At Your Discretion: Photographs of suffering and choosing not to look
This essay deals with archival photographs from Nazi concentration camps, comparing two diverging attitudes to the ethics of looking at these photographs of suffering. Through the examination of the non-analytical nature of photography and the ethics of looking, and informed by the work of photography critics and scholars such as Zelizer and Linfield, the essay concludes that it is most ethical to be given the choice of whether to look, enabling the viewer to make an informed and intentional decision. When referring to photographs of suffering, I examine the ‘most morally vexing photographic genre’ (Linfield 2010: 66): photographs of encamped people when they are to be murdered. These are not the more familiar photographs of the mounds of naked corpses bulldozed into mass graves, of which there are plenty, but the images of these people when they are still, barely, alive, not long before their dehumanised ending. What might be the ethics behind revealing or hiding this suffering?
In Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt (1963) argues that the dehumanisation of Europe Jews by Nazism enabled the horrific, extensive human rights abuses of the Holocaust. In her famous notion of ‘the banality of evil’, she ventures to assert that there was a commonplace, banal component to such evil, involving almost automatic unthinking. This concept of dehumanisation has by now assumed a prominent place in thinking on genocide and mass atrocity, with the diminishment of the victims’ human status being a ‘prerequisite to their destruction’ (Alvarez 1997: 168). Without the dehumanisation of Jews and other minority groups, the Nazi regime could not have committed its atrocious crimes. Concentration camps were created with the intention of diminishing their prisoners as much as possible, reducing them to subhuman bodies, machines of forced labour.
The Nazi regime viewed the camera as a key tool in nation building; two official SS photographers were employed at Auschwitz, and thousands of images were produced over the twenty months that the camp was active. Created as grim records of their barbarous crimes, these photographs depict human relations ‘based on the unfettered cruelty of the powerful, and the utter helplessness of those they have caught’ (Linfield 2010: 66), and thus succumb to depicting their victims from this monolithic and lethal “Nazi gaze”. These photographs were designed to degrade the victims into mere objects framed by the camera, and they are now condemned to be gazed at in this undignified and powerless state, immortalised in this way against their will. Must their torment be available and unrestricted for countless to see? To look at such photographs, some critics argue, is to ‘place ourselves – not just physically but morally too – in the position of the original photographer, which is to say a killer’ (ibid.: 69), watching in smug safety while the victim is stripped of their dignity, their humanity, their life. These critics claim that such photographs are not only the documentation of cruelty, but the acting-out of it (ibid.). If to look at these harrowing photographs is to mimic, and potentially collude with, the gaze of Nazism, are they ethical to view at all?
The overwhelming majority of these images were from Nazi sources, primarily SS soldiers, while some were also created by German tourists as they visited the ghettos and by the Allied Forces as they liberated concentration camps. Although these images were created for “innocent” or “redemptive” documentation purposes their oppressive forces are unavoidably recreated. In representing the victims of the Holocaust in the state of suffering inflicted by Nazi regime, it evokes the same patronising positions of power. To view these images therefore perpetuates the manner in which the Nazis viewed these innocent people, so it could be argued that to refuse to look at them is to condemn this gaze and refuse to participate in its perpetuation.
Although it irrefutably testifies to reality and exposes the suffering and plight of the powerless, however, the sole truth that the photograph can establish is that its subject has ‘been there’ (Barthes 1993: 76). Inherently non-analytic and non-explanative, the photograph of suffering alone cannot adequately contextualise nor expose the sheer gravity of what it intends to depict. This nature of the photograph means that it cannot offer anything but a mere glimpse into the entirety of Nazism’s cruelty. As Mavis Tate, a British Member of Parliament who witnessed the camps, reported, “the reality was indescribably worse than these pictures; you cannot photograph suffering, only its results” (British Pathé 2012). This photograph therefore cannot represent its subject as anything but this dehumanised victim; there is no past nor future given to the person they depict, other than that they will soon die. To view these images is to therefore succumb to the desire of the Nazis – to forget of these people’s history, to strip them of their uniqueness, their culture, their life, their humanity. Thus, to choose to not look at photographs of suffering is to acknowledge and protest that there is no way to view these images in a way that ethically represents the victim.
This dissociation between the depiction of the victim in the photograph of suffering and a true representation of their humanity has also been enabled by their embedment in collective memory. The scope and content of Holocaust photographs have remained detrimentally unchanging, despite the existence of over two million photographs documenting the Holocaust in public archives. The certain few images which are repetitively reproduced and resurface come to signal this event, and what is collectively remembered about the Holocaust is consequently reduced to darkly emblematic visual cues – gaunt faces, tattooed arms, shaven heads. In Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch questions whether these repetitive photographs can ever ‘enable a responsible and ethical discourse in its aftermath. [...] Do they act like clichés, empty signifiers that distance and protect us from the event?’ (2001: 8). The repetition of these photographs of suffering, she argues, has thus ‘disturbingly brought with it their radical decontextualisation from their original context of production and reception’ (ibid). Looking at these photographs, therefore leads to the reduction of their subjects to banal symbols of this inflicted suffering rather than seeing them as real, human victims.
