By drawing on “a historical iconography of suffering,” media theorist Marta Zarzycka observes, these photographs “convey the unimaginable to the outside world in a knowable form.” In looking at them, people see the bodies of Holocaust victims, their expressions and gestures, as well as their possessions, their embraces and injuries. Photographs from the camps and ghettos provide a very different perspective from such ghastly caricatures. All this material made the targets of genocide appear close to, but less than, human. My research on the visual culture of mass atrocity finds that Holocaust photographs are valuable because they emphasize our common humanity, against all odds.įor example, propaganda material in Hitler’s Germany – which included cartoons, posters, drawings, etchings, children’s books and other visual work – portrayed Jews so they appeared menacing, with fangs, claws and fiery eyes. Ultimately, Bartov found that the presence of pictures of Jewish life before the years of destruction elevated the museum’s exhibition above other presentations of Holocaust imagery. Historian Omer Bartov, writing around the same time, accepted the “haunting” power of this footage, but he too worried about “the distancing which this massive exposure to dehumanized victims” might cause. Shortly after the museum opened in 1993, reporter Philip Gourevitch compared the archival footage presented in the Museum’s permanent exhibition to “peepshow” and “snuff films.”Ī 2013 exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Similar reasoning underlies criticisms scholars and journalists have lodged against the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The case against the activists turned largely on the claim that displaying such photos in this context would violate the dignity of their subjects. In 2009, Germany’s Constitutional Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that animal rights activists could not use Holocaust photographs in a visual campaign against animal cruelty. Perhaps the sternest critique, advanced by scholar Barbie Zelizer in her 1998 book “ Remembering to Forget,” holds that familiarity with Holocaust photos actually makes it easier to ignore contemporary scenes of suffering.Īrguments for restricting images have already achieved some partial successes. Others who work in schools and museum contexts observe that Holocaust photos are usually displayed without proper provenance or attribution. Some of these critics claim that any photograph staged or shot by perpetrators cannot be viewed without further dehumanizing the subject. Scenes of dead civilians stacked haphazardly after the My Lai massacre in Vietnam clearly echo the iconography of bodies piled at the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in Germany.Ī picture of emaciated Muslim prisoners in Bosnia, starved by the Serbs, that ran in Time during the 1990s Balkan Wars caused Margaret Thatcher to remark, “I never thought I’d see another holocaust in my life.” Restricting images?ĭespite this history, arguments that circulation of Holocaust images should be restricted persist. But images of the Holocaust significantly shaped the representation of those subsequent atrocities. In the decades since the Universal Declaration, photographs of other human rights violations have become iconic. Historian Sharon Sliwinski, commenting on the widespread publication of photos from the camps at this time, claims that the Declaration as a whole reads as “an anxious response to the encounter with the visual representation of the Nazi atrocities.” The preamble to that text, which shapes many aspects of international and domestic politics, mentions “barbarous acts” that have “outraged the conscience of mankind.” Holocaust photos also influenced the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundational human rights document first published in 1948.
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