Media critic Zelizer, a columnist for the Nation who teaches at the
Annenberg School of Communications at the Univ. of Pennsylvania,
studies the effect of atrocity photos, paying particular attention
to those taken at the liberation of Nazi concentration camps in
WWII. Like so many writers on photography, Zelizer adopts as her
starting point a line from Walter Benjamin: "Every image of the
past that is recognized by the present as one of its own concerns
threatens to disappear irretrievably." According to her, the
liberation photographs have become paradigmatic for the ways in
which atrocities are depicted in the news media; they function as a
series of markers for collective memory of the Holocaust and
project that reality forward onto more recent acts of barbarism. At
the same time, the Holocaust photos served to establish the
photograph as the seemingly irrefutable documentation of an
otherwise unimaginably horrible fact. Zelizer traces the historical
status of reporting on the Holocaust from before the liberation
through the present to illustrate the way in which the status of
photojournalism was significantly improved by the later events.
(The word "photojournalism" was not even coined until 1942.) She
follows the trajectory of post-Holocaust collective memory from the
flood of images in the immediate aftermath of the war through
nearly three decades of silence until the late 1970s, when the
Holocaust once more became a central part of sociopolitical
discourse. Finally, she analyzes the ways in which contemporary
reporting attempts to reproduce the effects of reporting on the
Holocaust. Her final conclusion is a damning one, that the use of
such agonizing images merely allows for "atrocity's normalization."
Moreover, "we may remember earlier atrocities so as to forget the
contemporary ones." Regrettably, she couches her findings in a dry
academic style that makes for tedious reading. The overall effect
of the volume is enervation. An important topic still in search of
the right analyst. (Kirkus Reviews)
There is no more gruesome and tragic record in the history of the
20th century than the photographs taken at the liberation of the
concentration camps in Germany after World War II. These images are
seared into our collective memory as brutal evidence of the
atrocity of war and the evil of which humanity is capable. But the
horrific content of these images has somewhat obscured their status
as historical documents. This text reveals the unique significance
of the concentration camp photographs - how they have become the
basis of our memory of the Holocaust and how they have affected our
presentations and perceptions of contemporary history's subsequent
atrocities. Prior to the Holocaust, news reporters primarily told
their stories in words, using photographs almost as an
afterthought. When the camps were liberated, however, journalists
and reporters turned to photography to bear witness to the
unspeakable and indescribable scenes of the dead and dying. Through
this process, the text argues, photographs earned a new legitimacy
as tools of reporting. The author shows how, since the end of the
war, the use of "atrocity photos" has fallen into patterns - or
waves of memory - determined by the different roles that the photos
occupy in the public imagination. Most recently, for example, the
images from Bosnia hark back to the Holocaust imagery, an echo that
can actually dilute our response to what happened both then and
now.
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