Is Seeing Believing? Photographs, Eyewitness Testimony, and Evidence of the Holocaust
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12523924 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Shneer (University of Colorado System, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 45 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 65-78 |
| Publication date | 2014-12-13 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | East European Jewish Affairs (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1350-1674 • E-ISSN: 1743-971X |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13501674.2015.968827 |
| OpenAlex | W2000963594 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
During World War II, the first media outlets to publish photographs of the Nazi mass murder of Jews and others were Soviet newspapers and magazines. The problem with Soviet photographs was that the Soviet media were considered unreliable from a Western standpoint, because unlike in the West, which perceived a clear ideological differentiation of art from photojournalism, Soviet photography blurred that distinction. According to Western standards of evidence, Soviet photography could never be taken seriously as photojournalism, precisely because the photographer was always metaphorically present. Since Soviet photojournalism failed the test of the documentary imperative, it rarely convinced people of the truth of its subject matter. In this epistemological context when photographs might fail to convince, the act of physically bearing witness, of seeing with one's own eyes, became the most important way of proving to a disbelieving public the veracity of Nazi atrocities
Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology · Ideology · Literature · Nazism · Newspaper · Photography · Photojournalism · Political science · Politics · Subject (documents · The Holocaust · Visual arts · Witness · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Photography and Visual Culture
| Citations per year | 0.56 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2017 - 2024 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |