Photography and Jewish History: Five Twentieth-Century Cases 9780812298529

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PHOTOGRAPHY and JEWISH HISTORY

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania Series Editors: Shaul Magid, Francesca Trivellato, Steven Weitzman A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

PHOTOGRAPHY and JEWISH HISTORY Five Twentieth-Century Cases

Amos Morris-Reich

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Hardback ISBN 9780812253917 Ebook ISBN 9780812298529 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morris-Reich, Amos, author. Title: Photography and Jewish history : five twentieth-century cases / Amos Morris-Reich. Other titles: Jewish culture and contexts. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania, [2022] | Series: Jewish culture and   contexts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022000588 | ISBN 9780812253917 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Kahn, Albert, 1860–1940. | Lerski, Helmar, 1871–1956. |Fischer, Eugen, 1874–1967. |   Frank, Robert, 1924–2019. | An-Ski, S., 1863–1920. | Cdovin, S. (Solomon), 1892–1954. |   Photography—History—20th century. | Jews—History—20th century. | Photography—Philosophy. |   Photography—Political aspects. | Photography—Social aspects. | Historiography and photography. |  Jews—Historiography. Classification: LCC TR15 .M666 2022 | DDC 770—dc23/eng/20220121 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000588

CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments    vii Introduction   1

Chapter 1. Utopia and Photography circa 1900: Albert Kahn and the Archives of the Planet    31 Chapter 2. The Boundaries of Photographic Intention: Helmar Lerski’s “Failed” Project    58 Chapter 3. Album of an Extinct Race: Eugen Fischer and Photography    87 Chapter 4. Photography for Its Own Sake: Robert Frank and The Americans   120 Chapter 5. Photography and Rupture: S. An-sky, Solomon Yudovin, and the Documentation of Russian Jewry    149 Conclusion. Photography and Democracy    185 Notes   199 Index   225

PREFACE and ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There is a degree of irony in the fact that the closer the publication of this book drew, the more the question of gender came to the fore. The irony is that the study I am working on now (following my work on the project you hold in your hands)—which revolves around the Jewish “pathos formula” and pertains to violence and suffering from tragedy to comedy, from art to pornography— is inherently gendered. But in the review process for this current volume, gender was proposed to me as a category that I failed to represent, in a critique that cut across and disrupted, or disturbed, my assumptions about photography, the research of Jewish history, and the relationship between the study of history and contemporary values and political commitments. This critique challenged things that I take for granted and so do not see—but also, at the same time, things about which I hold strong convictions and concerning which my vision is, I wish to believe, quite clear. Because, in a lengthy process of revision, I have attempted to satisfy this critique, the account before you could be characterized as a form of compromise. I hope that it is a good kind of compromise. While I was researching and writing this book, my ideas were tested numerous times,

in Israel, Europe, and the United States. The first time I was asked directly about gender was several years into my work on the book, at a 2018 seminar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center, where Christine Hayes (Yale Religious Studies) posed the question. What elicited her comment was an aspect of a group photograph from Chapter 5 that had to do with gender and that I had not noticed. The second time gender was brought up to me was when the first anonymous review of the manuscript came in, and the reviewer wrote that she or he thought that in 2019 it was problematic to write about five cases, each of them associated in a variety of ways with a particular person (respectively, a banker-cum-philanthropist; a scientist; two photographers; and an activist and folklorist), but that none of those people were women. In my work on this project, I sought cases with which I could explore, critique, enrich, and complicate our understanding of photography and Jewish history. Not only is the history of photography (like that of language) a history of power, but the study of history as such unavoidably partakes of the original structure and patterns of inequality and partiality that are built into history.

viii   Preface and Acknowledgments

Furthermore, every book that is based on a selection of cases will necessarily be partial; that is all the more true for this book in particular because, as a rather personal book, it never sought to be representative in the first place. The book emerged in a long and gradual process that involved an idea or a general line of thought in which one question led to another, and the book as a whole evolved, to a great degree, from the cases themselves. My selection of cases was therefore not coordinated from the top down but based, rather, on a strange range of considerations. The most important consideration for me was that I find the cases inherently interesting, multilayered, and diverse, rife with internal contradictions and tensions, rich enough to allow me to explore my questions and line of thought, and ambivalent and ambiguous enough to question key assumptions about photography and Jewish history in the twentieth century. Some of the cases stemmed from materials I had not incorporated into my previous book but that I knew were too good to pass over. Others fired my interest the instant I was exposed to them. One case I was drawn to even because of a (deluded) thought that it would promise easy and subsidized travel to Paris. At another, interrelated, level cases always seem to me to be more interesting than a synthetic account. But it was clear to me, of course, that working on cases meant surrendering any claim to an exhaustive or representative coverage of the subject. Now, it did not happen that I came across a case centering on a woman and consciously decided not to study it. But nor did I consciously decide to include any case centering on a woman. Why? Because my treatment of the cases, as will be further explained in the Introduction, is drawn from sociology, history, and the philosophy of science and technology, which deal with how humans interweave

a technology into the world and how, in the process, that technology changes the world and is itself changed. It is not about establishing a classical canon or the pinnacles of human or Jewish achievement but has to do with critically showing the interweaving of photography and political concepts in order to complicate our understanding of a technology in the world. Even though each case is associated with an individual name, the fact that it is a “case” means precisely that it is not a biography of the person; each case involves a network of persons, ideas, relations, institutions, practices, and values. The contexts of the cases studied involve complex circumstances and, at the extreme end of this range (Chapter 3), a deeply corrupt context of ideas and values. The contexts, the cases, and their treatment differ dramatically from the kind of art history scholarship feminist historians have criticized for the systematic omission of women in the context of classical Western art. While the reviewer suggested that I add another case, this one focusing on a woman, I decided on a different strategy—one that seemed, finally, more powerful. In the dialogue that ensued at the Katz Center seminar I mentioned earlier, Christine Hayes gave me what I thought was very wise advice. In her view I needed to be more attentive to gender, to the possibility of its presence, in each respective case. This meant that I did not come to the various cases with any predetermined notion of gender but attempted, instead, to pay much closer attention to gender from within the diverse respective contexts of each case. This process greatly enriched and complicated the analysis of each of the cases and their relationships, revealing a larger picture of the evolution of ideas about gender over the course of the twentieth century. In Chapter 5 gender plays a more prominent

Preface and Acknowledgments   ix

role because of the temporal structure of the case, binding two different time periods: the beginning of the twentieth century and my own period, the beginning of the twenty-first century. Consulting numerous friends, colleagues, and family members about gender, I learned to appreciate a range of views based on diverse philosophical and political principles, assumptions, and expectations. I wish to thank in particular Uri Simonsohn; Noa Morduch-Simonsohn; Lior Levi; Graham Shapiro; my daughters, Abigail Morris-Reich and Yael Morris-Reich; and my mother, Eva Morris. I think that, in the end, the disruptive or “disturbing” effect of the introduction of the question of gender could be likened to the more subversive form of destruction described in Vilém Flusser’s astonishing essay “The Gesture of Destroying”: Unlike the more direct, frontal form of destruction, “disturbance” is a form of destruction that is productive because it forces change, and that is why I can speak of the account as a compromise. To a great extent this volume was shaped during two short stays at the Katz Center in the winters of 2016 and 2018. I am deeply indebted to Steven Weitzman for the dialogue with him. And I am greatly indebted to the academic and administrative members of the center, the productive encounters with the fellows and guests there, and the critical and fruitful seminar meetings. I wrote most of the book while I was still at the Department of Jewish History and Thought at the University of Haifa, and I am grateful to my many friends and colleagues there. I am particularly indebted to Arnon Keren and Baruch Eitam. I also wish to thank Cedric Cohen-Skalli, the director of the Bucerius Institute for Research of Contemporary German History and Society at the University of Haifa, as well as Manfred

Lahnstein and Michael Goering of the ZEIT Foundation. My first seminar at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, at my new academic home at Tel Aviv University, was on Flusser’s philosophy of technology, and I am grateful to my outstanding students in that seminar for our joint experience. Haim Lusky gave an intriguing guest lecture on Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography. I am greatly indebted to him for the long, intense, loud conversations on photography that shaped the analyses in this book. Gabriel Motzkin taught me to insist on thinking independently. More than twenty years ago, Paul Mendes-Flohr introduced me to Georg Simmel, who has continually accompanied me ever since. For many years and in very many ways, I have had the privilege of working closely with Sander Gilman—I am deeply grateful to him for his intellectual guidance and ongoing support. It is also a great privilege for me to have an ongoing dialogue with Margaret Olin on photography, Jewish history, and politics. I want to thank Lorraine Daston for her intellectual openness and for her sharp intellectual advice. I am grateful to David Nirenberg, who in a conversation following a lecture at the University of Chicago, when I was unsure how well my argument about photography in history had been understood, expressed the issue with his characteristic sharpness: “Don’t you understand that historians conceive of photographs as illustrations of history?” The evolution of my thinking about the conceptual side of this book—the questions I address here and the strategies I developed to address them—was deeply and fundamentally shaped by my long dialogue with Danny Trom. One of the main things I have learned from Danny is that for historical

x   Preface and Acknowledgments

understanding one has to grasp, stabilize, and articulate the social-intellectual axis or stable structure of the phenomenon one seeks to analyze. The counterintuitive idea this volume attempts to demonstrate is that photography is a circular social process, and that in the process “photographic objects” are produced. This sociological idea then intersects with Flusser’s philosophical contention (coming from the other direction, so to speak): that codes (of the kind involved in photography) are artificial, but that after they are learned, they become second nature, and their artificiality is forgotten. Danny brought to my attention Albert Kahn’s “Archives of the Planet,” studied in Chapter 1, and was also critical in helping me understand its historical context. I also wish to thank Paula Amad for her helpful replies to my questions about Kahn, and especially about the status and role of gender in his network of projects. Please note that the photographs in the printed version of this book are produced as halftones rather than full color. To directly experience the powerful effect of color in the photographs from the “Archives of the Planet,” I greatly encourage readers to view the digital version of this book or to search for the scanned photographs online, where they are readily accessible. For Chapter 2, I am very grateful for my dialogue with Ofer Ashkenazi. I would also like to thank Florian Ebner for the conversations with him during my first stay at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, where Helmar Lerski’s estate is held. I am also deeply grateful to Hillel Newman, without whose learned help I would not have been able to historically and textually reconstruct and analyze the remarkable Talmudic story that begins the short excursus on the asymmetry between linguistic and visual images in Chapter 3.

