According to a much-quoted observation by Roland Barthes, photography can be seen as 'the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity'. Traces of this dissociation have been present in the history of the photographic portrait from the very beginning but in the years after 1920, they take on a new and different forms ranging from documentary photography to photo-montage and surrealist images.

Dr Stefanie Diekmann, photography scholar and Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the Viadrina University in Frankfurt will discuss some of these developments in portraiture and focus on the particularly interesting phenomenon of the modern self-portrait, including photographs by Werner Rohde, Umbo, Witikiewicz, Václav Zygmunt and others.

Sponsored by the Goethe Institute, Glasgow.

Mighty Hands (1936), by Władysław Bednarczuk © National Museum in Wrocław