Photography has often been scrutinized regarding its relationship to reality or historical truth. This includes not only the indexicality of photography, but also the question of how structures and processes that comprise history and historical events can be depicted. In this context, the Holocaust provides a particular challenge to photography. As has been discussed in numerous publications, this historic event marks the “limits of representation.” Nevertheless there are many photographs “showing” the Holocaust that have been produced in (...) different contexts that bespeak the photographers’ gaze and the circumstances of the photographs’ production. Some of the pictures have become very well known due to their frequent reproduction, even though they often do not show the annihilation itself, but situations different from that; their interpretation as Holocaust pictures results rather from a metonymic deferral. When these pictures are frequently reproduced they are transformed into symbolic images, that is, images that can be removed from their specific context, and in this way they come to signify abstract concepts such as “evil.” Despite being removed from their specific context these images can, as this essay argues, refer to historical truth. First, I explore the arguments of some key theorists of photography to investigate the relationship between photography and reality in general, looking at their different concepts of reality, history, and historical truth, as well as the question of the meaning of images. Second, I describe the individual circumstances in which some famous Holocaust pictures were taken in order to analyze, by means of three examples, the question what makes these specific pictures so particularly suitable to becoming symbolic images and why they may—despite their abstract meaning—be able to depict historical truth. (shrink)

This article reads Jean-Luc Godard’s film essay Histoire du cinéma as a contemporary artistic endeavour to resist the synchronising, standardising time of global capital, the pervasive uniformity of the global super-present, brought about by today’s televisual and digital communications, which threatens to trivialise the different processes of memory and history, as well as art and culture in general. Taking its point of departure in Bernard Stiegler’s observation that the final stage of capitalism is the control and synchronisation of “available brain (...) time,” the article argues that Godard’s work opposes this control and synchronisation of our minds through an aesthetics of contemporaneity. The argument is based on the development of a theoretical framework that combines recent theories of contemporaneity with reflections on the politics of images. Focusing on the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered in Histoire du cinéma, the article deals with Godard’s image-political creation of temporal contemporaneity through a montage of clips of old films and newsreels, photographs, stills, images of paintings, new footage, advertisements, music, sound and voice recordings, textual citation, narration and commentary. (shrink)

The Holocaust takes on a riveting immediacy in these true stories of the everyday, understated heroism that saved thousands of Jews from annihilation at the hands of the Third Reich. Combining personal interviews with contemporary and vintage photographs, To Save a Life pairs the stories of a handful of rescuers with those of people they saved. Ellen Land-Weber creates a moving, multidimensional picture of the evasive strategies and heartstopping close calls that filled the years of the Holocaust (...) for both rescuers and rescued. In paperback for the first time, the rescues narrate their growing awareness of the tightening circle of Nazi terror, their experiences in hiding, often being shunted from one safehouse to another, and their hair's-breadth separation from friends and family who did not escape. Promotional Information: Life-saving acts of heroism by ordinary people in the face of Nazi tyranny. (shrink)

Art historian Andrea Liss examines the inherent difficulties and productive possibilities of using photographs to bear witness, initiating a critical dialogue about the ways the post-Auschwitz generation has employed these documents to ...

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 Cerna˘u?i, 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. (shrink)

Georges Didi-Huberman's study is concerned with epistemological and ethical questions that arise from visual representations of the Shoah, while Michael Fried's is concerned with the ontological possibilities explored by contemporary art photography. The books have two things in common: an argument against postmodern skepticism, and an insistence that photography has become a field in which questions of history, truth, and authenticity are being explored with particular acuity. Rather than reject even the possibility that photographs have something to tell us (...) about the Shoah, Didi-Huberman shows that they can offer important insights into the difficulties and the possibilities of apprehending some aspects of the past.Fried shows that contemporary photographic work has taken on the ambitions of high modernism by accepting the challenge of “to-be-seenness.” Photography as a “historical practice” does not escape from the difficulties of evidence and of the “constructed” nature of historical understanding; photography functions neither as a pure trace of the past, nor as a mere invitation to spectacle. (shrink)

