Dutch Face-ism. Portrait Photography and Völkisch Nationalism in the Netherlands

Ensel, Remco

doi:10.1163/22116257-00201009

Cited by 3 publications

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“…The effectiveness of horror vacui may only be established through further research; going forward, I hope that the article's insights into visual forms of symbolic power and processes of historical change that compel novel forms of classification may be constructively applied to studies of contemporary White nationalism, ethnic closure, self-racializing forms of claims-making and beyond.to photographs of the face -face-ism, in Remco Ensel's memorable phrase -was not unique to Germany; Dutch photographers like W.F. van Heemskerck Düker also contributed to fascistically-inflected Heimat photography(Ensel 2013). , alongside figures like Hans F.K.…”

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confidence: 99%

Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography

Skarpelis

2023

American Journal of Sociology

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Racial purity and supremacy were core to Nazi Germany's claims to European dominion. At the same time, their very own "racial scientific" research showed that most Germans were "mixed-race." Given the dissonance between phenotypical aspirations to a Nordic ideal and the reality of a largely non-blond German population, how did the National Socialist regime maintain legitimacy to rule? Anthropologists, bureaucrats and artists resolved this racial misalignment through horror vacui racialization, an excessive social classification that manifested as a racializing turn inwards aimed at Christian Germans. I theorize the role of culture and art in stabilizing race-based rule in authoritarian and colonial contexts through racial repair that realigns desired and actual racial selfunderstandings. The article shows how an ostensibly biologically essentialist regime strategically used racial relativism in science, politics and popular culture. I outline the sociological implications for the sociologies of culture; race and ethnicity; theories of the state and of empire and science and technology studies.

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Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography

Skarpelis

2023

American Journal of Sociology

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“…Fine arts and popular leisure were closely matched. Following in the footsteps of the elitist beach tourists, Jan (1910-1988Ensel, 2013) were a few of the Dutch photographers who went to Zeeland to capture the local women at home, on the beach and in the dunes, occasionally busy knitting (Figure 7).…”

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Knitting at the beach: tourism and the photography of Dutch fabriculture

Ensel

2017

Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change

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This article considers the picturesque spectacle of knitting women dressed in attire, set against the background of the dunes in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Images of the knitting women at the beach were incorporated in the current visual repertory of the tourist press, including picture postcards. Taking its cue from a picture on knitters at the beach by the well-known modernist photographer Eva Besnyö, this article aims to show a pictorial tradition in which nationalist and tourist representations are linked to convey a Dutch Heimat idyll. ARTICLE HISTORY

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“…However, the far right of the political spectrum in the Netherlands before and during WW II developed its ideology in close relation with German discourse (see Orlow 2016). Therefore, the Dutch words "bloed en bodem" too are connected in particular to Dutch Nazi discourses on topics such as politics (Kunkeler 2018, 209-10), art (Mulder 1982;Ensel 2013), eugenics (Snelders 2007), and colonialism (von Frijtag Drabbe Künzel 2017). One prime example of the Dutch discourse on race during WW II, is the book Wien Neerlandsch Bloed…: Het Rassenvraagstuk en zijn Beteekenis voor Nederland (van Schoping 1941) 3 which discusses the practical problems of classifying people based on their biological ancestry as follows:…”

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The Datafication of Race-Ethnicity

Schie¹

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While this dissertation will undoubtedly herald a new phase in my life, it is also the capstone to a few years of hard work. To get to this point, I had to navigate many different institutional and physical infrastructures while meeting many different people along the way. The quote "a good infrastructure is hard to find" is from Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr's Sorting Things Out (1999, 33), a study that was instrumental to my research. I find its dual meaning very interesting: the moral, emotional, financial, and technical support that I was lucky enough to receive is quite scarce and such support tends to "fade into the woodworks" (Bowker and Star 1999, 34) once a project, such as this one, has been completed. In these acknowledgements, I would, therefore, like make visible the various supportive foundations that enabled me to write this monograph.While it might sound surprising in hindsight, the beginning of my academic journey was not entirely successful. I failed four times at making it past the first year of a bachelor program. After having tried my luck at Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Business Administration, and Philosophy and Religion Education respectively, I ended up in the BA program of Theater, Film, and Television Sciences at Utrecht University in 2011. This time I did much better: I actually managed to graduate. However, there is more to this story than mere personal perseverance; I could not have succeeded without the privilege of receiving financial support both from family and the Dutch government. Not everybody is given a second chance at a university education, let alone a third, fourth, and fifth.Given my interest in new media, I decided to do an MA in New Media and Digital Culture, also taught at the Media and Culture Department of Utrecht University. In this program, I met many inspiring teachers who would later become colleagues, such as René Glas, Imar de Vries, Stefan Werning, Michiel de Lange, and Joost Raessens. I would like to give a special mention to Marianne van den Boomen, who came up with an idea for my research internship only weeks before she passed away. I am thankful for the opportunity to do this research internship with Mirko Schäfer at the Utrecht Data School (UDS) in 2014. I still have fond memories of working together with Irene Westra in the small office in the attic of Kromme Nieuwegracht 20. We decided to take a few weeks to figure out both how to scrape an online forum and figure out the ethical implications of such a method. Inexperienced as we were, we followed the wrong order and found out that the technical part of our research was not as difficult as we had envisaged. I will never forget how, after three days into this investigation, we had to tell Mirko we managed to download information concerning more than 130,000 people without having read up on research ethics yet. Mirko, thank you so much for turning these bad research practices into an opportunity to write about big data research ethics and for preparing us for our first conference presen...

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Dutch Face-ism. Portrait Photography and Völkisch Nationalism in the Netherlands

Cited by 3 publications

References 4 publications

Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography

Horror Vacui: Racial Misalignment, Symbolic Repair, and Imperial Legitimation in German National Socialist Portrait Photography

Knitting at the beach: tourism and the photography of Dutch fabriculture

The Datafication of Race-Ethnicity

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