Haim Lusky brought up Lee Miller’s photographs from Dachau, and it was after my conversation with him that I wrote the short excursus on Miller in Dachau in Chapter 4. With regard to Chapter 4, I would also like to thank Sarah Greenough for an illuminating conversation on Robert Frank and for enabling me to see Frank’s materials held in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I would like to thank Joel Kantor and Ilanit Konofni for enlightening conversations about Frank. I would also like to thank W. J. T. Mitchell and Joel Snyder for their valuable memories of and observations about Frank. It was Eugene Sheppard who first brought to my attention Solomon Yudovin’s photographs as a part of S. An-sky’s expedition. For my work on Chapter 5, I am deeply indebted to the extraordinarily generous assistance of Benjamin Lukin and Alex Valdman. Joseph Wilson helped me with an outstanding short study on Roman Vishniac. I am also deeply indebted to my brother Michael Morris-Reich, again with respect to Chapter 5, or helping me understand the history of the dybbuk in the twentieth century. I greatly encourage the readers of this book to look at Stephen Shore’s color photographs, reproduced in this chapter in the digital version of the book, to gain a sense of the significance of color. I am very grateful to all the photographers and owners of the rights to photographs who have allowed me to reproduce their photographs in this book. In many cases the process of acquiring rights and scans was rather smooth. In other instances the process was hard, frustrating, and slow, especially as it took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a way this process—especially when it did not go smoothly—involved the very kinds of considerations that interested me in this study as a whole. These include the

Preface and Acknowledgments   xi

obscure, “behind-the-screen” features of history that normally remain outside our accounts: features such as the complex, changing, and intertwined questions of the possession of rights and the material possession of photographs as well as personal, institutional, and commercial considerations. In the final stages of the writing of this book, such questions, which usually belong to a silent dimension of the history of photography, affected what photographs I was able to use. For instance, and somewhat ironically, Archives of the Planet—the spectacularly affluent, future-oriented photographic archive that was established at the beginning of the twentieth century and based on systematic, scientific logic for the benefit of future generations (see Chapter 1)—has now, in practice, ceased to exist. As a result the archive cannot be visited; the originals cannot be viewed; and, while acquiring permissions is not a problem, the only available scans for reproduction must be downloaded from the internet, and their watermarks cannot be removed. Or, in another ironic instance: Robert Frank, the photographer who revolted against an ordered, dogmatic photographic world with an album that broke photographic conventions and democratized photographic vision (Chapter 4), then drastically limited the reproduction of photographs from that album in an attempt to regulate their circulation and discussion. (We can only speculate about his reasons, but they would seem to be less commercial than the expression of his frustration that his subsequent work did not elicit the same appreciation and attention as that earlier, groundbreaking book.) There are additional oddities that would not usually enter into the written account: Some archives (Chapter 2) at times claim ownership of and grant permission to use photographs they do not in fact possess; on

other occasions (but sometimes involving the same archives), they claim not to have photographs in their possession that according to their own past publications they do (Chapter 5). In one instance, involving an item I actually received from it and used in a previous publication, the archive now claims not to possess that item. In fact, another archive claims to hold the rights to that item (Chapter 5), but the version it has is obviously different in terms of contrast (and one of the two is mirrored; see Figure 5.17). Other features of this material history are more closely related to political history: For instance, the publishing houses that published some of the Nazi literature studied in this book (Chapters 2 and 3) have changed ownership—but only partially. In the process of changing hands, parts of the publishing houses were dissolved. The legal rights to some of those photographs are now no longer traceable. But there are other issues with the rights to some other photographs from the Nazi context: A photograph by Riefenstahl (or possibly a photographer working on her team) that I wanted to reproduce in chapter 2 could not be acquired because its authorship has been questioned, and until it has been traced, no use of it is permitted; meanwhile, for other—rather obnoxiously racist and antisemitic—photographs (Chapter 3), I still had to pay some publishers substantial fees. And one final example: Scholars who specialize in the study of Solomon Yudovin’s work (Chapter 5) express their doubts about the authorship of a photograph found in the photographer’s files, but only in the very final stages of acquiring the rights for its use. These are instances of a real yet invisible history of photography. This book is based on exchanges of ideas with friends and colleagues—expressed in numerous ways and at every possible level of this book—including Scott Ury, Gur Al-

xii   Preface and Acknowledgments

roey, Dmitry Shumsky, Shaul Katzir, Amir Teicher, Galia Bar-Or, David Myers, Michael Miller, Stefanie Schuler-Springorum, Kelley Wilder, Steffen Siegel, Hagi Kenaan, Vered Lev-Kenaan, Vered Maimon, Snait Gissis, Pawel Macjeko, Meirav Almog, Lior Levi, Hannah Pollin-Galay, Rakefet Zalashik, Uwe Hoßfeld, Guy Miron, Eli Lederhendler, Fernando Vidal, Shai Lavi, Leora Auslander, Dan Diner, Yossi Ziegler, Zur Shalev, Veronika Lipphardt, Yoram Shiftan, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Freddy Rokem, Rachel Suissa, Niv Allon, Alexander Ivanov, Michael Berkowitz, Margit Berner, Yanay Toister, Katharina Konarek, Arie Dubnov, Balazs Berkowitz, Sharon Livne, Shahar Bram, Lukas Meißel, and Guy Raz. I am very grateful for the support of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University. I would like to thank Anat Vatouri and Julija Levin for their extraordinarily helpful assistance in securing the permissions for the photographs reprinted in this book.

I am greatly indebted to the three anonymous reviewers for their critical comments, which required and enabled me to rework, strengthen, and hone the general goals of the book and the cases. I am similarly indebted to Jerome Singerman for the dialogue with him and his significant input in leading the book to publication. I wish to thank Marie Deer for editing my work and greatly sharpening the articulation of my ideas. Finally, it is a special pleasure for me to thank my children, Abigail, Yael, and Saul, for amazing conversations and observations. In my previous book, which focused on photography within science, I quickly realized the gulf that separates the practicing photographer from the scholar of photography. But as I moved deeper, in this book, into the peculiarities of photography as a medium, with its own inherent internal logic and set of considerations and sensitivities, I relied ever more deeply on my wife Orit Siman-Tov’s knowledge, expertise, and eye from within the praxis of photography.

INTRODUCTION To be this radical, the proposed model must be this broad.

I

t is a sign of the immense contemporary technological and social profusion of photographs, their illustrative power, and their accepted evidentiary status that historians nowadays regularly append them to their accounts. Most often, however, these photographs are illustrations, the events and the photographs implicitly conceived as independent of each other, as if the photographs had been taken from some separate, outside perch. Scholars of photography, on the other hand, tend to prioritize photography itself, relegating to an invisible background the fact that it unfolds along the evolving ground of history. In fact, however, photography exists within reality; it partakes in and is a component of the history it documents, so that they necessarily affect each other. In his seminal Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilém Flusser makes the claim that photography is a component of reality, and that its invention radically changed the world.1 Photography created a new form of evidence and a new form of imagination. Photography provides certainty. Yet this certainty always comes with the suspicion of a doubt about its truth. The suspicion is

—Vilém Flusser

that what is seen in the photograph was not in fact there. This doubt is constitutive of photography—that is, the certainty of photography is created through the doubt; the doubt only strengthens photography’s grip.2 Because his abstract, philosophical language runs counter to the common perception of photography as a medium that neither affects the objects nor is a component of the events in which it partakes and that it documents, it is a counterintuitive and elusive task to notice, bring to the surface, and demonstrate his point. The greatest difficulty in adapting Flusser’s ideas to history pertains to the actual contexts of the use of photography; here, a method was required to bridge the gap between philosophical contentions about photography and the study of photography in history. For this purpose, this book develops a method that emphasizes the entwinements of “technology,” “ideology,” and the medium-specific particularities of photography in five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect. The body of this study is made up of an exploration of the changing purposes, uses,

2  Introduction

and forms of photography (photography as technology, photographers as active agents, and assumptions made by audiences about photographs and their perception) in concrete historical cases. With my intention being to expand, rather than reify, our initial understanding of the relationship between photography and Jewish history, the cases that have been chosen are all ones in which the nature of the relationship between photography and Jewish history or the significance of the Jewish aspect is open to debate. Drawn from geographically, culturally, and linguistically distinct contexts, all the cases cross national boundaries, and as each case also spans several decades, there is partial chronological overlap between the chapters; their respective significance for the history of photography transcends their historical particulars, however. And whether they belong to science, art, or politics, all the cases demonstrate the interrelatedness of those spheres; each chapter, following the threads that arise within its particular contexts, explores numerous horizontal and diachronic facets of the history of photography. As the book investigates how photography has been entwined with wider concerns about reality, human nature, and vision, subtly altering major psychological and political categories of twentieth-century Jewish history, the roles photography has played in sensual, cognitive, and political education come to light. In the comparison of seemingly independent cases, a common thread gradually emerges: photography as involved in the fierce twentieth-century struggles over transforming vision. Photography is shown again and again to be closely bound up with deeply conflicting views on photography, on vision, on the real and reality, on nature and human nature, and on Judaism, Jewish nature, identity, and visibility. This is not the history of a gradual, incremental advance in

technology or ideas, then, but the history of fierce political, scientific, and philosophical disagreements, whether overt or covert. The structure of this introduction to Photography and Jewish History is as follows: First, I will outline the two goals of the book and lay out the four central complications we encounter in attempting to apply Flusser’s philosophical claims to history. Second, I will elucidate the notion that photography can be viewed as a “philosophical technology” or “style of reasoning,” which is ultimately a way to drive the notion that photography is a constitutive component of reality whose explosive dissemination since its invention has altered the subjects, objects, and contexts with which it has come into contact. Third, I will address the notion of exploration used in this book; and fourth, I will discuss the decision to write a history through five cases and some of the considerations that governed the selection of cases, also offering a short outline of the chapter subjects. Finally, I will turn to the methodological framework used to address the relations among photography as a technological medium, the ideological contexts of its use, and the objects and subjects to which it is put to use—all of which can, together, bring to light the emergence of a certain class of “photographic objects.” The demonstration of this class of photographic objects serves as a decisive demonstration of the constitutive role of photography in twentieth-century history.

