Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe by Angi Buettner

Author:Angi Buettner [Buettner, Angi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138268302
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Nachtwey does not explicitly refer to the Holocaust as an influential factor influencing his work. Nonetheless, a look at his oeuvre reveals how strongly he draws on Holocaust imagery to construct ‘our visual history’ and ‘collective memory’. The quote also echoes Holocaust rhetoric. It ends on a variation of the ‘Never Again’ slogan: the events he photographs, so Nachtwey, are not to be ‘forgotten’ and not to be ‘repeated’. And being a witness is one of the key tropes of Holocaust discourse. Jeffrey Shandler (1999) has described how central the trope of witnessing has become with the film footage documenting the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Viewing liberation footage was established as an act of witnessing the conditions of recently liberated camps, and as a morally transformative experience (Shandler 1999: 5–8). Nachtwey also uses these two tropes as the motto of both his web and Facebook page: ‘I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated’ (jamesnachtwey.com). Strong examples of Nachtwey’s use of the Holocaust frame are two of his famous photos that work with the trope of suffering and starving figures.

One is titled ‘Afghanistan, 1996’. It is a silver gelatin photograph showing a figure wrapped up in a burka on hands and knees, crouched between grave stones.7 The other one is from Sudan in 1993, captioned ‘A starving man moved towards an emergency feeding compound (Nachtwey 1999: 176–177, available also on Time.com, ‘Inferno: Photo Essay by James Nachtwey’, 2000). It also is a blackand-white photograph, and shows a naked, starving man crawling on hand and knees on the dirt ground. Both photographs are strongly reminiscent of Holocaust images depicting the suffering in ghettoes that have become widely used. The two Nachtwey photographs have exactly the same composition as an iconic photo from the Warsaw ghetto. It is titled ‘The last journey: death and burial in the Warsaw ghetto’, and reproduced in a pictorial history of the Holocaust published by Yad Vashem (Yitzhak 1990: 160). It shows a man, clad in a black coat, starving, and crawling on hand and knees.

Many of Nachtwey’s photos from the war and conflict zones of the world, more generally draw on the iconic and compositional strength of the distorted, two-dimensional figures in Holocaust sculptures, either as individual bodies or groups, such as Françoise Salmon’s bronze sculpture The Unknown Prisoner, in Neuengamme (Figure 5.1).

The stick-like bodies from Holocaust vintage photographic images are among the most dominant tropes of Holocaust imagery. Images of the piles and mass of corpses and the rendering of the pile of bodies (by bulldozers, for example) soon began to run parallel with depictions of the one skeletal body. In the many images of stick-like bodies, the victims are refined for purposes of representation. The ultimate refinement of this aesthetic possibility can be seen in many Holocaust memorial sculptures, sculptures that often form solidified bodies and similarly refine and emphasise the body, but also often barely are three-dimensional sculptures.

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