Like a noir film filled with mystery and espionage and shadowy figures set behind a political backdrop, Barbara Diener weaves a pretty damn good tale. Rather than tell one story with one point of view, Diener chooses to let the viewer unravel their own mystery with some occasionally obscure but fascinating facts. Creating a narrative that allows the viewer to become an active participant in the story is an intriguing, if not tricky, endeavor. I love the questions that come up with her project, The Rocket’s Red Glare, and hope that you find the same cabal embedded in this project that I do.

Like I mentioned in my questions here, I’ve been finding out about some interesting research-based works and have been loving every minute of them. I wish I could say that I love it when a plan comes together, but I didn’t plan on this at all. All the better as far as I’m concerned. Actually, a better strategy would be to get more people into projects like this, which is just where we are now. Dive into the work and process of someone who knows how to raise awareness, entertain with her images, and keep you looking for more beyond what she presents to you. Barbara Diener is one to watch long after you’ve digested what we have here for you. Consider this your first step.

Bio -

Born in 1982 in Germany, Barbara Diener received her Bachelor of Fine Art in Photography from the California College of the Arts and Masters of Fine Art in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.

Diener’s work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, Mass.; David Weinberg Gallery, Chicago; New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, N.M.; Invisible Dog Gallery, Brooklyn; Pingyao Photo Festival, China; Philadelphia Photo Arts Center; and Project Basho, Philadelphia. Her photographs are in several private and institutional collections including the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. 

She is a winner of Flash Forward 2013, the recipient of a Follett Fellowship at Columbia College Chicago, and was awarded the Albert P. Weisman Award in 2012 and 2013. Diener has participated in several highly ambitious and competitive artist residency programs, the Fields Project in Oregon, IL, ACRE in Steuben, WI, and HATCH Projects through the Chicago Artist Coalition. In recent years (2015, 2018, and 2020) she has received an Individual Artist Grants from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Events. Daylight Books published Diener's first book of her body of work, Phantom Power, in June 2018.

Diener teaches photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Collection Manager in the Department of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Interview -

Michael Kirchoff: Every photographer experiences that spark that drives them into the direction of image-making. How did you get your start, and what were your early influences?

Barbara Diener: I have been wanting to make photographs since I was a kid. Before I had a camera I pretended that a cassette case was my camera by holding it up to my eye and envisioning what the captured still image would look like. On my 8th birthday, my grandmother took me to Toys ‘R Us and allowed me to pick out one thing, whatever I wanted. I chose a hot pink point-and-shoot camera. I did not know anything about composition or proper exposure, I just wanted to hold on to everything I experienced. I was not really exposed to fine art photographers until college but I do remember receiving an Imogen Cunningham book from a family friend when I was a teenager, and I also have a vivid memory of seeing that Annie Leibovitz photo of John and Yoko for the first time and being extremely moved by it.

MK: What is it that inspires you to decide upon a particular project? Is there an overriding theme in your work that you feel best represents you as an artist?

BD: My initial inspirations for a project are always personal and revolve around notions of home, family—or the lack thereof—, loss, and heritage. I was born and raised in Germany to an American mother and German father and moved to the States on my own when I was 19. I am an only child, and my few living relatives on my mother’s side are also in the United States. While I am geographically closer to them now, I still don’t see them very often. I don’t have any relationship with relatives on my father’s side. Fourteen years ago, my father passed away suddenly and this life-changing event continues to influence my work. He was a young boy during World War II and it was always hard for him to talk about any details regarding the war, and therefore hard for me to know exactly where my family fit into that historical moment.

As a transplant from Germany, I use photography to better understand cultural norms, history, heritage, and collective memory. My ancestral past and the curious relationship my family had to World War II—my grandfather and uncle were in the German army, but did not join the Nazi Party and my uncle was 18 when he was wounded at the very end of the war and died of his injuries—are a source of guidance and mystery as I search for clarity.

MK: What is it that you get out of creating photographs?

BD: I am not quite sure how to explain the satisfaction I get out of creating photographs but I do feel a sense of restlessness when I haven’t made anything at all in a while. Sometimes a little baking or knitting can curb that unsettled feeling but nothing quite compares to poring over a contact sheet, or now, digital files after a shoot.

MK: Can you tell us a little about your latest project The Rocket’s Red Glare? I believe there’s a strong personal connection, is that correct?