In The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield challenges the idea that photographs of political violence exploit their subjects and pander to the voyeuristic tendencies of their viewers. Instead she argues passionately that looking at such images—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes the human capacity for cruelty. Grappling with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing (...) photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress and asks how photography should respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare. A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it—and to do that, we must begin to look. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Staging History:Aesthetics and the Performance of MemoryBelarie Zatzman (bio)I want to talk about a certain time not measured in months and years. For so long I have wanted to talk about this time, and not in the way I will talk about it now, not just about this one scrap of time. I wanted to, but I couldn't. I didn't know how. I was afraid, too, that this second (...) time, which is measured in months and years, had buried the other time under a layer of years, that this second time had crushed the first and destroyed it within me. But no, today, digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched by forgetfulness. This time was measured not in months but in a word—we no longer said "in the beautiful month of May," but "after the first 'action' or the second or right before the third. We had different measures of time, we different ones, always different, always with that mark of difference....—Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories1What are the boundaries of remembering? How do we make manifest the ruins of memory? How do we enter that time not measured in months and years? How do those not directly affected by the Holocaust encounter its meaning? How do we move toward the performance of memory with youth as co-creators, when we must be awake to the act of staging histories "both remembered and not remembered, transmitted and not transmitted"?2 In designing aesthetic practices of remembrance in the present, we face both the specificity of time and the collapse of time as a way of knowing. This paper articulates the design of a project, titled "Wrapped in Grief," in constituting personal and public memory in the aesthetic space made available by arts education. How can our drama work "capture the aesthetic of memory, its instability and its contingency"?3 "Wrapped in Grief" responds [End Page 95] to these questions about the performance of memory by articulating a process for constructing and rehearsing our own identities among the narratives of others, present and past. Contemporary research examining memory and memorial underscores the fact that in provoking history as an act of remembrance for a new generation, we are narrating a sense of self. The paradox of re-telling these personal and public histories is that we are playing out that which cannot be represented. In this sense, drama education offers an aesthetic frame that allows us the possibility "to be the story and to repeat its unrepeatability."4"Wrapped in Grief" was produced with youth between the ages of twelve and sixteen years old. As a Holocaust memorial project, it was designed as a scaffolded pedagogy in which historical contexts became the foundation informing all of the exploration that followed. First, young people created tableaux to locate particular events during the Holocaust; for example, Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938), the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (19 April-16 May 1943), the book burnings of 10 May 1933, and the White Rose movement (public demonstrations against the Nazi regime by a network of students and faculty in Germany, 1942-43). The second stage of this arts education project asked participants to work on the identification of loss in their own lives, in juxtaposition to the historical archive with which they had been presented. "Wrapped in Grief" culminated in the staging of a mise-en-scene of memory, in which the young people fashioned large-scale sculptures as an artifact of their experience of memorial.The aesthetic frame that circumscribes the design of this "Wrapped in Grief" structure is threefold, and it takes up the challenge of staging history by (1) creating narrative relationships between diverse texts—autobiographical, legal, documentary; scripts, photographs, visual art forms; diary, memoir, survivor testimony; (2) exploring the relationship between the range of source materials and the students' personal and artistic reflections about them through writing, images, improvisation, tableaux, movement, scene study, or visual art activities; and (3) considering our relationship not only to the Holocaust, itself, but to how it shapes our lives in the present. As such, "Wrapped in Grief" stands... (shrink)

This text was delivered as the laudatory speech on the occasion of Didi-Huberman’s receipt of the Adorno prize in 2015. The influence of Adorno’s work on Didi-Huberman’s methodology is clarified, especially Adorno’s reflections on montage, the essayistic style and the anachronism of time. Didi-Huberman thematizes and analyses anachronism as a specific time structure of images. His works stress the similarity of images with the literary montage technique to develop a comprehensive theory of the readability of images – a practice in (...) which we approach images, based on the combination of voir and savoir, of looking and knowing. Two books, dealing with images and the Holocaust, are specifically exemplary of this approach: Images in Spite of All and Bark. Images in Spite of All calls a halt to one of the crudest erroneous readings of Adorno’s work, since the theorem of the Unspeakable or Unrepresentable always referred to Theodor W. Adorno ; and it is remarkably resistant to nuanced philological–philosophical studies of Adorno’s writings. By attentively considering the conditions in which the four photographs taken in Auschwitz-Birkenau were produced, Didi-Huberman dares to imagine the unimaginable. In this and in his more personal work of Bark, he successfully avoids an impossible reconstruction but instead asks what happened in that other place, in the cultural and our personal and memory. This is the work of ‘readability’ in the Benjaminian sense. (shrink)

