“Recycling the Orphan Photograph: The New Life of Jewish Objects”, Visual Studies 31/1 (2016): 63-76. (original) (raw)
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When historians, archivists, and museologists turn to Eastern European photos from family albums or collections—for example, photos from the decades preceding the Holocaust and the early years of the Second World War—they seek visual evidence or illustrations of the past. But photographs may refuse to fit expected narratives and interpretations, revealing both more and less than we expect. Focusing on photos of Jews taken on the main avenues of Cernǎuţi, Romania, before the Second World War and during the city's occupation by Fascist Romanians and their Nazi-German allies, this essay shows how a close reading of these vernacular images, both for what they show and what they are unable to show, can challenge the “before, during, and after” timeline that, in Holocaust historiography, we have come to accept as a given.
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New German Critique, 2024
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Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2018
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The mass production of comparatively cheap, small, and user-friendly cameras in the latter half of the 1920s generated a rapid spread of private photography, first mostly in Europe and North America, then increasingly across the globe. In the ensuing decades, millions of nonprofessional photographers regularly captured their experiences and the environment in which these experiences took place. 1 Given the ubiquity of private photography since the 1930s, the propensity of families to preserve private collections, and archives' growing interest in retaining and digitizing such collections and albums, private photography has become one of the types of source material most readily available to historians of the past century. Yet, notwithstanding this unprecedented access to private photographs, historians rarely exploit this vast reservoir of visual documents. 2 As Jennifer Tucker and Tina Campt have noted, a certain wariness with regard to the use of photography among historians is not unwarranted. Photographs comprise intricate sets of visual signifiers, whose subjective and elusive meanings are shaped through interactions with particular viewers. 3 Private photography amplifies these concerns. Compared to art photography, photojournalism, and photographs produced for commercial or political purposes, the circumstances of the production and the viewing of private photographs-as well as the intentions of the photographers-are poorly documented. Moreover, these
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