Photographing the Holocaust, Photographing the Real

I've always wondered about the idea that photographs are not real. I would rather not take the line that photographs lie. They don't. People lie.

Photographs are very real, though beneath those little pixels or grains of the image are contained the realities of how they were made, modified and distributed (the indexicality of the photograph points in multiple directions).

There may very often be some dishonesty involved in all of that making, modification and distribution, but that is all part of the photographic story. It's not just the image that matters. The picture might be staged, or manipulated, or captioned with an untruth, but that dishonesty is still real and it's part of life. It's all real.

Anyway. I don't think there is anything more real than what the pictures on this post show, the way they were made, and the history they are part of. And I think that the story of how these pictures were made, and how other pictures were made during the Second World War, by people on all sides, are brutally revealing of the multiple functions of photography in all its forms - as accusation and evidence and defiance (in these pictures), but as much, much more besides; pseudo-science, identification, propaganda, as a mark of humanity, of inhumanity, as a trophy, a souvenir, and ultimately, and most brutally, as a marker of life or death.

These pictures are some of the secretly taken pictures of bodies being burnt at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 (the crematoria were so busy burning bodies that day that additional pyres were set up outside the ovens), and of women running towards the gas chambers.

The people who took the pictures were sonderkommando, prisoners detailed to work around the crematoria. This is an extract from Janina Struk's Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence.


Somewhere about midway through 1944, we decided to take pictures secretly to record our work… From the very beginning, several prisoners from our Sonderkommando were in on my secret: Szlomo Dragon, his brother Josek Dragon, and Alex, a Greek Jew whose surname I do not remember… Some of us were to guard the person taking the pictures. In other words, we were to keep a careful watch for the approach of anyone who did not know the secret, and above all for any SS men moving about in the area… 

We all gathered at the western entrance leading from the outside to the gas-chamber of Crematorium V… Alex, the Greek Jew, quickly took out his camera, pointed it towards a heap of burning bodies, and pressed the shutter… Another picture was taken from the other side of the building, where women and men were undressing among the trees. They were from a transport that was to be murdered in the gas-chamber of Crematorium V.






Read more here.

Why Don't We Believe in Newspapers Anymore?

Mail Online Screenshot

I read Janina Struk's book Photographing the Holocaust: Interpreting the Evidence over Christmas. It was a really interesting perspective on images that we take for granted, on history that we take for granted.

And then I reread this article by Fred Ritchin in Time on the social contract of viewing photographs and the mass of photographs that are currently made. It starts like this.

During the last century, photographs of mass murder in Nazi Germany, Argentina, Cambodia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia seared the civilized conscience with their revelations of barbarity. Some of the more irrefutable images were the most clinical, eschewing the empathy of the documentary observer while cataloging the horrors as a form of record-keeping, leaving it to the viewer to arrive at the moral calculus of each atrocity.

It's a great point to make, but even with the most horrific images, people don't always respond to pictures in the way they are supposed to. They never have. Compassion fatigue is nothing new and often it is shaped not so much by the images but by the places they are published, by the way they are framed. The moral compass has never pointed straight.

In her book, Struk talks about how holocaust images and films were shown in London at the end of the Second World War. Reactions to the images varied; 'In a Mass-Observation report, made to assess the response to atrocity films, one person who did not intend to see them said: 'I'm beginning to get fed up with all these pictures in the papers. I know it's very terrible and I was as horrified as anyone at the beginning... I do think they've overdone it... I mean you keep on looking at dead bodies heaped on top of each other - you just get used to it. Just as you get used to the idea of death all through the war.''

Ohter people felt disgusted not just with the photographs, but with the people in them for their grey skin and emaciated bodies. 'Such views,' writes Struk, 'may have been exaggerated by the dehumanizing way in which those liberated in the camps were often described in the press: 'pitiful specimens', 'the living dead', 'ape-like living skeletons', 'skeletons held together with rags', ' wrecks of humanity'.

People were often confused by the context in which the newsreels of the atrocities were shown; as a prelude to a Donald Duck film or as a short clip. One Mass-Observation respondent said, 'though the film is terrible, it's very short - too short to be properly convincing and of course you know quite well that the worst shots have been cut out. And then it's followed up by a Walt Disney, and that sort of removes any impression it made; people are laughing again within a minute. And it's all mixed up with a propaganda film about Noble London and how wonderful Londoners were in the Blitz, and that makes you feel the whole show really only is propaganda.'

So not everyone was shaken to their boots by these terrible images. They weren't shaken because the pictures were dehumanising, because the journalism that accompanied them was dehumanising, because they were shown in a context where they were surrounded either by entertainment or propaganda. Or maybe even because the publications in which they appeared shared, in some small way, the sense that these people who had been so callously killed were essentially foreign - they were regarded as Jews or Russians or Gypsies or Communists or Poles or.... pretty much anything except Western European (and this is a point Struk makes in the book).

And perhaps these same reasons are why photographs of atrocities today do not touch us in the way we think they should; because for them to touch us, the people they show need to be made real, they need to live and breathe and laugh and cry, they need to be about people who have lives we can understand. They need to be shown in media in which dehumanisation, stereotyping and war-mongering does not take place. They need to be shown in an appropriate context in publications that are free from propaganda and bias.

screenshot from Der Spiegel

And I don't think there are too many publications that can make that claim.

So maybe the problem isn't so much with the mass of photographs that are made as Ritchin suggests, but with the publications that show them. So instead of saying, Why Don't We Believe in these Pictures anymore, maybe we should ask Why Don't We Believe in these Newspapers Anymore? or Why Don't We Believe in these Broadcasters Anymore?

And Struk already answered that.

Photographing the Holocaust: Interpreting the Evidence is a really interesting book. Buy it at your local bookshop.