Valerie Hébert has edited a masterful collection that dissects twelve photographs that document a moment in terror and horror from December 15, 1941 in occupied Liepāja. Holocaust studies, from museums to monographs to webpages, often use these photographs to depict the stages of a “killing action” in the “Holocaust of Bullets” that killed around one and a half million Jews before the Nazi regime built the concentration/death camp system. Almost everything about the photographs, however, is challenging. Who took the photographs, why did they take them, who are the perpetrators and victims in the photographs, what do the photographs tell us about the Holocaust, and on a deeper level, should we look at them? Hébert and eight other scholars, a multi-disciplinary cross-section of experts on history, the Holocaust, and photography, weigh in on these debates and provide context to the photographs, to the history of the Holocaust, specifically in Latvia, to a sophisticated analysis of the meaning of photographs, and to the meaning of photographs. Throughout these discussions, and woven through the articles, is the moral question raised by Hilary Earl, one of the contributors, about “the ethics of witnessing the photographs of unwilling subjects” (237). This concern and the thoughtful wrestling with it that each of the contributors addresses extends the value of the collection to ever larger audiences, from historians of Latvia and/or the Holocaust, to any depiction of violence through the ages to our morning newspapers.
Framing the Holocaust grew out of an academic workshop, “Regarding Atrocity: Photography, Memory, and Representation,” which Hébert organized at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Hébert begins the collection with an introduction that outlines the project and includes the twelve infamous photographs and the different captions that have accompanied them. She also dedicates the book to Edward Anders, a Holocaust survivor from Liepāja. Anders also contributed a moving foreword to the collection, and his memoirs, Amidst Latvians during the Holocaust (Riga, 2011) is essential reading for any examination of the Holocaust in Latvia. Each of the contributions address two separate, but intertwined issues: what do we see in the photographs and why should we (or shouldn't we) look at them?
The contributions from Hébert, Daniel Newman, Tanja Kinzel, and Marilyn Campeau provide answers to the first issue: what we see in the photographs. Edward Anders’ foreword also includes the chilling realization that when he looks at the photographs, he can identify friends and family friends. Newman's contribution outlines the massacre and the provenance of the photographs. He examines the theories about who took the photographs, and relates how David Zivcon, a Jewish mechanic/electrician found the photographs in a Gestapo officer's apartment, surreptitiously took them to a friend at a photo lab to make copies, and then hid them in a metal box behind a wall until the war ended, when he retrieved them and turned them over to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission for Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and their Accomplices (the Extraordinary Commission). More importantly, Newman identifies many of the victims in the photographs, includes biographical information about them, and even passport photos of three of the victims. Marilyn Campeau, on the other hand, discusses the provenance of the captions on the photographs added by the Extraordinary Commission as putting “Soviet words on German perpetrator images” (142), and engages in a more general debate about how to use and evaluate Soviet sources on the Holocaust. Kinzel adds insightful commentary about what the photographs tell us about the photographer, about his gaze encompassing pornographic, humiliating, and demeaning intentions. Kinzel struggles with our use of the photographs and whether we duplicate the perpetrator's gaze, but counters such concerns by reading from these photos “the victims’ expressions (however subtle) of agency and choice” (113).
Transitioning from Kinzel's focus on the photographer and the photographed, contributions from Danny Hoffman, Daniel H. Magilow, and Dorota Glowacka go further into theoretical discussions of atrocity photography, place, and gender. These contributions draw from the theoretical work of Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Marianna Hirsch, Roland Barthes, and Emmanuel Levinas, to name just a few, to deconstruct meaning in the photographs and in our use of them. These contributions range away from the beach at Šķēde and link these discussions to Soweto and Sierra Leone (Hoffman), to beaches more generally (Magilow), and to the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau (Glowacka) and Phan Thi Kim Phuc (“Napalm Girl”) and Alan Kurdi (the drowned Syrian refugee boy from 2015) (Earl), and by implication to every atrocity photo we come across in the future.
Although different contributions will appeal to different specialists, everyone can find value in the success of this multi-disciplinary volume. Hilary Earl extends such value in the final contribution to the collection, “A Pedagogy of Witnessing: Reading and Interpreting the Šķēde Beach Execution Photographs in the University Classroom” (223). She relates how she uses the theoretical debates as a “teachable moment” in a classroom setting, instructing students to define “atrocity photograph,” familiarize themselves with articles from the “look/don't look” divide, and then debate the merits of each through the Šķēde perpetrator's lens of victims who have been restored with more of their identity and agency. She argues the exercise succeeds in “creating historically literate students” that “value. . . . context” and challenges “their pre-existing views of photographs and photography” (242). Hebert's collected volume, Framing the Holocaust, does the same for academics as well. This is essential reading for understanding Latvian history, the Holocaust, and atrocity photography.
