The Face of the Socialist Woman: Gender and Photochemical Labour at the Filmfabrik Wolfen

This article examines the history of women’s work and its representation at the VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen. Located in East Germany’s ‘Chemical Triangle’, the Filmfabrik Wolfen was, at its height, the single largest employer of women in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Though photographic factories elsewhere in Europe and North America also employed large numbers of women, the Filmfabrik Wolfen was unique in its elevation of these workers as in sponsored media. Images of the factory employees appeared in photographs, films and the illustrated press, where they were celebrated as representing the ‘face of the socialist woman’. Situating these images within a larger political and economic context, this essay examines the construction of the woman worker within the visual imaginary of the socialist photographic industry. Attending to these images, I argue, not only sheds light on the labour behind the manufacture of photosensitive materials; it also confronts us with the enduring power of the working woman’s image, whose radical potential is not exhausted by its political instrumentalisation.