This essay explores the polemics that took place in France in 2001 on the occasion of an exhibition of photographs of Nazi concentration and extermination camps. The article analyzes hostile responses to this exhibition and to its catalogue, written by art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. Condemned for having transgressed an apparent prohibition of the representation of the Holocaust in France, Didi-Huberman responded with a book that tackles the questions of representation in relation to war and trauma. While recognizing the (...) ethical and intellectual merits of Didi-Huberman's response, the essay nonetheless suggests that the French debate, whether it promotes or demotes images of the Holocaust, seems to perpetuate an apocalyptic, allegorical, and sublime reading of Auschwitz. (shrink)

In 1963 at the University of Cambridge, Peter Eisenman -- world famous for his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005) and respected and feared by his colleagues for his intellectual acuity and quick-wittedness -- wrote a dissertation on the formal basis of modern architecture. This striking document, with its idiosyncratic photographs, fully deserves to be published here, for the first time, in a faithful reproduction of the original. In an afterword, Peter Eisenman discusses this remarkable starting point of his (...) practical and theoretical work. (shrink)

The playwright Edward Bond has recalled the impact of seeing photographs of Nazi atrocities at the end of World War Two: “It was the ground zero of the human soul.” He argues we need a different kind of drama, based in “a new interpretation of what it means to be human.” He has developed an extensive body of theoretical writings to set alongside his plays. Arguably, his own reflections on “what it means to be human” are based in his (...) reaction to the Holocaust, and his attempt to confront “the totality of evil.” Bond argues we are born “radically innocent.” There is a “pre-psychological” state of being. The neonate does not “read” ideology; it has to use its own imagination to make sense of the world. To enter society, however, the child must be corrupted; its imagination is “ideologized.” Bond claims that “radical innocence” can never wholly be lost. Through drama, we can escape “ideology” and recover our “autonomy.” It leads us to confront extreme situations, and to define for ourselves “what it means to be human.” The terms of Bond’s theory are Manichean. His arguments are based in the assumption that there is a fundamental “humanity” that exists prior to socialization. In fact, the process of socialization begins at birth. As an account of child development, “radical innocence” does not stand up to close scrutiny. Arguably, however, Bond’s work escapes the confines of his own theory. It can be read, not in terms of the “ideologized” vs. the “autonomous” mind, but rather, in terms of “conscious” and “unconscious.” In Coffee, Bond takes character of Nold on a journey into the Dantean hell of his own unconscious. He does not recover his “innocence,” but, rather, he has to face the darkness of both history and the psyche. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the four images from Auschwitz analyzed by Didi- Huberman in Images in Spite of All —the so-called Sonderkommando photographs— through the lens of the “historical sublime” as proposed by historian Eelco Runia. These photographs are taken as an example of a possible reconciled aesthetic experience with an “unimaginable” past that horrifies us. Moreover, I argue that aesthetic depictions are able to champion a model of historical commemoration which makes these events imaginable again. In (...) order to show this, I will first employ the concept of the “sublime historical event” which Runia proposes to interpret the Holocaust’s historical catastrophe. Runia’s “historical sublime” provides a framework to understand the process of becoming what “we are no longer” through the invention of new identities that defy our former ones and explain historical discontinuities. Secondly, I will examine the Sonderkommando photographs by applying Runia’s notion of commemoration to the viewer’s aesthetic experience of these images. I will finally suggest the possibility of a reconciliation with our former identities, those who committed sublime historical acts with which we no longer identify, thanks to this aestheticized experience of commemoration. (shrink)