BD: The Rocket's Red Glare uses the life of instrumental German rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, as a metaphor for the selective way history is told. This series challenges the often dual retelling of significant 20th-century events, starting in Nazi-era Germany and culminating in the moon landing. My interest in interpreting this chain of events comes from my own reckoning with history and my complicated German heritage surrounding World War II.

In 1932, Wernher von Braun went to work for the German army, which fell under National Socialist rule the following year. Accounts of when he joined the Nazi party vary, but by 1937 he was the technical director of the Army Rocket Center in Peenemünde, a small coastal development in Northern Germany where the V2 rocket (Vengeance Weapon 2) was created and tested. This location has now been turned into an educational facility, cultural events space, and history museum—the Historical Technical Museum, Peenemünde. After the war, when von Braun was brought to the U.S. under the controversial Operation Paperclip—a government initiative to secure, extract, and exploit German scientists—his talents were called upon by the U.S. military. He settled in Huntsville, AL with members of his original rocket team where they eventually developed the Saturn V and put the first man on the moon.

My complex feelings about my heritage are embodied in von Braun’s life. His story truly exemplifies the multifaceted, complex narrative I am trying to unpack with The Rocket’s Red Glare. Rather than presenting a complete view of this history, I leave intentional holes in the narrative. These gaps serve as questions, looking at how stories pass through generations and how facts are distorted, embellished, or undermined.

MK: I’ve become interested in several photographic projects that are research-based lately. What is it that you believe are some of the key points that need to be covered in a body of work like this?

BD: For me, it was important to really dig into the historical facts surrounding Operation Paperclip as a whole, and Wernher von Braun and his rocket team in particular. I am so fascinated by this part of German-American history. What is known now has taken decades to be uncovered. It is impossible to fully recreate the chain of events that lead to the capture and extraction of German scientists and their naturalization and assimilation in the United States completely accurately. I am currently reading a book, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State, which delves into the conflict between the State Department and the military at the time that German scientists were first brought to the U.S. Both made a concerted effort to investigate the level of Nazi involvement of each scientist. In light of the pending cold war and the subsequent space race, some agencies were more willing to “forgive” the atrocities committed during the production of the V2 rocket, the rocket that bombed London. These facts are not all visually captured in my photographs but I am including ephemera, historical documents, and news clippings to provide the viewer with some of this background information.

MK: It would seem to me that some of the areas you have or would like to photograph might be difficult to gain access to. I ask because I’d recently seen an image you’d made of a SpaceX rocket launch that was quite stunning. Have there been any particular hurdles you’ve had to overcome while working on this project?

BD: Honestly, one of the biggest hurdles has been the pandemic and related travel restrictions last year, but I know everyone is dealing with that. The NASA archives are more restricted and it took longer to schedule appointments to visit them. However, the Wernher von Braun Archive is housed at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, founded by von Braun, in Huntsville, AL. The center opened its doors in 1970 to make space travel more accessible to the public and it’s where Space Camp still takes place today. The archivists there have been extremely generous with their time and allowed me unrestricted access to scanning and rephotographing the archival material in the archive, including an astronomy manuscript that von Braun wrote at age 15, a short story about colonizing another planet he wrote when he was 17, and the first driver’s license issued to him in the U.S. A lot of that material has made it into the project to help tell some of this story. The various archives and institutions I have visited all tell the same story from very different angles. The U.S. Space and Rocket Center celebrates and idealizes the German scientists but the library archive at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, which houses the archives of many of the rocket team members, tells a much more nuanced interpretation of this history. The library also has accounts from soldiers who witnessed the atrocious aftermath of the underground facility, where the V-2 rockets were built with slave labor. The Kennedy Space Center on the other hand is all about the astronauts, with no mention of von Braun and his contribution to the engineering of the Saturn V, the rocket that landed on the moon. Since seeing that SpaceX launch you mentioned it has become my new mission to find a way to get even closer to a launch.

MK: I remember that we had previously discussed some of the webcam images that appear in The Rockets Red Glare. The more I look at them, the more I feel like they are quite representative of the project in the way that they are not so clear. They obscure as much as they reveal, much like different historical accounts might do. I’m wondering what your take on this might be.

BD: I completely agree. When I started capturing these screenshots it was to counteract the fact that I could not travel to Germany and photograph in Peenemünde myself, due to the pandemic. But they now function as a metaphor for the juxtaposition of fact and lore that I keep coming up against. The history surrounding Operation Paperclip is very convoluted, so it is fitting to include images in the project that aren’t sharp and clear.

MK: In relation to my previous question, I also begin to wonder about how we separate fact from fiction. This is being done to some degree with your own photographs, being that many are composited images. Is it your intention to leave it up to the viewer to decide what is real or not?