FLUSSER’S TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE TWO GOALS OF THE PRESENT BOOK Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography is the first rigorous attempt

Introduction  3

to think about photography as a historical “event.” Flusser states in the very first paragraph of his book that the invention of photography is equivalent to the invention of writing. Writing brought about linear thinking and history; photography, or the technical image, marks the advent of post-history, a dramatic, transformative, and consequential event. In a basic sense Flusser redirects the discussion in a performative direction because its core question is “What has photography done to history?” The present book, Photography and Jewish History, has two principal objectives. The first is to adapt the idea formulated by Flusser, that photography changed the world, to the study of history. The second objective is to explore twentieth-century Jewish history from this theoretical perspective, through cases that involve political contexts and historical and experiential categories. The questions with which I approach the cases differ from those posed in previous studies of photography and Jewish history. Although Photography and Jewish History touches on photographs of Jews or Jewish photographers, it is not a history of photographs of Jews or of Jewish photographers. Rather, the questions this study seeks to introduce are: What is photography doing in the respective context of each case? How has photography been entwined into political subjects, contexts, and categories of experience? And how has photography changed the ways we perceive, imagine, experience, remember, or think about them? In studying the cases through these questions, I have attempted to concretize and historicize Flusser’s ideas about photography. Approaching the cases with these questions in mind entails a Gestalt shift for the study of photography and Jewish history. The aim of these two main objectives, taken jointly, is to reorient and significantly broaden future scholarship on photography and Jewish history.

FOUR COMPLICATIONS Several of the more theoretically oriented scholars working on photography today work from Flusser’s premises, and from our contemporary moment in time his framework of thought seems to me to offer the most vigorous and interesting points of entry into the study of photography in history. Yet Flusser does not frame this volume from the outside; rather, he belongs to the historical context of photography and Jewish history in the twentieth century. He was born in 1920, in Prague, to a German- and Czech-speaking Jewish family. In 1939, when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, he fled with his girlfriend and later wife, Edith, and her parents to England and shortly after that to Brazil. His parents and sister, who remained behind, were killed in the Holocaust. Although he was able to create a family in Brazil, for most of the 1940s, as a refugee in a foreign country dealing with a foreign language and culture, and haunted by the murders of his family and friends, he was suicidal. Working during the day and reading philosophy at night, he gradually integrated into the intellectual environment of Brazil. It was not until the 1970s—and in fact only after he and his wife had immigrated back to Europe (following the coup in Brazil), establishing themselves in Robion, France—however, that he turned to writing on photography. Flusser was not only transnational, but multilingual: He wrote in German, Portuguese, English, and French, and translating his work was one of the instruments he used to develop his ideas. His writings have a visionary, prophetic quality, more future- than past-oriented. They mix a haunting sense of determinism and ambivalence with the vision of a dystopian future. This nexus of his background, biography, and writings in-

4  Introduction

troduces complications that I would like to set aside here. (These complications include awkward and unfounded statements in his writings on Judaism.3) Flusser called his autobiography bodenlos (groundless) and understood himself as a nomadic intellectual; his originality and idiosyncrasy cannot be fully separated from his relative academic marginality. His traumatic biography is potentially significant for his mode of writing and his philosophical outlook, although just as with the other persons discussed in the book, that remains a necessarily interpretive question. If Flusser brings home the quintessential significance of the discussion of photography to its evolving history, he does so in a highly unusual form. Towards a Philosophy of Photography is very short and compact. It does not seem to be guided by any given methodology or disciplinary framework, nor is its intellectual tradition (including, because he cites no predecessors, Flusser’s acquaintance with and response to Walter Benjamin’s short essays on photography) easily recognizable; it is, rather, based on pure intuition, containing threads of thought that go in several directions. The book resists summary; the number of its interpretations is probably the same as that of its readings; it poses questions to the reader about how to read it; and although it makes claims about history, it certainly does not make it easy to actually test them in practice. What it does do, however, is to suggest a way to think about the dynamic, circular interchanges among image, picture, text, and technical image (photograph). This idea is provided in the dense opening lines of the book: Images are significant surfaces. Images signify—mainly—something “out there” in space and time that they have to make comprehensible to us as abstractions

(as reductions of the four dimensions of space and time to the two surface dimensions). (8)

What is a photographic image? Flusser suggests it is the matching, by an observer, of an abstracted image on a surface (a photograph) with something that is usually drawn from the four-dimensional world (“mainly—something ‘out there’ in space and time”). A photograph can provide a viewer with an image of a tree, a political event, or an ambivalent smile. Why is photography an event? Photography is an event, Flusser posits, because with it there came to be a new form of imagination—that is, a new way by which humans match an image with the world. If, since Aristotle, imagination has been recognized as the power with which an image appears in perception, then what Flusser describes is a dramatic “event,” because photography marks a new phase in the way humans produce, store, and retrieve images, thereby changing human judgment, thinking, and action. Photography freezes the four-dimensional world into an abstracted, two-dimensional image. The physical/chemical/computational dimension of the production of a photograph is fully materially explainable; the matching of an image to the world is fundamentally not. But Flusser is interested not in the (“comprehensible”) content of the images— the tree, the political event, the smile—but rather in the consequence of the freezing. The core of this current volume is the attempt to apply Flusser’s general, and highly abstract, idea to history. To adapt Flusser to history, I emphasize the historicity of the concept of “comprehensibility” in the quotation from Flusser as historical and evolving across time and place. Thus I demonstrate through five cases that what is “out there,” the images abstracted from that “out there,”

Introduction  5

and the matching process between the two evolve over time. While in each case I attempt to delve into the particulars of the matching process from within the context of the case, I am at the same time particularly interested in the evolution of what I will call “photographic objects,” that is, the class of photographic objects that depends on the matching process itself. In the broadest sense, according to Flusser, every photograph is a photographic object, because every photograph is based on the matching process that takes place within the individual viewer of the photograph. But in this book I argue that the history of this class shows an evolution toward increasing dependency on photography itself. In this introductory chapter, I come back to this complicated idea from several angles, and using different vocabulary, in my attempt to explain it; in each of the cases detailed in this book I study and demonstrate the process; I collect many of the threads in Chapter 4; and in the concluding chapter, I return to Flusser at greater length to assess his ideas based on the findings of the chapters. But in my attempt to develop a method to connect Flusser’s theory with history, four partially interconnected issues arise that are so pressing that they require discussion at the outset: First, the tension between the performative perspective introduced by his book and the actual focus on images; second, subjectivity, or the contrast between “decoding” and “interpretation”; third, the status of the world or the “out there”; and fourth, the question of literacy.

Performativity and the Image While Flusser suggests the performative dimension of photography, his actual account concentrates almost exclusively on the di-

mension of the photographic image, on what is shown in the image, thereby dramatically restricting the performative perspective.4 Although Flusser states that “photography is the result of something new (a look at the world and simultaneously a change in the world”5)the photographer affects the situation and is affected by it6 —in the performative context, Flusser advances one key development with regard to photography in history: When it was invented, photography was capable of capturing events and situations, representing them, and transmitting them across time and space, but over the course of time the vector was reversed, and now events and situations take place in order to be photographed (62). While critically important, this is nonetheless only one way photography intervened in the tissue of social reality; the performative perspective reveals many other features of photography whose relationship to the “content” of the photographic image is more complex. For instance, in Chapter 3 of this current volume, photography is interwoven into the scientific discussion of the image of the Jews as an extinct race in the context of the eradication of the Jews that was underway in Europe in the early 1940s, although the photographs in that instance do not show the actual, physical eradication. The complexity that must be noted here is this: How can we expand our understanding of photography’s performative orientation without losing sight of the fact that the broader performative dimension is tied to the visual nature of the medium but in more complex ways than Flusser’s examples suggest? This is further complicated by the fact that, in moving from Flusser’s abstract discussion to actual historical cases, we immediately see that photography’s presence involves various levels of performativity and representation simultaneously, rang-

6  Introduction

ing from the general and the abstract all the way to the specific and concrete aspects of each case.

