![Stroop Report - Warsaw Ghetto Uprising BW](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Stroop_Report_-_Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising_BW.jpg)
Photography of the Holocaust is a topic of interest to scholars of
the Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
. Such studies are often situated in the academic fields related to
visual culture
Visual culture is the aspect of culture expressed in visual images. Many academic fields study this subject, including cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, media studies, Deaf Studies, and anthropology.
The field of vi ...
and
visual sociology
Visual sociology is an area of sociology concerned with the visual dimensions of social life.
Theory and method
Visual sociology can be theoretically framed around three themes. Luc Pauwels suggests that the framework is based on the origin ...
studies.
Photographs created during the Holocaust also raise questions in terms of ethics related to their creation and later reuse.
Origin of the photos
Much of the photography of the Holocaust is the work of Nazi German photographers.
Some originated as routine administrative procedure, such as identification photographs (
mug shot
A mug shot or mugshot (an informal term for police photograph or booking photograph) is a photographic portrait of a person from the shoulders up, typically taken after a person is arrested. The original purpose of the mug shot was to allow law ...
s); others were intended to illustrate the construction and functioning of the camps or prisoner transport.
There were also photographs of concentration camps authorized for use by German media, those appeared in print around 1933–1936 in German newspapers and magazines such as ' or '.
A small number of pictures appeared in later years, vetted by propaganda and censorship officials before publication.
![Auschwitz Resistance 280](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Auschwitz_Resistance_280.jpg)
Many photographs of the Holocaust are taken by unidentified authors, but others are known. Nazi German photographers of the Holocaust who acted in their official capacity include ,
Friedrich Franz Bauer,
Franz Wolf, and
Franz Suchomel.
The destruction of the
Warsaw Ghetto
The Warsaw Ghetto (german: Warschauer Ghetto, officially , "Jewish Residential District in Warsaw"; pl, getto warszawskie) was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. It was established in November 1940 by the G ...
was methodically documented in the well-illustrated
Stroop Report
The Stroop Report is an official report prepared by General Jürgen Stroop for the SS chief Heinrich Himmler, recounting the German suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the liquidation of the ghetto in the spring of 1943. Originally ti ...
.
Some photographs were taken by the camp prisoners themselves, for example by
Wilhelm Brasse
Wilhelm Brasse (3 December 1917 – 23 October 2012) was a Polish professional photographer and a prisoner in Auschwitz during World War II. He became known as the "famous photographer of Auschwitz concentration camp." His life and work we ...
or
Francisco Boix
Francesc Boix Campo '' Close-mid_central_unrounded_vowel.html"_;"title="rClose-mid_central_unrounded_vowel">ɘnsɛsc_bɒVoiceless_postalveolar_fricative.html" ;"title="ɛ.html" ;"title="Close-mid_central_unrounded_vowel.html" ;"title="rClose-mid ...
, working as aides for their Nazi overseers.
There were also photographs taken in the ghettos by their Jewish inhabitants, some with official permission, some in secrecy as an act of defiance and for evidence purposes.
Jewish photographers of the ghetto life included
Henryk Ross and
Mendel Grossman
Mordka Mendel Grossman was born on 27 June 1913 in Gorzkowice, Piotrków Governorate, Russian Empire (today Poland). He died on 30 April 1945, during the death marches. He was a photographer and worker in the Statistical Department of the Litzma ...
, both of whom documented the
Łódź Ghetto
The Łódź Ghetto or Litzmannstadt Ghetto (after the Nazi German name for Łódź) was a Nazi ghetto established by the German authorities for Polish Jews and Roma following the Invasion of Poland. It was the second-largest ghetto in all of ...
.
A number of other photographs of the Jewish ghetto life come from Nazi personnel and soldiers, many of whom treated those locales as tourist attractions.
Unofficial photographs of the Holocaust were taken by, among others, ,
,
Willy Georg and .
![Auschwitz aerial view RAF](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Auschwitz_aerial_view_RAF.jpg)
Other photographs were taken during the liberation of the camps by photographers attached to Allied units which arrived to secure them.
