Choosing not to look: Representation, repatriation, and holocaust atrocity photography

History and Theory

Volumn 47, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 309-330

  Crane, Susan A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149096223     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2008.00457.x     Document Type: Review

References (57)

1. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 212.
2. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 92. graphic to spiritually sacred artifacts, we should consider what a similar reclassification of Holocaust photographs could offer. Have Holocaust atrocity photographs reached the limits of their usefulness as testimony?
3. See, for example, Alan Sekula, "The Traffic in Photographs," Art Journal (Spring 1981 ), 15-25, and his "Rethinking the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs)," October 102 (Fall 2002), 3-34.
4. Tessa Morriss-Suzuki, The Past within Us: Media, Memory, History (London: Verso, 2005), 27-30, 77-120 passim.
5. Marianne Hirsch, "Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory," in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 214-246.
6. On Woolf, see Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 1-17 passim; 21.
7. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, annotated and with an introduction by Jane Marcus (London: Harcourt, 2006), 125.
8. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 9.
9. Woolf, Three Guineas, 271.
10. Marcus contends, quite rightly, that Woolf s chosen images are crucial to her argument, yet they have typically been omitted for generations of readers in both UK and American editions; see Marcus's introduction to Three Guineas, especially lx-lxvi.
11. The exception happened to be the first copy I saw, the 1993 Penguin edition: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas (London: Oxford University Press, 1993).
12. The only violence Woolf famously advocates in her pacifist tract is, arguably, only symbolic:the destruction by fire of existing academic institutions in order to create them anew; see Woolf s incendiary rhetoric in Three Guineas, 45-46.
13. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper, 1998), unnumbered photo section.
14. Carolyn Dean, "Empathy, Suffering and Holocaust 'Pornography,'" in her The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 16-42.
15. Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 72.
16. Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 180.
17. The way that crowds overwhelmed the first major exhibit of American lynching photography, in New York in 2000, reminded the historian Grace Hale all too eerily of the spectacle and spectatorship generated by perpetrators of the original lynchings; see Anthony Lee's introduction to Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 1-9; 6.
18. I am obviously alluding to a larger debate about the "limits of representation," as it appeared in the volume edited by Saul Friedlander and continues today (Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992]), My point here, however, is about metonymy and what atrocity images permit us to "know" about the alterity of the past - images show us horrors, but reveal little about the identities, subjectivities, or agency of the victims and possibly not even of the perpetrators. They can only stand in for, represent a part of, a larger historical process.
19. Michael Ann Holly, Past Looking; Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), xiv.
20. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003), 174.
21. Bernd Huppauf, "Emptying the Gaze: Framing Violence through the Viewfinder," New German Critique 72 (Fall 1997), 32, 34.
22. Julia Hell, "The Angel's Enigmatic Eyes, or the Gothic Beauty of Catastrophic History in W. G. Sebald's 'Air War and Literature,'" Criticism (Summer 2004), 377.
23. Rolf Sachsse, Die Erziehung zum Weggsehen: Fotografie in NS-Staat (Dresden: Philo Fine Arts, 2003).
24. Hanno Loewy, "'. . .without masks': Jews through the Lens of 'German Photography' 1933-1945," in German Photography 1870-1970; The Power of a Medium, ed. Klaus Honnef, Rolf Sachsse, and Karin Thomas (Cologne: Dumont, 1997), 100-114.
25. See also Bernd Boll, "Zloczow, July 1941: The Wehrmacht and the Beginning of the Holocaust in Galicia, From a Criticism of Photographs to a Revision of the Past," in Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century, ed. Omer Bartov, Atina Grossman, and Mary Nolan (New York: New Press, 2002), 61-99;
26. Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel, "Ordinary Men, Extraordinary Photos," Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998), 265-293.
27. David Crew, "What Can We Learn from the Visual Turn? Photography, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust," H-German Forum, Sept. 18, 2006, http://h-net.msu.edu/, 2.
28. Peter Fritzsche, "The Holocaust" in Imagining the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Stewart and Peter Fritzsche (Champagne-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 66-67. Note however that Fritzsche does not provide the source for the image, in the caption or anywhere in the book.
29. Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (Blooraington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 5.