Subjectivity Flusser’s conceptualization draws its principal concepts from physics, computer science, cybernetics and communication, and the philosophy of science and technology. While this is one of the sources of his clarity and originality, when we turn to history, one of his key notions instantly raises a difficulty. Flusser speaks throughout about the “decoding” of photographs, and although he speaks about the potential infinite regression of decoding, decoding implies a “code,” which is, in principle, decodable.7 Once the code is broken, the coded message can be understood in a one-to-one correspondence between code and message. (Contrast “decode” with “interpret,” “message” with “meaning,” or “data” with “knowledge.”) Decoding, coding, data, information, communication: Flusser’s terminology assumes, and implicitly strives to convey, unequivocal signification, which, as anyone who has engaged in the attempt to study even one single photograph knows, cannot be ascribed to photographs. As a historian I face kinds and degrees of subjectivity that Flusser did not discuss or even acknowledge. In fact, when one works from historical cases, questions pertaining to subjectivity are particularly interesting. One thread in this book pertains to the effect of photography on perception: In several places, including this Introduction and the chapters that follow, I attempt to understand the subjectivity of perception within the process of the stabilization of perception.8 However, even elementary aspects of photographs (for instance, whether a particular uniformed man

is young or middle-aged) are disputable (Chapter 3). But the subjectivity of perception also involves contextualized knowledge. The question of whether a photograph accentuates or undermines the Jewishness of blacksmiths (Chapter 5), or whether the children in a photograph are terrified or at ease (Chapters 3 and 5), are not simple issues of visual perception. In addition, there is a psychological dimension to the subjective interpretation of photographs (Chapters 1 and 5). The tension in Flusser with regard to subjectivity can be pinpointed within two contradictory lines of thought in his book: One of these thinks about the event of photography in historical and metahistorical terms (i.e., intersecting photography and history), while the other thinks about photography as a sealed universe (a “perfect information game”), finite, complete, and with internal logic and rules. Although when the theory is applied to history these two lines of thought pull in different directions, both prioritize technology and express a possible form of technological determinism. There are two senses in which Flusser contributes to this discussion, however. First, he suggests that “doubt” is peculiar to, constituted by, and shaped by the medium of photography (38). Thus some features of photography and of Jewish history, including some features of my own subjective sensitivities as a male Jewish Israeli historian, are shaped by the medium (photography) whose history I am studying. Second, in the absence of a theory of the interpretation of subjectivity as related to photography, my judgments are based on intuition, and they therefore cannot, and are not intended to, survive statistical examination (although my criticism of subjectivity may perhaps contribute, along the way, to some future theory of the subject).9 There is also a sense (on which I elaborate in

Introduction  7

the concluding chapter) in which this study rejoins and nuances Flusser’s technological determinism by showing its flip side, often overlooked: I show that flip side in demonstrating that the ideas, values, and institutions with which photography is entwined shape its evolving (technological) history.

The World/“Out There” The third complication touches on the status of the “out there,” which I address with some hesitation because it takes us deep into interpretative aspects of Flusser’s book. As we saw in the lines of his that I quoted earlier, Flusser posits the “out there” as integral to the abstraction of the four dimensions of space and time to two-dimensional images. In my reading this fits well with his view of photography as a historical event. It also fits well with the will to test it in historical actuality because it suggests that its intervention or interference in the world takes place by way of creating images of the world that are then interwoven into the world. One could say, therefore, that Flusser posits a triangle comprised of the “apparatus,” or camera; the photographer, or “functionary”; and the four-dimensional world (three dimensions plus time), “out there” in Flusser’s terminology. Flusser ties the reason that photographs are difficult to decode to the “out there”: Technical images are difficult to decode, for a strange reason. To all appearances, they do not have to be decoded since their significance is automatically ref lected on their surface—just like fingerprints, where the significance (the finger) is the cause and the image (the copy) is the consequence. The world apparently signified in the case of technical images appears to

be their cause and they themselves are a final link in a causal chain that connects them without interruption to their significance. . . . i.e., they appear to be on the same level of reality as their significance. What one sees on them therefore do not appear to be symbols that one has to decode but symptoms of the world through which, even if indirectly, it is to be perceived. This apparently non-symbolic, objective character of technical images leads whoever looks at them to see them not as images but as windows. Observers thus do not believe them as they do their own eyes. Consequently they do not criticize them as images, but as ways of looking at the world (to the extent that they criticize them at all). Their criticism is not an analysis of their production but an analysis of the world. (14–15)

These lines are critical for my endeavor, not only because they acknowledge the “out there” that goes into the photographs but also because they acknowledge the realism with which people handle photographs, the fact they do not distinguish between the photograph and the “out there” that it shows. I will elaborate on this later on in this chapter from a sociological point of view. But if the few examples that Flusser mentions in passing, for instance the Lebanese war, imply an “out there,” Flusser is nevertheless much more interested, throughout the book, at least in my reading, in the relationship between the photographer and the camera; the “out there” recedes to the background of the discussion, to the extent that it is there for Flusser at all. This is related, in part, to another thread in his argument, namely the idea of the freedom or creativity of the photographer as expressed in her manipulation of the camera against the camera.

8  Introduction

In this context Flusser notes that photographers wish to produce states of things that have never existed before, “not out there in the world, since for them the world is only a pretext for the states of things that are to be produced,” as “it is not the world out there that is real, nor is the concept within the camera’s program—only the photograph is real” (37). Some scholars and artists working with Flusser in the context of art and digital photography emphasize this aspect of the book, because digital photography expresses this point even more strongly than does photochemical photography. As I am interested here in photography in history, what I find more compelling is Flusser’s recognition of the “out there” and the realism of its social handling in actuality; indeed, a grounded study must acknowledge to an even greater degree than did Flusser the intentions, interests, desires, wishes, and prejudices that go into the photographic process in the first place. The intricacies of photographic intentionality are tackled directly in Chapter 2 of this book, but in a general sense, thinking dialectically with Flusser, the “out there” of photography and photography itself shape each other reciprocally, and as we move from Flusser’s abstract and general discussion to one that is grounded in concrete historical contexts, we will study numerous intermediary registers of linkages between the two.

Literacy Talking about amateur photographers‚ which is “almost everyone today”—Flusser calls them illiterate (57). What he means by this is that they are programmed by the apparatus, and, naïvely incapable of decoding the abstracted images, they take them

as “states of things that have been reflected onto surfaces” (41). Flusser’s position is elitist in the sense that it distinguishes the few who are capable of decoding photographs from the masses who are incapable of doing so. His statements seem to be based on a form of metahistorical position, meaning that photography is very new, historically speaking, and that, from the sophisticated point of view of future generations, we will be considered illiterate. But the word “illiterate” is at best imprecise; we might do better to talk about “degrees of literacy,” instead, because as we see in Flusser’s explicit comparisons of photography and writing, his stance is equivalent to declaring literate people to be illiterate. Flusser brings a rather narrow perspective to the analysis of literacy in this respect, and when we test his ideas in concrete historical settings, it instantly becomes clear with what incredible creativity and sophistication the photography and photographs are handled that Flusser nonetheless judges to be illiterate. In the conclusion to this book, I return to the relationship between photography and democracy in the twentieth century, but my perspective will differ from Flusser’s because I consider his to be narrow and elitist; mine is more pragmatically oriented, based on the sophistication shown in the handling of photography in actuality. And elsewhere, in fact, Flusser himself also seems to be closer to my own position when he states that because “there are no instances of ‘naïve human beings’ (a contradiction in itself), it follows that there can be no ‘naïve photography.’”10 Yet above and beyond these complications and qualifications, Flusser articulated, almost in passing, one of the most essential features of the medium of photography: its incredibly irresistible power, the self-evident and often-overlooked fact that in a very basic sense “nothing can resist the force of this

Introduction  9

current of technical images” (20) and everything washes into it. To carry Flusser’s philosophical contentions over to history, this study draws on the work of the Canadian philosopher of science Ian Hacking and the sociologist Luc Boltanski, who did not study photography but whose work on parallel or related contexts enables this volume’s study of the intermediate, subjective, and constitutive registers of interconnections between history and photography.

PHOTOGRAPHY AS A STYLE OF REASONING Flusser’s concentration on photography as technology depoliticizes its history. To adapt Flusser to the study of history requires a framework that is capable of noticing the existence of the political dimension in the first place. To do so I draw on two partially overlapping analytical frameworks. To elucidate what I mean in speaking about photography as a constitutive component of history, one that alters the subjects, objects, and contexts with which it is interlaced, I use Hacking’s notion of style. To clarify how photography is taken on in actual social life, I then turn to Louis Dumont’s and Boltanski’s similar sociological concepts of ideology. Hacking elucidates his notion of style in his book Historical Ontology. Style is not merely epistemological, relating to how given or known entities and things can be known, but ontological. Style—in this case photography—is a component of reality and establishes new kinds of things, objects, or entities, as well as changing how we think about them. One of the threads that run through the cases studied in this book, a thread to which I return later in this Introduction, pertains to the ontological quality of photography. The “world” is everything

that happens, even everything that might possibly happen (though this “everything” cannot be fully known, mastered, or represented). “Reality” is far more partial, pertaining to entities, things, or objects that can be stabilized, sustained, and represented.11 Photography does not mediate between the world and reality but is, rather, a component of reality, though a component that is, commonly, socially conceived as simultaneously documenting reality; in addition, I contend that since its inception, photography has continually and dynamically altered the relations between the world and reality. Hacking’s notion of style is thus particularly apt as a framework for the study of the relations between photography and history; the chapters assembled here demonstrate in particular how, through the interplay between technology and ideology, a certain class of objects, which I characterize as “photographic objects,” can be identified, brought to light, established, and solidified. This particular kind of structure, built on the association of historically disparate cases, persons, and events brought together through a medium—in this case photography—was inspired by a book published by Hacking in 1980 on the history of statistics.12 In this book Hacking brings together several disparate cases, drawn from different national and linguistic contexts, that concern what he views as a series of independent and accidental events, around 1850, that together indicated a sea change in styles and habits of thought and in which statistics gained its meaning as probability, or patterns of likelihood. Hacking’s book points to a discontinuity in statistical reasoning; here, what I attempt to demonstrate is a subtle alteration and redefinition in the major categories of twentieth-century Jewish history and experience, brought about by photography. There is a structural similarity between Hacking’s

