Yellowing snapshots
Photography and memory in Holocaust literature
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2950508 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sue Vice (0000-0002-4772-7739, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 293-316 |
| Publication date | 2004-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal for Cultural Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1479-7585 • E-ISSN: 1740-1666 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/1479758042000264957 |
| OpenAlex | W2000636554 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 6 |
In this essay, I will consider the representation and role of photographs in contemporary writing, and the relation of the photographic image—whether reproduced or simply described—to the construction of memory and history. Following on from work by Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, and, more recently, Marianne Hirsch, I will contrast texts in which photographs seem to be straightforward repositories of the past and its secrets (in Stephen Poliakoff’s plays Shooting the Past and Perfect Strangers) with some in which the photographic image is unreliable and only tangentially related to the narrative in which it appears (in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz). I will also discuss Georges Perec’s autobiographical novel, W or the Memory of Childhood, which I argue is a significant precursor of Sebald’s work: although the childhood photographs that Perec describes in W are genuine ones (reproduced in David Bellos’s biography), they do not appear within the text. In conclusion, I will discuss the ways in which the representation of photography sets personal against public memory. To do this, I will discuss Binjamin Wilkomirski’s infamous Fragments, an alleged Holocaust memoir which turned out to be a fake; some commentators claimed that its imagistic description of “snapshots” of wartime childhood memory revealed its fraudulence long before this was proven. I will set Fragments against JarosΠaw Rymkiewicz’s autobiographical novel The Final Station, in which the narrator describes and addresses well‐known Holocaust photographs—but does not reproduce them
Art · Art history · Biography · Childhood memory · Episodic memory · Life writing · Literature · Memoir · Narrative · Photography · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database · Representation (politics · Set (abstract data type · The Holocaust · Visual arts · Computer Science · History · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology · Visual Culture and Art Theory
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,09 |
| Citation span | 2004 - 2018 (15) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |