In
“Photographs, Symbolic Images, and the Holocaust: on the (Im)possibility of
depicting historical truth”, Judith Keilbach argues that Holocaust pictures
exist even though the depicting the Holocaust itself through images is impossible. The existence of Holocaust images, however,
is possible because of the connections between history, photography, and
truth. Keilbach best describes this
relationship through her interpretation of Kracauer’s ideas:
“while both photography an d
historicist thinking record the appearance of events without considering their
meaning, history itself tries to grasp their meaning and thus that which ‘has been perceived as true.’ As a
consequence, photography might be able to illustrate ‘the spatial configuration
of a moment’ but not its truth” (58).
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Knowing the history behind a
photograph allows viewers to maintain some accuracy in assessing its meaning. Although Keilbach uses the term “truth” here
to describe a quality of reality that cannot be preserved or replicated, I will
now refer to the truth of an image according to this undeniable physical,
“spatial configuration of a moment” conveyed in images. I now draw attention to the image of the
soldier on the cover of
Paris-Match magazine. In
Semiology,
author Roland Barthes thoroughly describes the soldier’s features as indicators
of pride in France and its imperialism.
While Barthes highlights the notion of national pride, I cannot ignore
the historical implications of imperialism.
One of the most prominent historical results of imperialism is the
expansion of slavery. Looking at the
image on the magazine elicits a feeling of national pride, but in historical
context may have been a slave or former slave doing his duties.
This brings me to my
next point about social context. No
matter under what conditions the photograph was originally taken, this image is
put into context of society to depict French pride. Keilbach discusses how “our imaginations of
the Holocaust… are shaped by photographs that are part of our cultural memory”
(55), a cultural memory that is shaped by historical context. This next image is
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in fact a Holocaust
photograph. It shows an American soldier
coming to free Jewish people from a concentration camp at the end of World War
II. This photograph, taken from the
American point of view, depicts the soldier as a hero for saving them from the
Holocaust. Other images like the one on
the right (not definitively taken from an American perspective) illustrate
suffering which cultural memory usually assigns to the Holocaust. The number of faces visible in this photograph
represents the magnitude and widespread affect of the
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| http://history1900s.about.com/ |
Holocaust on the European
population. In this blog, I will apply
Keilbach’s emphasis on an image’s historical and societal context to
photographs I have taken and to photographs of others. My close reading of these photographs will
evaluate the importance of physical and societal context in terms of understanding
and interpreting the images’ meanings or implications.
I
will begin by discussing the truth of photographs in a physical context,
arguing that photographs require caption in order to be best understood. This first photograph, or set of photographs,
is my most meaningful football picture.
Just looking at the photograph on the left, at the surface it is a poor
quality photo; it is blurry due to a combination of fast motion and low
lighting, and half of a woman’s (blurred) head infringes on the edge of the
frame. Below the surface lies the
context
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| By Lisa Sinow |
in which I am proud of this poor quality image. As a photographer, I have taken thousands of
perfectly focused and perfectly framed pictures of football and other sports,
but this one is still my favorite because of its story or context. The string of Facebook comments is about the
photograph to its left. The player in
the photo Donovan Ward comments to his teammate “I knew I caught that shit”
alluding to events of the game. During
the game, the referee had called this pass incomplete but according to my
photographs Ward caught the ball. This
incidence is best summarized by the idea that “[a]lthough photographs may
confirm a past presence, it is often not possible from their depiction to make
out the incidents captured or the situation in which they were taken”
(56). This picture means so much to me
because it captures the truth that Ward did indeed catch the ball, but the
importance of this truth is denied without knowing “the situation in which [it
was] taken.” A caption is necessary to
express this story and clearly identify what the truth depicted is. The photograph to the right of the Facebook
comments merely shows “the next pic” that Ward refers to.
Another
image that would be better understood with caption is the photograph showing
students being pepper sprayed in Davis, CA, during the Occupy movement a few
years ago. The truth of this picture is
simply what is there: an officer is pepper spraying a group of students while
many onlookers take pictures of this unusual occurrence and other officers act
as crowd control. While the
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| http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/11/ |
truth of the
image is straightforward, revealing the context under which the photograph was
taken nevertheless increases understanding of the image. Keilbach compare Barthes’ and Benjamin’s
opinions in regards to the relationship between writing and photographs:
“according to Barthes, who underlines their polysemic meaning and heir
plenitude, photographs contain an overflow of information; according to
Benjamin, photographs show too little reality, that is, they omit structures
and context” (57). Whether looking at
images from Barthes’ perspective or from Benjamin’s perspective, either way
both men run into trouble interpreting images.