In responding to an essay by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer about photographs taken in the streets of Chernivitsi in the 1940s, and thus in the midst of the Holocaust, this paper seeks to link their concerns to a broader consideration of photography as a modern phenomenon. In the process, the paper provides a brief history of street photography, a genre virtually ignored in standard histories of the photographic medium. The author suggests that Hirsch and Spitzer’s paper bravely (...) reminds us that our fascination with photographs is based not on truth, but on a combination of desire and faith . Their account of street photography in Czernowitz thereby amounts to an interpretation of photographs as dynamic modes of apprehension rather than as static objects from the past that veridically represent it. It is precisely this aspect of photographs that makes them such unusually complicated, ambiguous, and incongruous historical objects. (shrink)

The book addresses the representation of three groups of "others" in Israeli schoolbooks: Holocaust victims, presented as the stateless persecuted Jews "we" might become again if "we" lose control over the second group of "others" - Palestinian Arabs - who are racialized, demonized and Nazified, and presented as "our" potential exterminators. The third group comprises non-European (Mizrahi and Ethiopian) Jews, portrayed as backward people who lack history or culture, requiring constant acculturation by "Western" Israel. Thus, a rhetoric of victimhood (...) and power evolves, and a nationalistic interpretation of the "never again" imperative is inculcated, justifying the Occupation and oppression of Palestinians and the discrimination of non-European Jews. Advocating a multidirectional memory, the book proposes an alternative Hebrew-Arabic, multi-voiced and poly-centered curriculum that would relate the untold accounts of the people whom the pedagogic version of history seeks exclude. Instead of traumatizing and urging vengeance, it will encourage discussion and celebrate diversity and hybridity. (shrink)

Nakba is ignored in Western philosophy encyclopedias, and the notion of genocide is rarely explained. In turn, there is much talk about the Holocaust.

Photographs furnish evidence. This is true in both formal and informal contexts. The use of photographs as legal evidence goes back to the very earliest days of photography, and they have been used in American trials since around the time of the Civil War. Photographs may also serve as historical evidence (for example, about the Civil War). And they serve in informal contexts as evidence about all sorts of things, such as what we and our loved ones (...) looked like in the past. (shrink)

사진은 사진의 발명 이전의 이미지들과 비교할 때, 무엇을 지시하고 있는지가 너무나 명확하게 드러나 있는 것처럼 보여서, 이미지를 생산한 사람의 의도가 그 이면에 숨겨져 있을 여지가 없는 것으로 여겨졌다. 다시 말해 사진 역시 전통적 그림과 같은 이차원 평면의 이미지이긴 하지만, 전통적 그림의 의미가 다의적(konnotativ)일 수 있는 것과 달리, 사진은 마치 숫자처럼 그 지시대상이 명확한 일의적(denotativ) 이미지로 간주되어왔다. 이는 예술적 측면에서는 특히 회화와 비교되며 폄하되는 요소로 작용해 왔고, 기술적 측면에서는 때때로 과장되게 수용되어 사진을 마치 세상을 투영하고 있는 창문처럼 여기게 하는 근거가 되어왔다.BR빌렘 (...) 플루서(Vilém Flusser)는 이러한 현상에 대해 사진을 전통적 그림과 동일한 존재 층위에 위치시킨 결과로 인한 오해라고 보았다. 이는 이미지와 실재라는 관계항 속에서 새로운 이미지인 사진에 대해, 새로운 존재론적 질문이 제기되어야 함을 의미하는 것이라 하겠다. 기존의 사진 이론들이 사진에 대해 ‘어떻게 실제적으로 사진이 존재하는가’라던지, 혹은 ‘하나의 보편적인 사진 언어가 존재하는가’와 같은 질문에 집중해왔던 것 모두, 사진 의미의 일의성이라는 특징이 전제되어 있기 때문이며, 이러한 전제는 사진이 그 원본과의 관계, 즉 지표성(Indexikalität)이라는 관점에서 해석되어 왔음을 보여주는 예라 하겠다.BR그러나 플루서는 이러한 방식의 사진 이해에 비판적 견해를 가지고서, 사진을 지표성의 관점에서가 아니라, 현상학적 관점에서 관찰하고자 하였다. 그리고 이를 통해 사진을 통한 새로운 철학적 방법론을 모색하고자 하였다. 이는 후설의 현상학적 개념, 예를 들어 지향성이나 판단중지와 같은 개념들을 자신의 사진 철학에 수용함으로써 이뤄졌다.BR이에 본고는 ‘사진 촬영자의 몸짓(fotografische Geste)’ 개념을 통해 플루서가 사진을 지표성이라는 관점에서 벗어나, 어떻게 후설의 현상학에 접목시키고 있는지에 대해서 분석함으로써, 플루서에 의해 시도된 사진에 대한 새로운 철학적 해석에 대해 고찰하는 것을 목적으로 한다. (shrink)