10  Introduction

claim about statistics and Flusser’s about photography. But an important difference is that Hacking tried to demonstrate a moment of change, whereas Flusser left open the question of the exact moment when the change happened: with photography’s inception? at the time of his writing? in the future? Hacking’s definition of style13 is rather idiosyncratic (and his use of “philosophical technology” as equivalent to style is not very helpful in making it clearer). It is intended to address styles of scientific thought or reasoning (though he also uses examples from the history of art), but photography matches the features of his conception of style very well: Style belongs to the realm of ontology; it is a component of reality, one that forms, holds relationships with, and reciprocally shapes other (ontological) components of reality. Style can be identified, first, by the way in which it becomes autonomous, becoming a “standard or model of what it is to be reasonable about this or that type of subject matter . . . they become reasonable in this or that domain.”14 “We should not envisage first a style and then the novelties”; rather, “style comes into being with the instances.”15 The characteristics of new styles can easily be applied to photography: New styles introduce novelties that include objects, evidence, new ways of being a candidate for laws of truth or falsehood, and possibilities.16 And the addition of photographs to passports, for instance, introduced new objects, redefined the passport as evidence, altered the category of identification, and reshaped the notion of the authentication of identity. (And all of this was tied to and also generated diverse concrete forms of activity and social outcomes.) If each new style introduces with it a dynamic and internal logic, then the scholarship on the entry of photography into science and law unquestionably shows that

photography established novel types of entities “not previously noticeable among things that exist.”17 Furthermore, styles introduce novelties “in an open-textured, ongoing, and creative way.”18 Styles “are in a certain sense self-authenticating,” and with the new objects that they introduce, they introduce an ontological debate as well.19 Whether in court, medicine, science, or any other sphere of life, photography has introduced questions as to what is real and has shaped how we conceive what can be authenticated as real, valid, or true (both in professional spheres of activity and in our general experience) and, consequently, the real itself. Reality is thoroughly entwined with, shapes, and is shaped by photography and its discussion. One of the major difficulties with conceiving of photography according to Hacking’s notion of style (and he had the same difficulty with his study of statistics) has to do with the pervasiveness of photography: It permeates every aspect of life and its presence is socially self-evident, to the extent that it is virtually impossible to appreciate the endless ways it also affects the other components of reality with which it interacts. Here is a random example: For generations now, in sociopsychological experiments, subjects have been shown photographs of, say, a black woman as part of a study of the perception of racial difference. But the psychologists’ blind spot goes far beyond the simple fact that showing a photograph of a black woman is not the same as presenting that same black woman in person. In fact, photography as a technology is a necessary condition for this class of experiments as a whole. Especially when what is being discussed (like the psychologists’ study of perception) has an end or goal that has nothing to do with photography, the way photography conditions and shapes the very terms of what is being discussed remains

Introduction  11

hidden. Each of the following chapters, therefore, demonstrates how photography has subtly altered the terms of experience and discussion of some part of modern Jewish history, including the memory of the past, Jewish identity, the image of Jews, and how actual Jews are perceived in reality.

EXPLORATION The claim that photography is a constitutive component of reality is tightly related to the performative framework of this book in terms of “exploration.”20 The gist of my orientation is that I will treat the persons I deal with as active actors who are engaged, within historical, social, or ideological situations and contexts, in an exploration in which photography and Jewish history intersect in one way or another. Exploration and inquiry are conceived here in the terms of John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry,21 that is, an understanding of humans as living in an ongoing process of activity. Inquiry constantly involves learning and exploration—activity carried out in close and reciprocal relationship with environments of people and things and objects in which people learn through feedback that they receive from their environments while at the same time also affecting those environments. Photography will be treated as offering opportunities to social actors to creatively question and criticize values, beliefs, and ideas or institutions, subjects, and objects. This is a circular process, as the opportunities are themselves shaped by photography. Whether photography is entwined with Jewish folklore (S. An-sky), a philanthropic program to advance world peace (Albert Kahn), an artistic exploration to control the image (Helmar Lerski), the science of race (Eugen Fischer), or the critique of society

and commercial photography by a photographer (Robert Frank), something is explored with the use of photography, the exploration intersects with Jewish history, and, it will be shown, photography shapes the form and the process of the exploration and its results. It could be a Jewish photographer exploring a Jewish subject (as with An-sky and Solomon Yudovin in Chapter 5 and Lerski in chapter 2), a non-Jewish scientist exploring a Jewish subject (Fischer in Chapter 3), or a non-Jewish photographer exploring a Jewish subject (Lee Miller in Chapter 4); a Jewish photographer or philanthropist exploring a non-Jewish subject (Kahn in Chapter 1, Lerski in Chapter 2, and Frank in Chapter 4), or a non-Jewish person exploring a non-Jewish subject (Fischer in Chapter 3). The main difference between an exploration or inquiry, as I use the terms here, and a scientific experiment concerns the much stronger protocol the latter involves. Exploration is more open and looser than the protocol of a scientific experiment, which is set in advance, strict, and highly controlled. In an exploration the means, ends, and ways are only partially known in advance—sometimes an exploration leads in unanticipated directions, and sometimes a search for one thing leads to something else—and if this is true for exploration in photography, it applies to the exploration of what is Jewish, who is a Jew, or what is Judaism as well. Ansky and Yudovin explored the uses of photography for the documentation of Jewish life at what they saw as the threshold of its modernization; Lerski explored photography with regard to the relationship between identity and visibility; Fischer explored photography between the biological and the visual; Kahn explored photography for political, sensual, and intellectual education; and Frank explored vision at the juncture of the documentation of reality and expressive art.

12  Introduction

Of course these explorations did not begin from scratch but involved existing photographic forms and conventions; at the same time their respective inquiries also introduced significant alterations. Whether the individuals mentioned earlier, those directing the explorations, conceived of themselves as scientists, folklorists, philanthropists, or artists, these changes bore on photography as substantiation, support, or evidence in their arenas or sites of inquiry. The cases converge at this point, with the actors’ (explicit or silent) acknowledgment that what they wanted to show could be shown with photography. Hence, irrespective of the object of their inquiries, they placed photography between what they wanted to show and the audience to which they wanted to show or convey it, thereby modifying both how it is seen and the answer to the question of what it is to look at, observe, or see whatever they wanted to show. In researching and writing this book, I too am engaged in an exploration, and my exploration pertains to the relationship between photography and Jewish history. My mode of exploration could be likened to what surgeons call “exploratory surgery,” that is, surgery performed for diagnostic purposes, which is therefore an open-ended exploration. A certain tension, however, characterizes my open-ended mode of exploration, a tension the philosopher Georg Simmel describes beautifully in the opening of his 1900 Philosophy of Money. Simmel writes that “every area of research has two boundaries marking the point at which the process of reflection ceases to be exact and takes on a philosophical character.” The reason for the tension built into inquiry is that individual sciences, such as history, “do not take any step without proof, that is, without pre-conditions of a substantive and methodological nature,” whereas test-

ing the “pre-conditions for cognition in general . . . call[s] for a science of a more fundamental nature. The goal of this science, which is located in infinity, is to think without pre-conditions,”22 which marks the infinitely receding goal of thinking.

A JEWISH HISTORY THROUGH CASES What does it mean to write a history through cases, and what, in fact, is a “case”? Put negatively, writing history through cases means not writing a narrative or synthetic history. The study of cases is not intended to offer a comprehensive historical account; the kind of territory that a study of cases seeks to cover and the kind of account that it can be expected to yield are partial rather than exhaustive. The aim of Photography and Jewish History is to open up, generate, and shape future discussion. By focusing on cases this study intends not to cover any particular ground but to allow threads, themes, and motifs to appear, disappear, and reappear across subjects and contexts and, consequently, to allow certain recurring tendencies to become visible. I am intrigued by peripheral elements of photography or Jewish history or both, and I seek to complicate, rather than simplify, how we think about photography and Jewish history. Both the selection of cases in this book and the new questions with which I approach those cases are explicitly intended as a radical critique of Jewish Studies. What is a “case”? A case is an instance of a particular situation or an occurrence relating to a person or thing in specific circumstances. A case intersects the private and the public, kinds of power and forms of knowledge, photography and other media.23 The logic of the case, which partially overlaps

Introduction  13

with Hacking’s “style of reasoning,” brings to light some of the more tenuous, unpredictable, delicate, and peculiar features of photography in history. As a case unfolds over time, history is revealed as a process of becoming and stabilization, fragmentation and fading, solidification and restabilization in which photography plays varied roles. Entering history through cases quickly reveals that, to analyze them, one has to reject historical necessity but also acknowledge that history is not random, because the circumstances of the case involve the structures of power and knowledge that shape it: Cases involve various degrees and kinds of contingency, bounded by the larger and longer history of which they are only a part.24 Indeed, by directing attention to more delicate, unstable, open-ended features of history, the logic of the case provides nonreductive access to the interplay between photography and several major political categories in twentieth-century Jewish history and experience. Each case directly involves at least one such major category: the Holocaust and memory (Chapter 5); nationalism and Zionism (Chapter 2, Chapter 5); assimilation (Chapters 1 and 5); racism and antisemitism (Chapter 3); and postassimilation (Chapter 4). And yet, while each of the cases explores how photography subtly redefines a particular subject or category in Jewish history, cases are not tokens, and as the reader will see, their peculiarities force to light unintuitive and less-expected facets of the history of photography, such as photography as a two-sided educational instrument, showing diversity but driving similarity (Chapter 1); photography’s role in the attempt to separate the identity of the “new Jew” in Palestine from his visual features (Chapter 2); or photography as a way to establish an image of a race in the process of extinction without showing the process of extinction itself