30. W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Random House, 2003), 98.
31. Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001), 3-21 passim.
32. As Mark Reinhardt points out, it is rather ironic to find that when the ACLU tried to bring suit against the American government, under the Freedom of Information Act, to gain release of more Abu Ghraib images, the government lawyers countered that recirculation of the images would constitute a violation of the rights of the Iraqi prisoners, under the Geneva Convention. Apparently there is still a sense in which the shaming of victims through taking the pictures remains linked to the existence of the image. See Reinhardt's insightful essay, "Picturing Violence: Aesthetics and the Anxiety of Critique," in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards, and Erina Duganne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 13-36; 18.
33. Lawrence Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 69.
34. It may be worth noting that when I assigned Langer's book, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), early in my career of developing the Holocaust class, the students uniformly hated it. They were thoroughly resistant to, and thereby reaffirmed, Langer's main message: that they, as postwitnesses to the Holocaust, tend to project romantic and idealistic expectations of heroism and courage onto surviving victims, many of whom find this an additional, unbearable burden on memory. The students continued to believe that the act of testifying about the past would be therapeutic for the surviving victims, rejecting Langer's conclusions.
35. For a painfully apt comparison of the shame associated with both surviving horrific abuse and the recirculation of atrocity images for a different group of twentieth-century victims, see Dora Apel's work on lynching photography; most recently, Apel, "Lynching Photographs and the Politics of Public Shaming," in Apel and Smith, Lynching Photographs, 42-78.
36. On the significance of "acknowledgment," see Reinhardt, "Picturing Violence," 31.
37. Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild: Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001).
38. Der gelbe Stern: Die Judenverfolgung in Europa 1933 bis 1945, ed. Gerhard Schoenberner (Hamburg: Rütten und Loening Verlag, 1960);
39. see also Robert Sackett, "Pictures of Atrocity: Public Discussion of Der gelbe Stern in Early 1960s West Germany," German History 24:4 (2006), 526561
40. George H. Roeder, "Making Things Visible: Learning from the Censors," in Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, ed. Laura Hein and Mark Seiden (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 73-99.
41. Yet the familiarity of the image does not preclude the multiplicity of meanings that different people, and different collective memories, will attach to it. From the "Family of Man" exhibit's inclusion of the mushroom cloud image, to the U.S. Postal Service's and Smithsonian's fiascos presenting this image in the 1990s, it has been clear that even iconic images have a range of meanings associated with them. This is precisely Caroline Brothers's point in her study of the famous Spanish Civil War photography of Robert Capa; see "Casualties and the Nature of Photographic Evidence," in her War and Photography (London: Routledge, 1997).
42. On iconic images, see Cornelia Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung: Offentlicher Gebrauch von Fotografien aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998);
43. Robert Harriman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007):
44. and Patricia Leavy, Iconic Events: Media Politics and Power in Retelling History (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).
45. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 220.
46. Or as Langer put it, "Perhaps it is time to admit that atrocity in the past may not discourage but in fact invite atrocity in the future." Langer, Preempting the Holocaust, 73.
47. Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 2.
48. Morriss-Suzuki, The Past within Us, 71-78.
49. See Bryan F. Lewis, "Documentation or Decoration? Uses and Misuses of Photographs in the Historiography of the Holocaust," in Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, ed. John Roth and Elizabeth Maxwell (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 341-357; 342 and passim.
50. John Berger, About Looking (London: Writers and Readers, 1980), 39-40.
51. Meir Wigoder, "History Begins at Home: Photography and Memory in the Writings of Siegfried Kracauer and Roland Barthes," History and Memory 13:1 (Spring/Summer 2001), 22.
52. Susie Linfield, "A Witness to Murder: Looking at Photographs of the Condemned" Boston Review (September-October 2005) http://www.bostonreview. net/BR30.5/linfield.html. Accessed June 23, 2006, 5.
53. Linfield, "A Witness to Murder," 19.
54. Lewis, "Documentation or Decoration?" 341.
55. see also Sybil Milton, "Images of the Holocaust Part I," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1:1 (1986), 27-61
56. and "Images of the Holocaust Part II," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1:2 (1986), 193-216;
57. Knoch, Die Tat als Bild, and Struk, Photographing the Holocaust.