This article explores the properties of glitch within practices of in-game photography. It argues that capturing the breaking of game textures and graphics reveals the process of creation of photorealism and the remediation of traditional photography within digital and playable spaces. On the other hand, it proposes that screenshotting game glitches acts as an involuntary bug report and part of an economy of ever-optimizing networked images.

At once photographic analysis, philosophical essay, and autobiographical narrative, Athens, Still Remains presents an original theory of photography and throws a fascinating light on Derrida's life and work.The book begins with a sort of ...

What lessons does Holocaust education hold for preservice teachers and how does Holocaust education aid their growth as social justice educators? In this qualitative teacher research study we attempt to answer these questions by analyzing the coursework and reflections of 16 social studies preservice teachers (PSTs) as they completed an in-depth study of the Holocaust through historical research, field trips, and reading young adult literature, and designed creative and engaging lessons to teach the Holocaust to secondary (...) social studies students (grades 6-12). Findings reveal “blind spots” in the PSTs Holocaust-related content knowledge, pedagogy, ability to make connections between the historical event and their students’ lives, and their acceptance the role of social justice education (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011). Over the course of the study, the PSTs improved their content and pedagogical knowledge, and took their first steps towards becoming social justice educators. We also found that for PSTs, taking on the role of Holocaust educators and social justice educators takes time and practice This study broadens scholarship on many common concerns in teacher education, such as dispositions, multicultural education, and teaching for social justice. The findings inform teacher educators, teacher candidates, and practicing teachers on the connections between Holocaust and social justice education, and provide a model for teaching social studies for social justice. (shrink)

Preface: Blurring the boundary between human and nonhuman beings -- Only one Holocaust? -- Evidence of things not seen -- The henmaid's tale -- Holocaust victimization imagery -- Procrustean solutions -- Scapegoats and surrogates : falsifying the fate of victims -- The 9/11 controversy -- An atrocity can be both unique and general.

R. Dr. Isaiah Aviad (Wolfsberg) (1893–1957) was one of religious Zionism’s main thinkers. This article seeks to examine his outlook regarding the Holocaust of European Jewry. Jewish thought contains three main approaches to dealing with the issue of evil in the world: the classic-causal approach, the teleological approach and the indifferent approach. The classic-causal approach explains the evil that exists in the world as occurring in a process of cause and effect; namely, the Israelites did not behave as God (...) expected of them and were therefore punished. The teleological approach does not explain present suffering and evil as a result of past sins but rather as having a future purpose; the indifferent approach attaches no religious meaning to human suffering. People are careless and are therefore negatively affected. R. Aviad manipulates between these three approaches regarding the Holocaust, whilst adding the Hegelian dialectic. His conclusion was that the State of Israel is the redemption and the teleological meaning of Jewish suffering and of the Holocaust.Contribution: This article helps to understand the theological approach of one of the religious Zionism’s main thinkers and contains issues both in Jewish theology and Holocaust studies. (shrink)

