published by the Hatje Cantz Verlag, May 2009. “ Persuading with the Unseen? Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, Photography, and German Communism’s Iconophobia.” Forthcoming in Visual Resources, 2010. “Postcards to the Front: John Heartfield, George Grosz and the Birth of Avant-Garde Photomontage,” in Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity, edited by Jordana Mendelson and David Prochaska, forthcoming, Penn State Press, 2010. “A Magnificent Distraction? The Drag Cult for Nazi-era Film Diva Zarah Leander,” Australia New Zealand Art Journal, Vol 6. No. 1 (November 2005), pp. 89-113. “The Weave of Memory. Siemon Allen’s Screen in Post- Apartheid South Africa,” Art Journal, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 68-81. Activities: Co-founded with Art History Department colleague Prof. Tanya Sheehan "The Developing Room: Photography Working Group” at the Center for Cultural Analysis. Chair with Dr. Stephen Pinson (New York Public Library) of the session “Subject: Photography,” 2007 College Art Association Conference, New York. Co-convener of the symposium Detours of Technology: Insights into the Hungarian and Weimar German Oeuvres of László Moholy-Nagy, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, October 28, 2006. Co-convener and Respondent for the symposium for the symposium Radical Politics/Radical Aesthetics (called in conjunction with the exhibition Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage, 1920-1938) Getty Research Institute, May 4, 2006. Selected Scholarly Papers: " Die Buchumschläge Heartfields und der Ursprung der Politischen Fotomontage," delivered at the symposium "John Heartfield: Zeitausschnitte," Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (held on the occasion of the exhibition by the same name), June 18, 2009. “ Persuading with the Unseen? Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, Photography, and German Communism’s Iconophobia,” delivered on the panel “Seeing and/or Believing the Photograph,” College Art Association Conference, Los Angeles, CA, February 25, 2009. “Modernity Inverted. “Looking Closely at Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s Face of the German Race,” delivered at the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, February 20, 2009. “Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung and the Demands of Soviet Propaganda,” delivered at the roundtable “Transnational Berlin 1850-1934,” Modernist Studies Association Conference, Nashville, TN, November 16, 2008. “Doing Violence to Perception. John Heartfield and Political Photomontage,” delivered at the Wolfsonian Museum to accompany that institution’s installation of my exhibition “Agitated Images. John Heartfield and German Photomontage, 1920-1938. Delivered September 27, 2007. “A New Way of Seeing or Blinded by Science? Laszlo-Moholy Nagy, John Heartfield and the Battle over Weimar-Era Photography,” Detours of Technology: Insights into the Hungarian and Weimar German Oeuvres of László Moholy-Nagy, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, October 28, 2006. “The Multi-Sensorial Unconscious? Walter Benjamin, John Heartfield and an Inverted History of Mass Media,” Das Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit. Orte Walter Benjamins in Kultur, Kunst und Wissenschaft, Zentrum für Literaturforschung and Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany, October 18, 2006. “Struck by a Bullet!” Fashioning the Haptic and the Offensive in John Heartfield’s and Kurt Tucholsky’s Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” Eye-Cons. Illusions in Word and Image (sponsored by the Scottish Word and Image Group), University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland, May 13, 2006. “Photographing the Authentically Ugly Heimat. Erna Lendvai-Dircksen and the Face of the German Race,” offered as “Special Presentation” at the conference Heimat: Utopia or Reality? Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Search for Heimat and National Identity, Department of Germanic Literatures, Rutgers University, March 4, 2006. “John Heartfield, Early German Cinema and the [Visceral] Fantasies of Photomontage,” presented in the session Film and Art, College Art Association Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, February, 2005.

Contact:
    Phone: 732-932-0122 Ext.22
    Email Dr. Zervigón

Office Hours:

Mondays 2:30-3:45 pm

Current Interests & Research:

·	German and Russian photography between the two world wars
·	Photomontage through 1945
·	Contemporary international photography
·	Contemporary South African art
·	Photography and Film

Undergraduate Classes Taught:
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·	History of Photography, 1800-1900
·	History of Photography, 1900-Today
·	Contemporary Photography
·	Science, Art, Photography
·	The Modern Photograph
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