Photographs, symbolic images, and the holocaust: On the (im)possibility of depicting historical truth

History and Theory

Volumn 48, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 54-76

  Keilbach, Judith ^a  

^a UTRECHT UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

Historical truth of images; Holocaust photographs; Indexicality; Photography; Reality; Symbolic images; Theory of photography

Indexed keywords

EID: 65849207010     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2303.2009.00498.x     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. André Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What Is Cinema? (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1967), 13.
2. Charles Sanders Peirce, "Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations, as Far as They Are Determined," in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Vol. 2 (1893-1913) (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 291.
3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 76.
4. Philippe Dubois, Der fotografische Akt: Versuch über ein theoretisches Dispositiv (Amsterdam and Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1998), 54 [translated from German].
5. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 87.
6. Cf. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
7. Quoted in Walter Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography," in One Way Street and Other Writings (London and New York: Verso, 1979), 255.
8. Roland Barthes, "The Photographic Message," in The Responsibility of Forms (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press: 1991), 9. Here Barthes refers in detail to trick effects, poses, objects, photogeny, aestheticism, and syntax.
9. Roland Barthes, "Rhetoric of Image," in The Responsibility of Forms, 28.
10. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and K. J. Sheperdson (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), I, 242.
11. Susan Sontag, "In Plato's Cave," in On Photography (New York: Doubleday: 1977), 23.
12. Bernd Stiegler, "Zeigen Fotografien Geschichte?" in Fotogeschichte 95 (2005), 3 [translated from German].
13. Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik, ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977), 87 [translated from German]
14. Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography," Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (1993), 424f.
15. Bernd Stiegler, Theoriegeschichte der Photographie (Munich: Fink, 2006), 349 [translated from German].
16. Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," 14f.
17. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 306.
18. Gertrud Koch, Die Einstellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktionen des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 137 [translated from German],
19. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovic, 1973), 446.
20. Cf. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Mariner Books, 2000);
21. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
22. On the specific national construction, cf. Levy and Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age.
23. Marianne Hirsch, "Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory," Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001), 7.
24. A discussion of the photographs can be found in Sybil Milton, "The Camera as Weapon: Documentary Photography and the Holocaust," Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 1 (1984), 45-68.
25. Jürgen Zetzsche, "Beweisstücke aus der Vergangenheit. Photographs des Holocaust und ihr Spuren in der Literatur," Fotogeschichte 39 (1991), 50 [translated from German].
26. Münchener Illustrierte Presse (July 16, 1933);
27. Illustrierter Beobachter 49 (1936).
28. Illustrierter Beobachter 24 (1941);
29. Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (July 24, 1941).
30. For a more detailed discussion of these press articles, cf. Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild; Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Editionen, 2001), 75ff.
31. On the Stroop report, cf. Richard Raskin, A Child at Gunpoint; A Case Study in the Life of a Photo (Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2004).
32. On the Auschwitz Album, cf. The Auschwitz Album: The Story of a Transport, ed. Israel Gutman and Bella Gutterman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002).
33. Georges Didi-Huberman, Bilder trotz allem (Munich: Fink, 2007), 43.
34. Dieter Reifarth and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, "Die Kamera der Henker: Fotografische Selbstzeugnisse des Naziterrors in Osteuropa," Fotogeschichte 7 (1983), 59 [translated from German].
35. Cf. Bernd Hüppauf, "Emptying the Gaze: Viewing Violence through the Viewfinder," New German Critique 72, no. 3 (1997), 3-44.
36. Cornelia Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung; Öffentlicher Gebrauch von Photographs aus nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslagern nach 1945 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998), 29. [translated from German]
37. Margaret Bourke-White, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly [translated from German version].
38. Cited in Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung, 29 [retranslated from German].
39. Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 111.
40. Cf. Brink, Ikonen der Vernichtung, 57f.
41. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 146.
42. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life;
43. Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).
44. Sybil Milton, "Photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto," in Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 3 (1986), 307.
45. This is how Nicole Wiedenmann summarizes Clément Chéroux's position in her essay '"So ist das, was das Bild dokumentiert, das Gegenteil dessen, was es symbolisiert': Holocaustfotografie im Spannungsfeld zwischen Geschichtswissenschaft und Kulturellem Gedächtnis," in Die Macht der Geschichte, ed. Fabio Crivellari et al. (Konstanz: UVK, 2004), 324.
46. According to Chéroux, the loss of information involves both the quality of the picture, which is diminished by its reproduction, as well as its contextualization; cf. Clément Chéroux, "Du bon usage des images," in Mémoire des Camps: Photographies des camps de concentration et d'extermination nazi (1933-1999), éd. Clément Chéroux (Paris: Marval, 2001), 13.
47. Allan Sekula says that when pictures are returned to the archive, their meaning is extinguished. Cf. Allan Sekula, "Reading the Archive," in Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press. 1989), 116.
48. On Schindler's List, cf. Miriam Hansen, "Schindler's List is not Shoah: Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory," in Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 77-103;
49. see also Christoph Classen, "Balanced Truth: Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List among History, Memory, and Popular Culture," History and Theory, Theme Issue 47 (2008), 77-102 (this issue).
50. On Maus and postmemory, cf. Hirsch, "Surviving Images.".
51. Milton, "Photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto," 307.
52. Wiedenmann, '"So ist das, was das Bild dokumentiert.'," 324.
53. Chéroux, ed., Mémoire des Camps, 16.
54. On the relationship between photographic and political discourse regarding the National-Socialist past of West Germany, cf. Knoch, Die Tat als Bild.
55. Roland Barthes, "Shock-Photos," in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), 73.
56. The interior room, from which the two photos were taken, is the inside of a gas chamber. The camera position not only explains the unusual composition of the pictures, it also points to the circumstances of their production; these circumstances led Georges Didi-Huberman to understand them as "wrest from hell" as well as an act of resistance; cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, "Images malgré tout," in Mémoire des Camps: Photographies des camps de concentration et d'extermination nazi (1933-1999), ed. Clément Chéroux (Paris: Marval, 2001), 219.
57. Didi-Huberman, Bilder trotz allem, 55 [translated from German].