The research is based on a study of short story collections by Israeli writer Ida Fink’s, All the Stories, and French writer Charlotte Delbo’s, Auschwitz and After, to reflect the impact of the Holocaust on autobiographical elements in their work. The authors are representatives of the first generation of Holocaust survivors, which means that the mass systematic genocide during World War II was a personal traumatic experience for them. The works of female writers are studied using the theory (...) of trauma at the genre level. Since autobiography has been considered a documentary genre with its own peculiarities, works about the Holocaust were seen as historical evidence of this event. However, based on the works of Juri Lotman and some principles of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact”, we can conclude that autobiography is similar to fiction if it can meet certain aesthetic functions. Under the influence of trauma, the genre of autobiography can be modified in the literary text in such a way that the line between autobiography and fiction is blurred. Ida Fink and Charlotte Delbo write short stories with fictional narrators, but all the situations are certainly the experiences of the writers themselves, who turn to the autofiction and conventions of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” to transfer their memories to literary heroes. The aim of the study is to define the peculiarities of the autobiographical genre, analyze its functions in Holocaust literature, identify poetic elements of autobiography, and prove that there is no canonical form of narration about the Holocaust-Era, as the writers were searching for how to articulate their traumatic experience in experimental forms. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 1, pp 118 - 147 This paper challenges the widespread emphasis on the absence of God in post- Holocaust historiography, theology, and art by suggesting that Barnett Newman’s _Stations of the Cross_ may have been conceived under the theological category of the apophatic rather than the aesthetic category of the sublime. This paper focuses on the “anti-realist” position of Newman and other artists for whom the Holocaust necessitated a renewed aniconic tendency in Jewish (...) aesthetics. His work, I suggest, holds out a tension between absolute absence and redemptive presence that at once resists and affirms a negative aesthetic of God’s solidarity with suffering. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders the category of “Holocaust denial” as the marked indicator of ethical transgression in Holocaust historiography within American civil religion. It maintains that the present category excludes and thereby enables other violations of responsible Holocaust historiography. To demonstrate the nature and gravity of such violations, the essay engages the widespread claim that Hajj Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the former mufti of Jerusalem, was an instigator, promoter, or “driving spirit” of the Nazi genocide against Jews, and the (...) associated suggestions of wider Arab and Muslim complicity. The essay uncovers the history of the Husayni narrative in question, the dramatic circumstances in which it emerged, its role in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, and its rediscovery and misuse within American popular and political circles over the past two decades. Such misuse, it concludes, corrodes Holocaust recognition within American civil religion and demonstrates the need for a revision of the socially accepted ethical boundary for responsible Holocaust historiography. (shrink)

In a recent article, Dawn Wilson (2021) has argued against single-stage accounts of photography by arguing against the latent photographic images upon which those accounts depend. Concomitantly, she argues that the only viable account of photography is multi-stage. Unlike single-stage accounts, multi-stage accounts do not postulate the existence of photographic images of any kind prior to development. Rather, according to multi-stage accounts, photographs are produced from “photographic registers.” In this Discussion Piece, I defend single-stage accounts by arguing that Wilson’s (...) rejection of latent photographic images is premised on an implausible view of what a latent photographic image is. Given a reasonable interpretation, the latent images described in single-stage accounts just are the photographic registers described in multi-stage accounts. (shrink)

This article tries to defend the position that Holocaust Education can be enriched by appreciating laughter and humor as critical and transformative forces that not only challenge dominant discourses about the Holocaust and its representational limits, but also reclaim humanity, ethics, and difference from new angles and juxtapositions. Edgar Hilsenrath’s novel The Nazi and the Barber is discussed here as an example of literature that departs from representations of Holocaust as celebration of resilience and survival, portraying a (...) world in which lies, hatred and violence are still perpetuated. Because of its transgressive qualities, Hilsenrath’s narrative of the Holocaust as a satire with elements of black comedy can offer pedagogical openings for using laughter to interrupt normative constructions of the Holocaust as an unspeakable and sacred event that lies outside history, and thus beyond the capacities of human understanding. It is argued that laughter is an important modality for inviting deep thinking about the Holocaust, to move it from a transcendent phenomenon to an immanent event, situated clearly in the realm of human action and worthy of understanding so as to prevent it from happening again. (shrink)

There has been considerable debate among philosophers and psychol- ogists about whether the internal representations of imagery represent in the manner of pictures or in the manner of language. One side, pictorialism,holds that an internal imagery representation of Reagan is like a picture of Reagan. The other side, descriptionalism,holds that an internal imagery representation of Reagan is more like a string of words denoting or describing Reagan. My aim here is to expose a widespread fallacy on the part of the (...) descriptionalists. In the course of so doing, I try to clarify the pictorialist position, and show how it can undercut what appears to be a category of evidence for the other side. (shrink)