BD: Yes, that is certainly a large motivation for the composited images but I am not trying to fool anyone with them. All elements of these images are real in the sense that something existed in front of the camera at the time it was captured, but by combining different timelines and geographic locations I am complicating the viewer's understanding of what they are looking at. Considering scenes taken out of context pushes the viewers to question fact and fiction, or rather the malleability of history, depending on who is recounting it.

MK: Within the collection, The Rocket’s Red Glare, is there one image that stands as a signature photograph or one that speaks loudest? Why?

BD: For me, that is Holding Missile, Peenemünde, 1940/2019. I was going through photos in the Wernher von Braun Archive in Huntsville, Alabama, and was poring over two boxes labeled Peenemünde Germany, when I came across this image of a young man standing in a field holding a strange-looking object. I knew right away I wanted to use it in some way but not just reproduce it as a straight photograph. I had previously taken the landscape in the background and they fit perfectly together. With this piece, I am literally merging different eras and places and I intentionally include two dates to hint at that. The first date indicates the year of the historical photograph, the second the year in which I made my photograph and the composite.

MK: What mental preparations do you make to execute a particular shoot or project that you are excited about? Do you ever look back and find that nothing you had planned is what was done, yet you feel completely satisfied with the outcome?

BD: It helps me to have a plan, schedule appointments for archive visits for example, or find specific locations through Google street view that I know I want to photograph. But no matter how much I plan and research a place remotely, the photographs that end up being the most successful to me are almost never planned.

MK: Anyone working in an artistic field has matured and grown over time. Is there anything you’ve discovered lately that you’d like people to know about you or your creative process?

BD: Since my projects originate from a very personal place it is important for me to find ways to make the work accessible to a larger audience. Research has become an integral part of my practice. It is a way for me to geek out and get into a subject matter but it also provides concrete facts that help me talk about a project in terms that are much more universal.

MK: How do you know if you’re ever really done with a specific body of work? Do you ever go back to revisit images or collections to improve upon what you felt was previously finished?

BD: For the past decade or so my projects have quite naturally morphed into one another. I would be shooting somewhere or researching something when another subject matter kept coming up and my interests shifted to the new topic. Often it is a theme or part of history I have already been interested in that then slowly but surely becomes a borderline obsession. Sometimes there is some overlap in projects; I start researching something new, while I am still shooting for the previous project. More often than not I revisit and reshoot locations, objects, people, etc. while I am still working on a project but once my focus has completely pivoted, I rarely go back.

MK: What’s next for The Rocket’s Red Glare? What about any new projects you might have in the works?

BD: I am in the process of turning The Rocket’s Red Glare into a book and that has been all-consuming. Beyond the book, there are still so many adjacent themes to this project that I want to explore before moving on to something completely different. For now, the book will focus on Wernher von Braun but I have simultaneously been researching another rocket pioneer, Jack Parsons, who was written out of NASA’s history for decades because of his ties to the occult.

Jack Parsons was born and raised on Orange Grove Boulevard, also known as Millionaire’s Row, in Pasadena, CA. Although he never attended CalTech, he spearheaded the self-proclaimed “Suicide Squad,” a group of CalTech students who shared Parsons’ love for rocketry. In 1936, these founders of what would become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) conducted the first rocket tests in the Arroyo Seco and were soon after commissioned by the U.S. Army Air Corps to develop “jet-assisted take-off” rockets. In subsequent years Parsons became more and more involved with the Los Angeles chapter of the Ordo Templi Orientis and he opened up his home, the Parsonage, to an eclectic cast of characters. In 1942, Parsons co-founded the rocket and missile manufacturer Aerojet, but by 1944 he was bought out and his affiliations with military and government projects were terminated. Parsons died tragically from fatal injuries after a presumed accidental explosion in his home laboratory.

And then there is Elon Musk. Certainly a key player in the current resurgence of space exploration and also quite a controversial personality. SpaceX will be a little trickier as far as access goes but I will certainly try.

A few months ago I went to shoot on Cape Canaveral in Florida for the first time and completely fell in love with the place. I think there’s still a lot there for me to discover. Most of the Cape is now a Space Force base and also houses the Air Force Space and Missile Museum. The director and curator of the museum are amazing and have been super welcoming, letting me photograph on historic launch pads and giving me access to their archives. I will definitely be going back!

You can find more of Barbara’s work on her website here.

All photographs, ©Barbara Diener