(Chapter 3). All the cases involve a complex relationship not only between photography and visuality but also between photography and the image of Jews—an image that precedes the photographs, is interwoven into their production, affects them, and, in a circular social dynamic, in turn affects the image that preceded them. As already noted in the acknowledgments, I did not set out to find cases to represent our contemporary twenty-first-century values but, instead, sought cases that relate to diverse aspects of photography and Jewish history within the languages I can read and which are connected to the partiality of my interests. Important kinds of photography, such as photojournalism and sports, fashion, advertising, or vernacular photography, are missing from this book. Nor did I cross over from still photography to film, even in the cases of Lerski and Frank, each of whom also engaged in filmmaking. What holds these cases together is the shared register of the analysis applied to them here. On being asked once how he had become a psychologist, the renowned psychologist Amos Tversky replied that the big decisions people take in life, like choosing a profession or a spouse, involve a great deal of chance. A person could choose a subject of study based on an encounter with a high school teacher, and a spouse based on the accidental circumstances that led to meeting that person, for example. Our smaller decisions, he added, reveal much more about us, because these are very systematic.25 To draw a parallel with the production of this book, the selection of cases here is akin to the big decisions in life and their treatment to the smaller ones. My selection of cases contributes to the expansion, rather than the contraction and reification, of what we intuitively consider to be, based on the very initial state of research in this field, the connections between pho-

14  Introduction

tography and Jewish history. For this reason I have avoided subjects that are instantly and intuitively familiar, such as nineteenth-century photography of the Holy Land; the Zionist iconography of the new Jew; iconographically recognizable photographs of the Holocaust; or the entrenched visual coding of Israeli soldiers inflicting violence on Palestinian civilians during the First Intifada in 1987.26 I have consciously sought transnational cases that challenge the existence of clear lines separating Jewish from non-Jewish history, and this, as a consequence, raises several questions with regard to the status of Jewish history. It is important for the general context of this book that in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Central Europe more generally, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jews were prominent in photography, especially commercial photography, where many studios were run by Jews. This is not because of any natural disposition of Jews toward photography or toward technology in general but because as minority members in their respective societies, they had better chances to enter such newly emerging market niches than they did in longer-established professions where the social division of labor had already hardened to exclude them. This book, then, is not a history of Jews in photography27 nor a history of the photographic representation of Jews, but rather the study of several cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect, an investigation held together by the exploration of the ways photography is interwoven with twentieth-century Jewish history and experience. My own insistence on thoroughly entwined historical cases situates this current study in the dialectics of modern Jewish historiography from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. The prevailing insistence on treating Jewish history as in-

dependent of and separate from general history (in Israel, for example, departments of Jewish history are still separate from those of general history) originated at the end of the nineteenth century as a response to voices in Europe that rejected the idea that there was such a thing as independent Jewish history (as opposed to, say, French or German history, in which case these voices made no similar objection) or a Jewish nation. The fact that such objections are difficult to comprehend today indicates deep changes, over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, in the values held by historians (even though, as is often the case in history, vestiges of the earlier views can still be found). Today it is possible to reject the separation from the other end and insist that, even though there is thorough intertwinement, this is a Jewish history; in the same vein it is likewise possible to insist that doing Jewish history is also a form of doing “general” history. This brings us to a more specific question pertaining to the historical range covered by the cases brought together here, a question that came up when I presented an early version of the outline of this book at Tel Aviv University. Shaul Katzir asked me after the talk, “Could you say the same things about the history of photography, but replace the cases with ones that have nothing to do with anything Jewish?” The short answer is: Not easily. In terms of subjects, objects, and forms of experience, issues pertaining to Jewish history are far more heavily represented, one could even say clustered, in certain areas of the photography-history overlap, while being virtually absent from others. Jews have been far more strongly present on the liberal, humanist, and democratic side of photography and almost completely absent from the other end of the range; at the same time and for closely con-

Introduction  15

nected reasons, as objects of photography they were prominently represented by their political opponents. I cannot think of even one case of a Jewish scientist or art photographer who drove an explicit and sustained racist outlook using photography, of the kind that is treated in the chapter on photography in the ideology of racial inequality (Chapter 3). At the same time it is not accidental that two of the chapters, those on photography and utopia (Chapter 1) and on the question of photographic intention (Chapter 2), which involve a humanist and antiracist agenda that has nothing particularly Jewish about it, objectively speaking, do involve a Jewish context. Jewish history is constitutive for the history of photography more generally. Locating cases that covered the same range but involved nothing Jewish, then, if it were even possible, would require considerable effort. The book opens with a future-oriented chapter: Chapter 1 studies the relationship between photography and utopia around 1900, through the case of Albert Kahn. Kahn, a French Jewish banker, dedicated his wealth to establishing the early twentieth-century world’s largest archive of color photographs, one of a set of interconnected projects of his. Why and how did Kahn conclude that the large-scale production and circulation of color photographs would benefit humanity? How was this archive related to his other utopian initiatives? How was the archive structured, and how were photographers guided to advance the archive’s goals? To what extent did the archive achieve its goals? The chapter contextualizes Kahn’s photographic archive within the economy of his projects, compares his utopian aims with those of other contemporary utopian projects (such as Herzl’s Zionism), and shows that the archive’s broader aim was to use photography to demonstrate fundamen-

tal human similarities throughout the world in order to promote world peace or, more precisely, to use photographs to educate the eye of observers to see and appreciate fundamental human similarities. The conceptual question this chapter addresses pertains to photography’s potential to serve the sensual and intellectual purposes of education. I pay special attention here to the role of the geographer Jean Brunhes, the scientific director of the archive, in achieving these goals. Kahn’s use of photography prefigured developments in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Edward Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibition and the production and dissemination of photographic images through the internet and social media. But if this aspect of his utopian aims can be said to have been largely achieved, the even more important point is that the very goal of the intellectual and sensual education of vision in the twentieth century cannot be imagined without the medium of photography. Chapter 2 studies a “failed” photographic project by the Swiss-German American Jewish photographer Helmar Lerski, the most eminent photographer in British Mandate Palestine. Lerski, a socialist, humanist Zionist, planned a project focusing on “Jewish and Arab types” in which he intended to execute his philosophy of photography as the site of the photographer who is the sovereign manipulator of light and the sole creator of the photographic image. Lerski’s exploration and experimentation with regard to identity and his attempt to separate identity from visual expression are inconceivable without the medium of photography. The failure of this particular project was not only pragmatic (because the publisher declined to publish it); it also reveals something fundamental about the documentary nature of photography and the limitations and boundaries built into attempts to employ it

16  Introduction

for political education, as well as the critical role of the public in that complex. In Chapter 3 I discuss the role of photography in the career of Lerski’s contemporary, the (non-Jewish) German anthropologist and geneticist Eugen Fischer. Fischer was a founder of the modern study of human heredity and later an avowed supporter of National Socialism. The chapter analyzes his uses of photography throughout his career, from his 1913 study of racial mixing in Africa through scientific and more general publications in the 1920s and 1930s. Paying particular attention to Fischer’s 1943 book Das Antike Weltjudentum (co-authored with Gerhard Kittel), and to one photograph in particular, I look at how he developed uses of photography to show what he saw as natural biological and racial inequality. This chapter addresses the question of photography and imagination: Fischer’s co-authored book, written at the height of German military success and published when the majority of European Jewry had already been murdered, employs photographs largely connected to questions of imagination, a departure from his earlier methods. I argue here that his study of ancient Jewry is, in fact, a photographic album of an extinct race. This discussion relies on the claim that photography shapes not only our understanding of how Jews look and can be identified but how they can be imagined and remembered after their extinction. If this were a straightforwardly progressive history of photography, the book would culminate with Chapter 4, on Robert Frank’s 1959 volume The Americans. Not only was Frank the last of the photographers represented here, in chronological terms, but he rebelled against the use of photography for attempts to educate the eye in the ways encountered in chapters 1 and 3. Breaking numerous conventions, Frank was the first

photographer to employ photography not for some other (political, scientific, philosophical . . .) goal but as the end itself. In this sense Frank was the first “Flusserian” photographer, who, thinking in photographic terms, explored the photographic apparatus by working with the camera against the camera and, in the process, employed a variety of strategies to establish “photographic objects.” Frank was a Swiss-born American Jewish photographer; The Americans is considered the single most influential photographic album published in the second half of the twentieth century, redefining major branches of photography. (Unlike the subjects of the other chapters, Frank has already been studied intensively, and I benefit from the existing scholarship.) In certain respects this is the most complex chapter in the book, seeking to demonstrate how numerous threads running through the other chapters coalesce in Frank’s work and in the remarkable history of its reception, and how Frank addressed and reshaped these threads. His work transformed documentary photography, art photography, and journalistic photography: My analysis of his photographs shows how he developed and merged photography’s uses as, simultaneously, an objective means of representing reality (i.e., as an instrument of deidealization and of social and political criticism) and a means of artistic and subjective expression, a way to create and establish photographic objects ex nihilo (objects that through composition exist in the photograph but did not exist in reality). I show how Frank consciously advanced the use of photography to establish photographic objects by studying and establishing a particular range of ambiguous and ambivalent expressions (the opposite of something like emoticons), and that, furthermore, because of the book’s immense impact on a wide audience of photographers and others, these