Holocaust education is important for learning how healthcare has been leveraged to influence social change in the past and how it can be used to advocate for ethical social change in the future. By understanding how medical professionals became the social and political leaders of Nazi Germany, today’s health professionals can learn how to avoid unethical politicization. By understanding how early twentieth century discourse on medico-social issues used terms and language that are similar, if not the same, as today’s (...) debates, proponents of different sides of these debates can understand the troubling subtexts and potential consequences of their – and the opposing side’s – positions. (shrink)

Kendall Walton argued that photographs are transparent, that we literally see things through them. This claim provoked many objections, and one line of argument has focused on the fact that when we see objects in ordinary situations we see their approximate location with respect to us, whereas in typical photographs we do not. The author argues, however, that this egocentric spatial information is not what distinguishes literal seeing from typical photograph seeing. Instead of it, the author proposes two (...) conditions for normal, literal seeing. One is that the seeing be real-time, and the other is that the image be “empty”. Some photographic images meet these conditions. (shrink)

A standard art-ontological position is to construe repeatable artworks as abstract objects that admit multiple concrete instances. Since photographic artworks are putatively repeatable, the ontology of photographic art is by default modelled after standard repeatable-work ontology. I argue, however, that the construal of photographic artworks as abstracta mistakenly ignores photography’s printmaking genealogy, specifically its ontological inheritance. More precisely, I claim that the products of printmaking media (prints) minimally must be construed in a manner consistent with basic print ontology, the most (...) plausible model of which looks decidedly nominalist (what I call the relevant similarity model) and that as such, photographic artworks must be likewise construed, not as abstracta but as individual and distinct concreta. That is, the correct ontological account of photographic art must be one according to which photographic artworks are individual and distinct concrete artworks. In the end, I show that the ontology of photographic art resists the standard repeatable-work model because the putative repeatability of photographic artworks is upon closer inspection nothing more than the relevant similarity relation between individual and distinct photographic prints. (shrink)

Robert Eaglestone argues that postmodernism is a response to the Holocaust. He offers a range of new perspectives, including new ways of looking at testimony and at recent Holocaust fiction; explores controversies in Holocaust history; looks at the importance of the Holocaust for recent philosophy; and asks what the Holocaust means for reason, ethics, and for being human.

Pictures are a quintessential source of aesthetic pleasure. This makes it easy to forget that they are epistemically valuable no less than they are aesthetically so. Pictures are representations. As such, they may furnish us with knowledge of the objects they represent. In this article I provide an account of why photographs are of greater epistemic utility than handmade pictures. To do so, I use a novel approach: I seek to illuminate the epistemic utility of photographs by situating (...) both photographs and handmade pictures among the sources of knowledge. This method yields an account of photography's epistemic utility that better connects the issue with related issues in epistemology and is relatively superior to other accounts. Moreover, it answers a foundational issue in the epistemology of pictorial representation: I argue that photographs have greater epistemic utility than handmade pictures because photographs are sources of perceptual knowledge, while handmade pictures are sources of testimonial knowledge. (shrink)

Photographic pictorial experience is thought to have a peculiar phenomenology to it, one that fails to accompany the pictorial experiences one has before so-called ‘hand-made’ pictures. I present a theory that explains this in terms of a common factor shared by beliefs formed on the basis of photographic pictorial experience and beliefs formed on the basis of ordinary, face-to-face, perceptual experience: the having of a psychologically immediate, non-inferential etiology. This theory claims that photographic phenomenology has less to do with (...) class='Hi'>photographs themselves, or the pictorial experiences they elicit, and is a matter of our cognitive response to those experiences. I illustrate this theory’s benefits: it is neutral on the nature of photography and our folk-conception of photography; it is consistent with photographic phenomenology’s being contingent; and it accounts for our experiences of hyper-realistic hand-made pictures. Extant theories of photographic phenomenology falter on one or more of these issues. (shrink)

Title: Modernity and the Holocaust Publisher: Wiley ISBN: 0745606857 Author: Zygmunt Bauman Title: Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465086365 Author: Paul Breines.