Not only does this widespread distribution of photographs dehumanise the victims of the Holocaust, but it also has negative consequences for other instances of atrocity since, as one is obligated to victims of the Holocaust to not only never forget their tragedy, but to also be alert and responsive to other instances of atrocity. In Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye, Barbie Zelizer compellingly argues that ‘photography may function most directly to achieve what it ought to have stifled— atrocity’s normalisation. It may be that the act of making people see is beginning to take the place of making people do’ (Zelizer 1998: 212). A symptom of repetitively viewing photographs of suffering is ‘compassion fatigue’ (ibid.: 218), a sense of moral resignation as one becomes habituated to the knowledge that atrocities are bound to happen and one is unable to do anything. This desensitised attitude towards viewing photographs of suffering consequently impinges the willingness to pay attention and the ability to respond to other instances of atrocity.
With these arguments in mind, the choice to not look at images of suffering from the Holocaust should be a radical, intentional, and intellectual one, carefully articulated so that it ‘remains an authentic choice, and not the last resort physically disgusted or the first resort of the wilfully ignorant’ (Crane 2008: 311). Needless to say, photographs of such dire suffering are hard to look at; they make the viewer feel uncomfortable – some are excruciating. However, rather than spontaneously and unquestionably looking away from these images out of fear or disgust, one should remain critical of what it is that makes them so uncomfortable. The emaciated, disgusting state of the bodies that trigger this impulse were inflicted by the harrowing project of the Nazis. By becoming aware of and reflecting upon this reflex to look away, one can instead make it an intentional one: a refusal to look at these images of suffering as a refusal to view these victims in this dehumanised representation, and an act of rejection of being in this position of power and repetition of the gaze which the photograph instils. To do so is a form of protest, somewhat re-imbuing the victims with a certain posthumous power, or at least removing some from the perpetrator. This, of course, does not mean that we will forget these innocent people and the crimes committed against them. Many of those who write about photographs of suffering, such as Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others and Woolf in Three Guineas, deliberately omit these photographs from their works. In withholding these images from view, they share knowledge, response, and activism, discussing them in the present absence of the atrocity.
While criticisms of atrocity images and the argument of not looking are logical and convincing, I still found myself compelled to look at these images of suffering during my exhibition research – not out of some voyeuristic desire, but rather, some mystical, visceral force that affected me in a way no words could. Even if Sontag and Woolf did not include images alongside their writing, they spoke ardently of their sheer poignancy and emotive power; in Three Guineas, Woolf dispassionately describes the horrific images of the Spanish Civil War, although her reaction is anything but. These photographs, she writes, are ‘a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye. But the eye is connected with the brain; the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling. When we look at those photographs, some fusion takes place within us; however different the education, the traditions behind us, our sensations are [...] violent’ (Woolf 1938: 125). Here, Woolf articulates the fundamental components of spontaneous responses to photographs of suffering: immediate visceral sensation and emotional connection. Her “violent” response manifested as political engagement; she went on to write Three Guineas, participate in pacifist organisations, and speak publicly against war. While Zelizer argues that viewing images of atrocity leads to a desensitisation to other atrocities, ‘people don’t become inured [...] because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.’ (Sontag 2003: 102). To look at these at these images is does not necessarily encourage an apathetic gaze; their evocative force can be a call for learning, or realistic, meaningful actions, like those of Woolf.
In the words of Sontag, it is true that while images can transfix, they can equally ‘anesthetize’ (Sontag 1977: 21). If these photographs simultaneously hold such an innate power and such a grave danger, how could one ethically present them? Choosing to look, perhaps, entails a duty to do so with responsibility, care, and awareness. To view a photograph of suffering alone is not enough; it must be looked at within a certain situated context, grounded in historical memory and knowledge. Otherwise, one risks viewing these victims in the manner the Nazis intended, whether or not one is aware of it. One method of ethically representing these people is through the employment of narrative alongside images of suffering; as first-generation survivors decrease with time and the Holocaust begins to slip from living memory, curators within museums dedicated to the commemoration of this event have a responsibility to present biographical accounts within exhibitions that present such photographs. These show the unique personal histories of these people, and in doing so these curators re-imbue these photographs and the people that they depict with humanity, as opposed to the dire states of suffering and dehumanisation that they reflect. This informed and connected looking experience opposes the intention of Nazism: to strip these victims of their individuality – shaving their hair, dressing them in uniform, referring to them as numbers, robbing them of their past and their future. Therefore, contextualising photographs of suffering from the Holocaust alongside personal narrative contradicts the dehumanising gaze of Nazism which condemns its victims to remain as powerless, undignified and forever lost in this factory of death amongst millions of others, but instead honours the ‘memory of the dead, the defeated, and the vanquished by making present to us once more their failed hopes, their untrodden paths, and unfulfilled dreams’ (Benhabib 1990: 196).
Viewing atrocity photographs from the Holocaust cannot alleviate the harm they caused, nor can it ever redeem the suffering of the people they depict. To choose not to look at these photographs, if done authentically, is an ethical option. However, to look at photographs of these doomed people is not always exploitative, so long as we decide to do so with intention, care, and intellect. Although more research about the context of these images should be undertaken – their sheer quantity means that we won’t know their provenance, subjects, and creators for a while, if ever – looking at these photographs of suffering is essential. If one does so in the best-informed way one can, and in an appropriate, situated context, one can better navigate the dual responsibility owed to victims of the Holocaust: the preservation of objective historical truth and the preservation of their subjective humanity.
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