Meanings of Modernity in Central Europe: Modernity as Anti-Nostalgia: The Photographic Book and the Eastern European Shtetl

Presenter: Rose-Carol Washton Long, professor, Department of Art History, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. This two-day symposium addresses the framework for modernism in the region covered by the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and their successor states, from roughly 1890 to 1945. The state of affairs summed up under the term "modernity," and the cultural responses to it designated "modernism" or, more radically, "avantgarde," are commonly understood to derive from historical developments in the nation-states of western Europe and North America.