Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (review)

Certainly, Baer's work is not the first to link photography to trauma. From Weegee's photographs of New York disasters, to news photos of the liberation of Nazi death camps, to Luc Sante's published collection of discarded police photos of murder victims, photographs have often been used to give visuality to the traumatic. Baer, however, is not interested in how photography might fill in the gaps in memory that trauma leaves, or in reintroducing specific traumatic images into a world that might have forgotten them, but rather in the structural similarities between photography and trauma. "Because trauma blocks routine mental processes from converting an experience into memory or forgetting, it parallels the defining structure of photography, which also traps an event during its occurrence while blocking its transformation into memory" (9).

In fact, by opening his book with an examination of Charcot's photographs of hysterics, Baer suggests that the link between trauma and photography was present from something like the beginning. Charcot was both an early doctor of hysteria and an early user of photography: in his attempt to document hysteria as a recognizable disease, he produced an "iconography" of photographs of his hysterical patients, often in a state of catalepsy brought on, in fact, by the photographic flash.¹ Baer reads in several of these photos not the scientific desire to make visible in order to name and organize, but precisely the delinking of seeing and knowing. It is from this observation that he launches his project.

While Baer uses this examination of Charcot's iconography to establish a counter-Enlightenment reading, his real interest seems to lie in the disjunction between seeing and knowing that the traumatic case of the Holocaust produced: The remainder of his chapters all deal specifically with photography and the Holocaust. He examines photos of the return, or what Marianne Hirsch or Andrea Liss might call documents of postmemory. Chapters 2 and 3 examine pictures by Dirk Reinartz and Mikael Levin of now-empty sites that were, at one time, concentration camps (in Levin's case, he revisits sites that his father, an Allied army photographer, took pictures of during the liberation of the camps). Chapter 4 considers Fotoamator, a film by Dariusz Jablonski that re-views color slides of the Lótz ghetto taken by the Nazi official Walter Genewein. Yet, these documentary images, particularly in their reframing, cannot give us access to history, nor context, nor even truth. Instead, they document that there are things that cannot be documented. Here photography can comment on the "crisis of referentiality" that it, in part, precipitated. And yet, also lodged in Baer's reading of these photos is something that sounds awfully close to hope. "Photographs compel the imagination because they remain radically open-ended. . . . [P]hotography [is] a medium of a salvaging, preservation, and rescue of reality. . . . [These photographs] testify to a refusal to give up on the possibility of a future. . . . Precisely because photographs do appear immutable, we carry the burden of imagining what could occur beyond the boundaries of the print" (24; emphasis in original).

Thus Baer suggests we relinquish a historical or contextual reading of such photographs, ones that "capture the shrapnel of traumatic time" (7). He wants to consider how these photos might allow us to consider historical temporality differently—not as the empty, homogenous time that the philosopher Heraclitus likened to a flowing river, but as that proposed by Democritus: as a rainfall, events occurring like the accidental collision of raindrops. History, then, is not the inevitable progression of cause and effect, but is composed of a series of accidents that may just as well have happened otherwise. Baer asserts that this consideration of temporality is most appropriate for "the photography of trauma" and requires a different reading. "The viewer must respond to the fact that these experiences passed through their subjects as something real without coalescing into memories to be stored or forgotten. Such experiences, and such images, cannot simply be seen and understood; they require a different [End Page...