Wolfen

Wolfen was home to ORWO-Werke, East Germany’s largest film factory. ORWO’s black-and-white and color films helped define the style of movies and photography throughout the Eastern Bloc. Until the Wall fell. The sprawling plant once employed 15,000 people; now two dozen work there. What is left of the factory manufactures an especially durable archival film designed to preserve analog pictures and digital data for over a thousand years. Photographs taken by Tobias Zielony on the scene—some on that very long-lasting film—are complemented by short texts based on Zielony’s conversations with employees who worked in the factory’s darkroom. The plant’s notorious contamination with toxic chemicals, the degrading labor conditions, the dependency on the Soviet Union come up, as do the collapse of the industry and questions of the past and the future, of knowing and ignorance, light and darkness.