Introduction  17

photographic objects would now be projected backward onto earlier photographs and realities. Frank’s use of the camera to prove that vision is individual as opposed to universal, and essentially expressive and open to interpretation rather than scientifically controllable or determinable, culminates, from the perspective of this study, the trajectory of photography as a component of twentieth-century reality, deeply entwined within categories that shape and define twentieth-century history and experience. Of the five cases studied in the book, that of S. An-sky/Solomon Yudovin (Chapter 5) is the earliest chronologically or roughly coterminous with Chapter 1, but it is also the only one from which an additional subset of subtle, complex, subjective, and stubborn questions emerges pertaining to the peculiar ability of photography to associatively express twentieth-century Jewish historical rupture and tragedy. If the book begins with Kahn’s forward-looking, progressive, utopian outlook on photography and history around 1900, it ends with a much more personal, subjective, reflective, ambivalent, and backward-looking account of photography’s ability to fold time, complex temporalities, and historicity with regard to the time it documents and the time it is seen. Before becoming a prominent Jewish artist in Soviet Russia, Yudovin was the photographer for S. An-sky’s 1912–14 expedition to document Russian Jewry. The chapter follows two sets of questions, one historical and one subtler and more personal. The first set of questions, from within the historical context of the case, addresses: How did photography come to be included in the expeditions’ techniques in the first place? What were its intended purposes? And how did photography interact with the ideological concerns that undergirded the expedition, such as the documentation of the “vanish-

ing world” of the Pale of Settlement and its renewal? Simultaneously, the second set of questions follows a thread that pertains to a subtler feature of history that is more personal and closer to the evolution of my thinking about photography in the course of twentieth-century Jewish history: I seek to show that the idea of a “return” to the people, or masses—Yudovin’s idea of studying a “vanishing world” to which he both did and did not belong and with which he both did and did not identify—is expressed in a dialectic of distance found in some of his photographs. The transformation in their meaning, between the time and place in which they were taken and the time and place in which I analyze them, brings into the analysis an apositivist, fragile, possible but not necessary register of history. Suggesting that looking at history through photography and at photography through history is itself a situated, unstable, evolving, and subjective endeavor, and we come even closer to the essential historicity of the matching process between image and photograph, thereby powerfully expressing the book’s core argument about photography as an event. By selecting cases in which aspects of Jewish history are present, but in an interpretatively open manner; by deliberately evading formulaic categories such as the photographic “visualization of Jews” or a history of “Jewish photographers”; and by choosing the mode of case studies rather than a synthetic history, this book resists being categorized as a narrative Jewish history of photography. But the cases illustrate a range of ways in which photography affected Jewish history and experience between 1900 and 1980, and if the broaching of modes of intention and expectation, reasoning, perception and judgment, and experience and affect studied in this book manages to serve

18  Introduction

as the starting point for future studies of this and related contexts, its goal will have been achieved.

THE METHODOLOGICAL TRIAD We need a historically grounded sociology of the image. —Allan Sekula In the remaining part of this Introduction, I wish to discuss several general concerns that anchor my adaptation of Flusser to the study of history and serve as a stable framework of analysis.28 As one approaches the history of photography, it is beneficial to distinguish among three layers: photography, photographers, and photographs. Philosophers of media and photography view the first layer as the most important, consequential, and revolutionary. It is probably not accidental that photographers have singled out Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography, which does not discuss photographers or photographs, as a major source of inspiration. The transition from the abstract discussion of photography to the discussion of photographers and photographs involves dodgier and more interpretive and subjective moments, eliciting the resistance of readers, but this cannot serve as an excuse for the historian. Only this multilayered approach can bring to the surface the educational influence of photography and the growing sophistication required from audiences. In terms of register, these cases involve neither the high theory of photography, on the one hand, nor a positivistic historical account, on the other, but are located in between, based on a form of sociological reasoning. To elucidate this intermediate stratum, I specify three interconnected

and codependent areas: the dispositions of photography, ideology, and “photographic objects.” The use of this triad enables an integrated study of photography and ideologies of vision.

The Dispositions of Photography The first area of concern involves the dispositions of photography as a medium, from a perspective grounded in history rather than in pure speculation about the medium. Emphasizing ontology over epistemology even more than Hacking does, but in a way that is not that different from his discussion of styles of reasoning in terms of the “philosophical technologies” discussed earlier, philosophers such as Gilbert Simondon and media theorists such as Friedrich Kittler have taught us that technologies and technological conditions possess intrinsic qualities that shape their use and their users. 29 Technologies (including photography) structure and individuate users and their objects. (The invention of the remote control, to take one example, dramatically changes the human user of the television, and the invention of the light, portable camera dramatically changes the human user of the camera.) Furthermore, they do this not only in actuality but in what they potentially make possible—or, in other words, in their inbuilt dispositions—whether or not we are aware of them and whether or not they are actualized.30 The kinds of photography that form the subjects of the following chapters share (albeit not in a homogeneous manner) a connection to the real, unlike photograms or similar photographic techniques that purposely detach photography from any real object. Different photographic technologies differ in their dispositions (in that, for in-

Introduction  19

stance, the daguerreotype is different from its competing contemporaries in its documentation of details; film is different from glass plates in its transportability; and color film is different from black-and-white film in its rendering of reality). At the same time, photography itself is also a distinctive technology or medium, so that the ideologies of vision arising from it are therefore, at least to some extent, also distinctive and different from, for instance, those related to statistics or drawing.31 Based on issues that recur in the following chapters, it is possible to define several basic dispositions of photography that play a role in, shape, and are shaped by the ideologies studied in the chapters. I use the word “dispositions” rather than “characteristics” because they are more potentialities built into photography than they are qualities that necessarily always come to expression in actuality. But they are available for potential uptake, whether or not they are actually deployed, and as such enable a closer scrutiny of actual photographic practices with regard to ideologies of vision. For the kinds of ideologies of vision studied in this book, which cluster around questions pertaining to humans as subjects or objects, photography can be described as possessing several dispositions. Each of these dispositions can be conceived of as involving opposite ends of a range, which can serve as axes through which the photographic practices or photographs found in each chapter can be analyzed.32 First, photography has a disposition to the grotesque, abnormal, and eccentric. At the other end of the same range, however, it also has a disposition toward the normal, mundane, everyday, and boring. Second, photography has the ability to challenge the observer, to compel viewers to exert energy and attention toward comprehending a photograph, and, in a related way, it has the ability to compel

the complication of vision. But it also has the ability to reduce the complexity of a represented object or state of affairs, to ease the deciphering of a photograph, to simplify and clarify its understanding, and, in a related way, to simplify vision. And, third, photography possesses contrary dispositions with regard to the relationship a photograph can form with the real: At one end of the range, a photograph can suggest itself as a direct, true, immediate, and univocal representation of the real, and in this sense solidify and harden that object; or, on the contrary, it can suggest more complex relations with the real, such as those involving intended manipulation of the real, suggesting a playful relationship with the real, signifying itself as involving artful deception or lies, and possibly undermining the sense that the real is what it appears to be. These dispositions can overlap, compete, exist in complex combinations in certain contexts; they can be a matter of different and contrasting interpretations, and elements of both ends of one single range can coexist simultaneously in a photograph. Most if not all objects can be photographed differently, and consequently photographs can be analyzed according to these pairs of contrary dispositions. In the current context I am interested not in developing or pursuing these dispositions for their own sake but rather in using them as an instrument for the analysis of the modes of photographic practices found in the various cases. They can help in characterizing the particular ways photography intersects with ideologies of vision. In Chapter 2 we will see the kinds of photographs that Helmar Lerski produced in order to contend that it is the photographer—not the object photographed nor the audience—who determines the photographic image at his or her will. Here the third disposition, concerning

20  Introduction

the relationship that the photograph forms with regard to the real, is of importance. In Chapter 1 we will see how the scientific director of Kahn’s archive, Jean Brunhes, instructed the photographers to focus on the typical and ordinary aspects of the societies they were sent to study and document. This touches on the first disposition and raises the question of whether his instruction on what to photograph was expressed in how it was photographed. In Chapter 4, on Robert Frank’s The Americans, the first disposition is of particular weight, and at least some of the power of the album can be shown to be connected to the fact that he draws on both ends of the spectrum, sometimes even in the same photograph. Given that one chapter, on Eugen Fischer and photography, addresses an attempt to deepen stereotypes of racial inequality, and another, on Albert Kahn’s photographic archive, studies attempts to demonstrate human heterogeneity and similarity, can we coordinate a certain ideology with particular forms of photographic treatment according to the above axes? I do not take these dispositions as possessing some intrinsic positive or negative value that transcends their contexts of application. In fact, for each of these opposing pairs we can certainly imagine proper contexts of application as well as contexts that each of us would find offensive or mistaken according to our own aesthetic, political, and ethical standards and values. (Representing a person as grotesque, for instance, can be justified in the case of an oppressor, and be disturbing in the case of victims of violence.) Analyzing these dispositions in various contexts brings their concrete and changing relationships to the surface and helps to situate them with regard to ideologies of vision. It is, however, necessary to define what is meant by “ideology” and by “vision” in this study.