Photographic Architecture and the Spread of German Modernism is a “picture anthropology” of modern architecture, showing how photography shaped its development, its reception, and its history in the 20th c. At first, architects used photography to promote their practices, even as they doubted its value and efficacy as a means of representation. Unlike other representations, photographs were both too real, and not real enough. Furthermore, the photographic image acted on its subject like an alchemical agent. Photography altered the material (...) that it represented, at the same time shepherding architecture from elite social representation in the nineteenth century to potential mass communicator in the twentieth. In architectural markets, technological development and public self-presentation were at least equally important, and both were affected by photography and the mass distribution of cultural information. The collateral effects of market competition in architecture in the age of printed advertising, however, produced resistance in the architectural profession, as it insisted on the inadequacy of the new medium to adequately represent built things. The book focuses on two interconnected subjects subsumed in the term, “photographic architecture”: on the one hand, architectural photography and its circulation; on the other, the impact of photography on architectural design. In this particular strain of modern architecture, the visible appearance of buildings and the modalities of photographic images overlapped in consequential ways. This book analyzes the formation and impact of such ideas and the discourses that accompanied them. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show that the current incineration techniques of corpses are directly related to the Holocaust itself and its purposes. It is the same technique which, in the inhuman years of Nazi atrocities, was developed to be applied massively against the Jewish people and the other groups, because as a method it served and expressed both politically and ideologically the plan of a “final solution:” the final “dis-solution,” the disappearance of the human body even (...) as a residue, because the human body, even as a corpse, still retains identity and value. The findings of this study suggest a different analysis of the Nazis’ choice to eliminate the corpses of the Jews, while, at the same time, exploring the original approach offered here helps to understand better the value that the human corpse retains. Many social and religious groups that currently refuse to accept this way of managing human corpses become more understandable in their choice not to accept what nature itself denies but modern technique imposes, namely perfect oblivion, extinction of the corpse. Initially, it is presented in historical and intercultural terms in which ways human societies mainly behave towards the human corpse along with the most prevalent funeral burial customs. Subsequently, the semiology of the human corpse is evaluated in terms of philosophical aesthetics and is included in the corresponding aesthetic categories. Finally, this work airs and analyzes new bioethical issues which arise considering this ever-increasing tendency towards the practice of those responsible for the Holocaust, namely the disappearance of the human corpse. (shrink)

The issue of Holocaust tourism might be a quite sensitive, but nevertheless very important topic in the domain of the Holocaust remembrance. As tourism is often associated with leisure activities, it is quite challenging to put tourism into darker contexts of history and death. Also, different people coming to the Holocaust-related places with different motives make the issue of designing educational tours even more complex. This paper will try to expose questions related to dark tourism, Holocaust (...) tourism, auratic memorial places, and to discuss ethical approaches to the Holocaust memory in the beginning of the 21st century. The text argues for the tourist experience as a memorable and educational tool with an active transformational potential, which will turn the visitor into a witness who further contributes to survival of the legacy of the Holocaust in the future. (shrink)

. The author first engages the problem of defining the value of a photograph, not in terms of its commercial or monetary value but of its actual or potential use. Walter Benjamin's influential writings on photography are discussed, notably his complex metaphor of "aura" as applied to both handmade art and the photograph, with the author challenging Benjamin's contention that works of art do not require titles, whereas photographs do.

Holocaust denial (HD) is the activity of denying the occurrence of key events and processes which constitute the Holocaust. Should it be tolerated? HD brings into particularly sharp focus many difficult questions faced by defenders of content-neutral liberal principles protecting freedom of expression. I argue that there are insufficient grounds for the legal prohibition of HD, but that society has the right and the duty to expel and exclude deniers from the Academy.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima power plant disaster, autoradiography became an increasingly widespread artistic technique for producing cameraless photography. By exposing photographic film directly using contaminated objects and materials, contemporary artists autoradiograph the geopolitics and local histories of atomic contamination due to bombing, testing, nuclear reactor explosions, mining or uranium disposal cells. In my article, I discuss the implications these autoradiographic works have for the concept of photography by drawing on Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects. Being hyperobjective, radioactivity confronts (...) human beings with a vast non-human temporality, which, in turn, necessitates a shift in our understanding of photography. While photo theory has often been modelled on snapshot photography, privileging instantaneity and pastness, autoradiography is a durational and pluri-temporal procedure that points emphatically towards the future and invites us to reconceptualize the basis of photographic ontology. (shrink)