Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany by Frances Guerin (review)

Frances Guerin’s thorough investigation of the aesthetics and ethical dimensions of amateur film and photography under National Socialism joins an on-going and rigorous conversation in the field. Her specific intervention in the reading of images largely produced by Nazi perpetrators or bystanders stipulates a reinvestigation of the nuances of distance that photographs and film connote. For Guerin, a critical gesture rests in recognizing “the space” between a Nazi-sanctioned visual narrative and “another narrative prohibited from dissemination by the Nazis” as the result of such distance (119). To that end, she meticulously lays out the significant role that multiple modes of distance play in photography and film and presents her reader with chapterlong case-studies. She aims to dislodge images from an overly simplified reading that has resulted alternately in the dismissal, castigation, and in some cases ubiquitous and problematic recycling of amateur images, often as evidence. “Amateur,” for Guerin, is a conceptual matter rather than a literal designation; she refers here to images made for non-commercial purposes and with an inability to infer who the maker was (28). In her presentation of numerous examples and re-readings of images, she also historicizes with attention to developing technologies and their relationship to conceptions of modernity.

In both her introduction and in Chapter One, “Witnessing from a Distance, Remembering from Afar,” Guerin explains the theoretical basis for the book. Careful to place herself in conversation with the rich memory literature of the last two decades, she extends an argument that she has made previously, namely that “the very presence of an image has the capacity to generate an intersubjectivity” and that doing so with images portraying Nazi violence occasions “our responsibility to bear witness to ourselves as we revivify and prolong the historical memory of the traumatic events” (27).

The 1995 exhibition “War of Extermination” and the debates surrounding it serve as the point of departure in Chapter Two, “On the Eastern Front with the German Army.” As is well known, the Wehrmacht exhibition traveled to thirty-four cities in Germany and Austria between 1995 and 1999 and resulted in wide-spread debate that shifted the conversation about the Holocaust in Germany. However, in 1999, charges of inaccuracy in the accompanying text resulted in its closing days before it ever opened in New York. In Guerin’s view, these disputes ultimately capitulated to an identity politics that effaced the images. For her, the precise identity of the photographer is beside the point; bracketing the maker is critical to the disruption of an overdetermined optics that short-circuits the possibility of ethical witnessing in the face of violent images. She notes that when the revised Wehrmacht exhibition reappeared, it had divorced itself precisely from amateur images, replacing them with wall-text as a kind of short-cut through the complexities that they otherwise would demand. All this, Guerin asserts, reinscribes a troubling “devaluing of the image.” For her, it is precisely the amateur’s “unreliability” that promises a fissure in monolithic renderings of the past (90, 211).

Guerin continues her analysis with Walter Genewein’s color transparencies in Chapter Three, “The Privilege and Possibility of Color.” Genewein’s status as the chief accountant in the Ło´dz´ Ghetto afforded him a confiscated camera and ample film courtesy of I.G. Farben. The photographs have been widely discussed, and Guerin does a good job of acknowledging many of those contributions, while also providing an updated historical record of the transparencies. Genewein’s images have also been recycled in numerous contexts that Guerin explores, indeed she cites her screening of Dariusz Jablonski’s 1998 film Fotoamator as an impetus for the chapter. Though she is keen to explicate the power of the moving image as Jablonski mobilizes it, she specifically distinguishes her reading from Ulrich Baer’s extensive discussion of both the images and the film by...