Reframing the Photographer and His Photographs: Photographer (1995)

Frances Guerin | Special In-Depth Section Refraining the Photographer and His Photographs: Photographer (1995) Frances Guerin While Holocaust testimonies have continued to abound over the past fifteen years, the preferred media through which they are communicated has shifted significantly. Archival film and photographs were once considered the ideal medium for witnessing the atrocities ofthe Holocaust. Today, however, they are held as an, at times, unethical, and at others, misleading relative of the spoken and written word of survivors.1 For, unlike language, the ontology of the image claims an immediacy and presence at events that are remarkable for their likeness to the lived experience. Images do not simply evoke the violence and trauma of the Holocaust, they re-present it; they make it present again. To give presence in images to events that escape comprehension , and people whose identities have been erased by the violence of their victimization, is to deny the incomprehensibility of the images and the dehumanization of the people. At least this is the argument that has, until recently, held sway over critics and historians of Holocaust representation. This iconoclasm is nurtured, even demanded by Claude Lanzmann in his Shoah (1985) and the writings that surround the film. Lanzmann imposes a taboo on imaging the events of the Holocaust, whether through documentary or fictional reenactment, because to envision is to understand, to historicize, to relativize what cannot even be approached.2 Lanzmann's, and by extension, the general anxiety over the use of the photographic image as a mode of representing the Holocaust partly grows out of the unfortunate paucity of images taken by the victims. This paucity poignantly tells of the confiscation of personal effects (including cameras and film), Jewish dehumanization, and murder. It also means that the majority ofthe surviving visual documents are those taken by either the German soldiers in the death factories or Allied soldiers at liberation. While these surviving images may be historically "authentic"—the Nazi soldier with his camera did witness the events of the Shoah—to represent the Holocaust in the photographic images of the perpetrator is to disseminate his perspective. The images are only authentic in that they betray their own violence and indignity towards their victims. Even though the Nazis were witnesses of sorts to the brutalities, perhaps most offensive in the official Nazi photography is its claim to mastery over that which can never be mastered or fully known—its victims. Similarly, the official, highly-censored film footage and photographs taken by the German soldiers were often mobilized as weapons in the elaborate propaganda ministry.3 These images rarely depicted subject matter unfavorable to Nazi ambition. Even the private , unsolicited photographs of amateur soldier photographers were usually compliant with Nazi ideology. The cameramen and photographers who were working for the propaganda ministry were most commonly cheerleaders whose purpose was to glorify the Nazi regime. The propaganda films and photographs were used as administrative documents, to capture the routine, the medical experiments, and the prisoner as anonymous scientific object. In turn, any photographs or film footage that could possibly incriminate the German administration were destroyed. All heinous acts of atrocity were hidden from the camera's eye. Thus, because of their biased perspective, the existing images have not been deemed accurate records of the reality of the camps.4 However, as Andrea Liss points out, these photographs nevertheless capture critical information that must be taken into account when remembering the Holocaust.5 Similarly, while they cannot even approach the absolute reality of the Holocaust, they do reveal aspects of other, nevertheless profound, realities. In the opening moments of Dariusza Jablonski's Photographer (1998), as Holocaust survivor Arnold Mostowicz wanders the aisles of a document archive, his internal voiceover asks where the truth about life in the Lodz Ghetto lies. Is it in the photographs of the Nazi official Walter Genewein, the photographer ofthe film's title? Or is the truth in Mostowicz' memory? "In the archives? In old documents? In the cemetery?" In his first direct speech before the camera, Mostowicz rejects the reality of Genewein's photographs. As the survivor says: "I feel like it is something unreal, totally untrue. I cannot even place myselfin that reality...