What's Wrong with This Picture

2017

The Holocaust photographs are an exceptional historical source. Like no other pictures, they shock, intrigue and encourage the viewer to take notice and reflect on the subject. They have a special place in the history of photography as well. We look at each of the pictures of the Holocaust victims (even if we do not know with certainty whether a pictured person died or not) with some anxiety, regardless of what they present. The whole series of associations related to ghetto, hunger, diseases, death camps etc., appear immediately before our eyes. From the beginning

Jewish Social Studies, 2021

Historians of interwar Germany have noted the transformation in the perception of "the ordinary" under Nazism. This article analyzes private photographs of the Jewish home as responses to this transformation. Taken and compiled in albums by German Jews in the late 1930s, these photographs display two major stylistic paradigms, which communicate two distinct approaches to the persecution of German Jews since 1933. The first documented domestic routines in a way that alluded to major tropes of both German national culture and Jewish religious heritage. It depicted changes in the daily experiences of Jews as the downfall of (German) bourgeois culture. The second paradigm moved in the opposite direction, by engaging in a conspicuous effort to disconnect ordinary scenes at home from the ominous circumstances that prevailed beyond its walls. The latter paradigm seems to portray the Jewish home as a site of escapist refuge from reality. Yet, I argue, it often functioned as a vehicle for a sinister depiction of the "new ordinary" as a signifier of inevitable demise.

History and Theory, 2009

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.

Shofar, 2019

This essay examines how fine-art photographs taken of former Nazi camps may foster or discourage critical engagement with how we and others-individuals, communities, nations-visualize, conceptualize, and memorialize the Holocaust. It discusses James Friedman's "12 Nazi Concentration Camps" as an exceptional body of work that breaks with how the camps are typically photographed: namely, as spaces of remembrance frozen in time, bereft of color and human life. Unlike images that portray the camps as silent, still, and vacant, Friedman's color photographs present the memorial camps as curious social spaces in which people-foreign tourists, local residents, children on school trips, workers, soldiers, Holocaust survivors, and a photographer among them-may interact. Through an examination of work by photographers who made pictures of the camps in the closing decades of the twentieth century, including Friedman, Erich Hartmann, and Dirk Reinartz, and a recounting of the author's own experience of photographing the camps at that time, this essay argues against efforts to fix the Holocaust in properly commemorative images.

History and Theory, 2009

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 Cernauti, 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.

Jewish Culture and History, 2024

This article explores the experience of German-Jewish refugees who joined the U.S. Army and returned to Germany wearing uniforms through an examination of their private photographs. Focusing on two case studies of images taken by soldiers in 1945–6, the study uncovers their complex dynamics of identity and belonging as they confronted their traumatic past. These photographs reveal a profound detachment from sites of Jewish trauma, enabling the soldiers to bid farewell to their old Heimat on their own terms. By shedding light on their struggles, the analysis provides insights into the process of identity formation and memory negotiation.