What does it mean to look at a photograph of someone about to be murdered? While a corpse can be shocking and grotesque, at least that person is no longer suffering. It is altogether thornier, Susie Linfield writes in her new book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence(University of Chicago Press), to glimpse a person who is still alive but won't be for long. Linfield describes these pictures as the "most morally vexing photographic genre." Should we still look? Why? How?
Linfield, director of the cultural-reporting program at New York University, delves into the darkest corners of the 20th century. Reproduced in the book, for example, are pictures of a prisoner in Stalin's gulag (executed days later), a child in a Khmer Rouge torture facility (also murdered), and a skeletal woman in the Warsaw Ghetto. "She looked as though she was about to topple over and die the next moment," the photographer, a German soldier, later recalled.
More than a million Nazi-produced photographs survived World War II, including thousands from Auschwitz, where official photographers were stationed. These images—the sanitized, whitewashed ones, at least—were relatively commonplace. In 1936 a German magazine published a photo essay blandly titled "Concentration Camp Dachau."
Much rarer are pictures snapped by Jews and other victims of the Nazis. Four such photos were taken clandestinely by prisoners at Auschwitz—corpses being incinerated, naked women en route to the gas chambers—and featured in a 2001 exhibit in Paris. The display sparked a contentious debate. An art critic who defended the exhibit was accused of "voyeurism, pagan idolatry, irresponsible aestheticism, and fetishistic perversion."
Such denunciations personify a strain of thought that Linfield characterizes as "rejectionist." Photographs that depict scenes of humiliation and degradation are more than documents of cruelty, the rejectionists argue, they are themselves acts of cruelty. To look at them is an insult to the dead. One such critic, Janina Struk, writes about the victims of the Holocaust: "They had no choice but to be photographed. Now they have no choice but to be viewed by posterity. Didn't they suffer enough the first time around?" Perhaps the most prominent rejectionist is the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. In Shoah, his nine-hour Holocaust movie from 1985, he refused to incorporate any documentary footage. He has since denounced the "absurd cult of the archival image," which, he argues, petrifies thought and "kills any power of evocation."
Linfield disagrees. "We do not honor the victims by being too delicate—too respectful—to look," she writes. In a recent interview, she adds: "The Nazi photographs are grotesque and sadistic, but we should not shield ourselves from such images. Anyone who wants to understand the experience of destruction, degradation, and humiliation would do well to look at these photographs."
The Cruel Radiance is more than an argument about the ethics of Holocaust representation—much more. The book opens with a provocative question: Why do photography critics hate photography? Linfield laments the work of critics who see photographs as a "powerful, duplicitous force to defang rather than an experience to embrace and engage." The field, she says, "is saturated with cynicism and distrust, which are mistaken for sophistication and smartness."
She traces this attitude back to the Frankfurt School critics, who were suspicious of popular culture, and especially the relationship between emotion and photography. Linfield's intellectual bête noire, however, is Susan Sontag, whose 1977 book, On Photography, Linfield argues, cultivated a tone of disdain among a generation of critics. "Sontag is compelling and often brilliant, but she has an antipathy toward photography, which she describes as a murder and an assassination, a deception and a manipulation, and a cheap form of knowledge," Linfield says. Instead, she argues for criticism that engages with images analytically and emotionally, that responds to photographs, not just deconstructs them. After all, she says, "photographs are uniquely capable of bringing us close to experiences of suffering and bodily harm."
Is No More
The boy is 7, maybe 8 years old. He stands on a rubble-strewn street in Warsaw in 1943 wearing a cap, knee-high socks, a coat, and a look of terror. His arms are raised. Gathered around him are women and children. It is a scene of chaos, save for the Nazi soldiers, calm-faced, guns in hand. In a new book, The Boy: A Holocaust Story (Hill and Wang), Dan Porat, a professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, weaves a tight narrative from the stories of people, both Nazis and Jews, whose lives converged in this iconic photo.
Where the facts aren't known—and much about this photograph remains unknown—Porat relied on his imagination. That approach, he explains, allowed him to take a fresh look at what, to him, is the central question that emerges from the Holocaust: How can one person come to regard another as subhuman?
What is known about the photograph is this: In May 1943, Jürgen Stroop, a general in the SS, commissioned a report to detail and commemorate the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The 125-page document included 52 black-and-white photographs taken by Nazi officials during the campaign. Bound in leather, the book was titled The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More! A handwritten caption below the picture of the boy reads: "Pulled From the Bunker by Force."
What is not known, among other things, is the identity of the boy. Several people have come forward, most famously a doctor in New York in 1982, but Porat is unconvinced. He does not believe that the boy survived. "Such claims speak to our desire for redemption," he says in an interview. "But there is nothing redemptive about this story. It is an absolute tragedy."
Asked about the picture's enduring relevance, Porat speculates that it has to do with the absence of stark violence. "There are no corpses, no obvious malnutrition." In addition, there is what appears to be a mother-son connection at the center of the frame. "The photograph is laden with this emotional bond that many of us can relate to," Porat says, arguing that the boy's anonymity makes him a universal figure. "He represents six million names."
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