With this image of Officer Pike, there is both too little and too much
information. There is too little
information in that there is no guidance in how to interpret the image. This lack of guidance allows for many
possible interpretations. Seeing only
the uncaptioned image, as a viewer we have no idea what the students have done
to provoke Officer Pike or if they even did anything to provoke him. The infinite possibilities of how to
interpret the image fall under the category of too much information. A caption indicating the reasoning for pepper
spraying students clarifies with whom the viewer is intended to
sympathize. Captions are “a way to
select and anchor meaning” (57) of an image.
My
final example of needing context to clarify an image comes from the film Standard Operating Procedure by Errol
Morris about the Abu Ghraib prison. One
of the pictures publicly released and shown on multiple occasions throughout
the film is of England dragging a prisoner out of his cell by a leash. What we see in the frame is England acting
alone to abuse the prisoner. Like the Paris-Match cover image and the Officer
Pike image, a caption confesses the image’s context, both
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| http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/ |
what is beyond the
frame and why she does this. England
reveals through a series of interviews in the film that the original image has
been cropped, concealing one of her peers from scrutiny. She also explains that she agreed to be in
the picture because her boyfriend
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| http://rajivawijesinha.wordpress.com/2012/02/ |
Graner had asked her to. She effectively displaces much of the blame
that is originally placed solely on her.
Keilbach summarizes Benjamin’s idea that written information is
necessary in order to read photographs with a “claim to authenticity”
(56). In this case, England’s interviews
act as the written information conveying authenticity. This authenticity comes from the
photographer, the subject, or both. We
accept England’s perspective as authentic, influencing how we perceive the
image of her.
Another
context that influences an image’s perception is social context. Because photographs are recognized as proof
of a past existence, images shown repeatedly create a symbolic meaning
understood as part of a collective memory shared with others allowing for
mutual interpretations of certain events (54).
One such event is America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The first image
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| http://alphahistory.com/vietnam/vietnam-war-soldiers/ |
depicts a bunch of soldiers
trying to protect themselves from an air raid around them. Most notably, the soldier lying on the ground
and the soldier in middle, who appears to be supported by his comrades, appear
to be injured. Just as “the landscape
pictures…[which] illustrate the tracelessness of extinction, favor an
‘abstract’ discussion of the Holocaust without triggering an imagination of
what had actually happened inside the concentration camps” (62), the image of
the fallen soldiers elicits a sense of evil and suffering. Because the traumatizing images from war are
so widely dispersed, many people interpret them in a similar fashion. This common interpretation among many allows
these images to be entered into public memory.
The images of injured soldiers deeply affected many Americans causing
them to speak out and protest the war.
Although
pictures become part of public memory through widespread mutual
interpretations, photographs can also be chosen to depict a specific societal
belief. In terms of the Holocaust, “[as
official] pictures became part of the Allied information program, and their
publication was done for educational, moral, and political reasons, they showed
the situation in the camps in a specific way.
The pictorial motifs in them corresponded with the (subsequent)
legitimization of the war, and so they present a picture of the inhumanity with
which the prisoners had been treated and their subsequent rescue by Allied
soldiers” (66-67). This reaction to
images also existed during the Vietnam War.
The second image from the Vietnam War shows a bunch of children running
away from obvious destruction behind them.
The child in the center of the image is completely naked. The image of
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| http://alphahistory.com/vietnam/vietnam-war-soldiers/ |
children, especially nakedness
associated with babies, represents a weakness and innocence, allowing people to
recognize the negative impacts of the war.
This image confirms and builds upon the growing discontent with the war
among American citizens. In the case of
public images like these war photographs, mass media and public perception act
as a caption which influences how we perceive them. They provide us as viewers with the context
we need to form an understanding of what is being depicted.
Historical
and social context is key in understanding the truth of an image and its
implications. Keilbach’s interpretation
of the relationships between historical context and photography and between the
societal interpretation and images indicate the necessity of a caption, or at
least the additional information conveyed in captions.
Works Cited
Photographs, Symbolic Images, and the Holocaust: On the (IM)Possibility of Depicting Historical Truth
Judith Keilbach and Kirsten Wächter
History and Theory , Vol. 48, No. 2, Theme Issue 47: Historical Representation and Historical Truth (May, 2009), pp. 54-76
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25478837
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