Such photographs started appearing from mid-1944, and gained wider notoriety in the spring 1945.
Most Allied military photographers remain anonymous as they were seldom credited, unlike the press correspondents who published some of the first photo exposés of the camps; the latter included
Lee Miller
Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977), was an American photographer and photojournalist. She was a fashion model in New York City in the 1920s before going to Paris, where she became a fashion and fine art ...
,
Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White (; June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971), an American photographer and documentary photographer, became arguably best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet industry under the Soviets' ...
,
David Scherman
David E. Scherman (1916 – May 5, 1997) was an American photojournalist and editor.
Born in Manhattan to a Jewish family, he grew up in New Rochelle, New York and then attended Dartmouth College. He graduated in 1936 and became a photograp ...
,
George Rodger
George William Adam Rodger (19 March 1908 – 24 July 1995) was a British photojournalist noted for his work in Africa and for photographing the mass deaths at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the Second World War.
Life and career ...
,
John Florea
John Florea (born in Alliance, Ohio on May 28, 1916; died in Las Vegas on August 25, 2000) was an American television director and a photographer.
Career
Florea started as a photographer for the San Francisco Examiner, then was signed onto the ...
and
William Vandivert
William Vandivert (August 16, 1912 – December 1, 1989) was an American photographer, co-founder in 1947 of the agency Magnum Photos.
Biography
Vandivert was born in Evanston, Illinois. He studied chemistry from 1928 to 1930 at Beloit College i ...
.
Because of the Cold War, many photographs made by the Soviets were treated with suspicion in the West, and received little coverage until decades later.
Holocaust photography also includes aerial reconnaissance photos made by Allied aircraft.
Many photographs were destroyed, some accidentally, as collateral damage during the war, others on purpose, in attempts by perpetrators of the atrocities to suppress the evidence.
Conversely, some Nazi photographs were stolen, hidden and preserved as evidence of atrocities by individuals such as Francisco Boix or Joe Heydecker.
The total number of surviving Holocaust-related photos has been estimated at over two million.
Usage of the photos
A number of surviving photographs documenting Holocaust atrocities were used as evidence during post war trials of
Nazi war crimes
The governments of the German Empire and Nazi Germany (under Adolf Hitler) ordered, organized and condoned a substantial number of war crimes, first in the Herero and Namaqua genocide and then in the First and Second World Wars. The most notabl ...
, such as the
Nuremberg trials
The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II.
Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded m ...
.
They have been used as symbolic, impactful evidence to educate the world about the true nature of Nazi atrocities.
Historical photographs are considered valuable artifacts for historical studies and memorial institutions such as museums and galleries.
There have been a number of gallery exhibits dedicated to this topic.
They are used by scholars to refine understanding of historical events, in a form of visual archaeology.
In addition to the photos themselves, caption of the photos have been analyzed as well, as they can be helpful in understanding framing biases; for example the same photo captioned in Russian might describe the victims as Soviet citizens, in Polish, as Polish citizens, and in Yiddish, as Jews.
At the same time, some have criticized whether unconditional public access to photographs of atrocities is ethical (as they were not taken with the subjects' consent, and have been known to cause distress to the subjects) and educational (as they have been accused of being trivialized in some contexts, or used out of context or with improper attribution).
Demand for Holocaust atrocity photographs has resulted in a number of fake images turning up at auctions.
Inmate photographs were analyzed in a 2021 French documentary, ''
From Where They Stood.''
See also
*
The Holocaust and social media
*
Sonderkommando photographs
The ''Sonderkommando'' photographs are four blurred photographs taken secretly in August 1944 inside the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. Along with a few photographs in the Auschwitz Album, they are the only ones known ...
References
Further reading
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*
External links
Auschwitz Album: photos taken by the SS (Yad Vashem)Mendel Grossman collection: photos of the Łódź Ghetto (US Holocaust Memorial Museum)Höcker Album: photos of Auschwitz-Birkenau taken by an SS officer (US Holocaust Memorial Museum)Henryk Ross collection: photos of the Łódź Ghetto (Art Gallery of Ontario){{Photography of the Holocaust