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In the mid-1960s, the industrial photographer Wolfgang G. Schröter turned his camera on the VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen. Located at the center of East Germany’s “Chemical Triangle,” the Filmfabrik was, at the time, Europe’s largest producer of colour film, second only to Kodak in the world.

Guiding the viewer from the manufacture of celluloid to the packaging of the finished film, Schröter’s photographs present the (gendered) labour of photographic manufacturing as a chromatic spectacle in its own right. In doing so, the series did more than advertise the factory’s product line. It also promoted an ostensibly socialist vision of chemical modernity, to be disseminated within the GDR and abroad.

Taking Schröter’s series as a starting point, this talk explores the intertwined histories of photography, chemistry, and contamination at the socialist film factory. More specifically, it considers how the act of picturing the film factory provokes a confrontation with the material ambivalences of photochemical colour. Though created for the purpose of advertising, Schröter’s series ultimately emerges as an unlikely archive that not only reveals the material conditions of photographic production, but also prompts us to reflect on the medium’s toxic legacy.

Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose research explores the history of photography, film, and modern art through an ecological lens. She is Assistant Professor of German Media at the University of Minnesota and holds a joint-PhD in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago, where her dissertation received the 2022 Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award.