Ideology The chapters all involve connections between the use of photography and wider agendas about vision. If we look at the course traced by the chapters, taken jointly, do we find that photographers arrive disposed to provide evidence for ideologies of vision from the beginning? Or can we point to a gradual advance, from a certain kind of randomness to a growing sophistication in how photography is bound to serve ideologies of vision? Or does it in fact happen in the opposite direction entirely, and do ideologies actually result from photographic practices? Can photographs serve different or even conflicting ideologies at the same time? And if we do see a course of growing sophistication in the ability of photography to serve ideologies of vision, is it fair to conclude that photographs can come with their own internal manual or code of use? Or is it that, on the contrary, whatever the ideological context of their generation and intended use (think of propaganda photographs from Nazi rallies, for instance), photographs always and necessarily possess an irreducible quality that resists the ideologies of vision they were intended to serve? All of the chapters are concerned with the serialization of photographs, but then the question becomes how one sees a photograph differently when it is serialized than when it stands alone. But having already been serialized, how was the photograph seen when it did stand alone after all? Four of the five chapters (Chapter 5 being the exception) involve an attempt to employ photography to transform vision. But how is vision understood before this transformation has taken place? In Chapter 5, on Solomon Yudovin, it is arguably understood as the possibility of seeing the old forms of Jewish life in a fast-transforming world. In Chapter 2, on Helmar Lerski,

Introduction  21

the before is related to the naturalness with which people assume a connection between the real object and the photographic image. In Chapter 3, on Eugen Fischer, it is related to the racist tradition according to which vision (sensual, intellectual, and political) is an innate and natural capacity; here the idea is that this innate vision has been deeply corrupted by modern conditions, and the aim of the transformation is to return it to that innate and natural state. And in Chapter 4, on Robert Frank, the before is related to the rejection of the position that vision is universal and not deeply individual. The answer to the question about the before, in each case, is thus tightly connected to the respective ideology in which the photographic practices were embedded, rather than any general explanation. If there is one thing that I do not mean by ideology, it is the notion that ideology is a set of beliefs or ideas external to social reality. What I do mean by “ideology” is at least two separate things, the second of which is harder to grasp than the first. On the one hand, I mean the more or less standard definition of ideology as a set of doctrines or beliefs that are shared by members of a social group and which form the basis for a political, economic, or cultural system: “the totality of ideas and values—or ‘representations’—common to a society or current in a given social group.”33 As there “is no direct and exhaustive consciousness of anything,” ideology is the “grid through which we take cognizance of the given and at the same time leave out a part of it.”34 To sharpen what is at stake in these chapters, however, it is critical that ideologies by definition possess a moral and ethical point of view. I will be examining cases of philanthropists, scientists, and photographers who developed, held, and promoted agendas about vision and who used photographic practices to advance

their convictions. I will demonstrate, for instance, that photography was employed to drive contrary ideologies, including, for example, humanistic and antiracist ideological convictions on the one hand, as well as antisemitic and racist ones about natural inequalities between populations on the other, or indeed, rejecting both, ones about the individuality of vision. In another context I will show that photography was used by some to simplify, arrange, and focus vision, while it was used by others to complicate and estrange vision. Here uses of photography are tied to “ideology” in the explicit sense outlined earlier. The second meaning of ideology is harder to grasp because it is right under our noses, so to speak: “the fundamental tenets of the ideology are likely to remain implicit. Fundamental ideas are so obvious, so omnipresent, that they do not need expression.”35 Here ideology is broad and hard to grasp because it is self-evident, taken for granted: It is not expressed, stated explicitly, or discussed, let alone questioned. For instance, in the chapter on Kahn’s photographic archive, I will show that Kahn created the archive because he wanted to advance peace among peoples; he and the scientific director of the project conceived photography first and foremost as a form of communication. The ideological moment here, the one that was so self-evident to them that they never explicitly expressed or questioned it, concerns the link between communication and peace. There was no need to explain that wars happen because of misunderstanding and lack of mutual knowledge, and that the dissemination of photographs, because it is a form of communication, will advance peace. One has to both recognize and then step out of their shared ideological convictions to question the relationship between communication and peace. (There are numerous

22  Introduction

counterexamples that illustrate that it is not mutual knowledge and communication that bring about peace between peoples but ignorance and indifference, for instance.) Ideology, in this sense, has to be stripped of its “self-evidence” and brought to the surface, conjured up “from the silences of common sense”36 that envelop and are built into the use of photography. The study of ideology in this sense is very close, methodologically, to studying ideas as embedded in particular social and cultural contexts by searching for their internal contraries, an analytic method developed by Louis Dumont to demonstrate the social and cultural specificity of ideology.37 The contrary, however, is often not stated openly but has to be unearthed and completed. In that same chapter on Kahn, for instance, I argue that human dignity is a vital component of the photographs in the archive and of Kahn’s project as a whole. But what kind of dignity do the photographs wish to express? Is it the dignity of the tribe, the type of culture, or is it the dignity of the particular individual? Or is it rather that it is not important to which tribe or type an individual belongs, and that what is natural and what the photograph wishes to express is being human per se? Searching for the contrary of dignity in Kahn’s archive may lead us to an answer, and it would be plausible to contrast the photographs in Kahn’s archive with photographs of non-Europeans in colonial contexts, of African or Asian subjects in the human zoos that were current then. But as it was scientific institutions that Kahn established, it is even more plausible to conclude that his stakes lay within the scientific field and that the contrary is to be found in the racist scientific photographic tradition that is studied in the chapter on Eugen Fischer. Does the racist scientific tradition ridicule or mock its subjects? As we will see in the chapter on Fischer, the

answer is no; or, at least, this is not its main goal. Rather, it uses photography to establish and naturalize the equation between biological difference and inequality. The search for the contrary of Kahn’s insistence on human dignity thus leads us to conclude that its contrary is not indignity or ridicule but rather human inequality. Another, similar contradiction can be revealed with regard to photography and heterogeneity. Kahn’s project aimed to demonstrate human heterogeneity but also, at the same time, to show that heterogeneity is superficial, because the reason for demonstrating it is to claim that something stronger and deeper lies underneath it, namely a fundamental human homogeneity. To understand why, then, demonstrating heterogeneity is nonetheless pursued as an objective, one has to unearth, again, what it stands against. And here again the contrary is not what we might assume to begin with: The contrary of heterogeneity in this context is not homogeneity but, rather, inequality. But what kind of inequality was Kahn’s demonstration intended to question: the inequality of cultures or of individuals? If we turn to Eugen Fischer’s attempt to employ photography to demonstrate the natural and inbuilt inequality among races, we reach, from the other end of the ideological spectrum, similar internal contradictions, based on other kinds of ideological self-evidence. What kind of inequality did Fischer wish his photographs to express? What was the contrary, in Fischer’s context, of racial inequality? Against what was his project geared? The opposite of inequality is equality, but equality can mean several things. It can mean the equality of individuals (all humans are equal); of everyone within one race (all members of a race are equal); or of the races themselves (all races are equal). The contrary against which Fischer’s

Introduction  23

project—demonstrating human variety and the inequality built into nature—is directed is the third possibility, that all races are equal. The ideological moment (in the sense of the self-evident “blind spot” within the ideology) is Fischer’s attempt to reduce inequality to the inequality among the races. If the contrary of Kahn’s insistence on dignity was inequality, the contrary of Fischer’s insistence on racial inequality is not human homogeneity but rather the specific kind of inequality that is built into modern, formal democracy. I am referring to the fact that modern democracy is based on at least one form of heterogeneity, namely that individuals differ from each other, in potential and in actuality, in every conceivable way, and that equality in such a democracy basically means formal equality before the law. (This is one half of it, of course; the other being that homogeneity is achieved in the free will of the people as a whole, through democratic self-government.) This is a form of inequality and heterogeneity that Fischer’s statistics and photography could not bring under control, a heterogeneity that transcends and crisscrosses the seemingly stable dividing lines Fischer tried to establish among races. Thus the contrary of Fischer’s inequality is an even more extreme heterogeneity, which transcends and undercuts the ideology of racial inequality. Frank’s album The Americans, studied in Chapter 4, in certain senses undermines both Kahn’s and Fischer’s ideologies, but Fischer’s ideology in particular it undermines in exactly this way, by driving inequality much further than Fischer would ever have wanted it to go and consequently undercutting the limited, dogmatic inequality of Fischer’s ideology. For the mere reason that his project was not ideologically motivated in the same way that Kahn’s was, Frank was arguably far more successful in

achieving this end. But Frank’s photography, with its emphasis on personal expression and on the individuality (as opposed to universality) of the photographer’s eye and of the perceiving viewer, could also be analyzed in terms of its contrary: In an ironic twist, Frank’s enormous success brought about a certain style of photography that can be seen as deriving from him and which has now somewhat undermined the originality and individuality of his accomplishment, because what he achieved has now been generalized by others. I am not interested in deconstructing ideologies to show their dogmatic core as an end in itself. Rather, the chapters demonstrate how photography participates in ideologies and, as a medium with particular dispositions, inflects them and is inflected by them. For instance, photography is (epistemologically) essentially an individualizing medium: It captures an individual subject who stands before the camera rather than any idealized or abstracted type. But a photograph can use an individual subject (sociologically or historically)—think, for example, of an image that was all over the news in 2015, of the small Syrian boy whose body was washed to shore—to generalize and express all the suffering of a people, in this case the victims of the Syrian civil war. Nevertheless, photography does not go well with typicality; they somehow undermine each other. Photography is less disposed to typicality than, say, drawn caricatures are. Because of the massive dissemination of photography, the way in which the typical is represented, conceived, or imagined has been greatly reshaped by this medium. Photography also alters the exotic, because the mass dissemination of the exotic brings the exotic closer, thereby diminishing its very exoticness. As Dumont contends, the only way out of an excessive relativism is through

24  Introduction

a comparison of configurations of ideology, which is what the chapters of this book do. While the question that hovers over the study as a whole, and to which I return in the conclusion of the book, centers on what photography shares across these configurations, the more immediate question, which I am compelled to address before I go further, concerns contingency and doubt. If, in the nineteenth century, emphasis was placed on the scientific, objective, privileged referential power of photography with regard to the real, current research emphasizes the contingency and doubt involved in photography. 38 Historically and sociologically, however, the documentary and referential power of photography with regard to the real and doubt about that very capacity both arose with the invention of photography and are intertwined with its history, and they are therefore contraries within the same ideological matrix. To speak about one is in a certain way simultaneously to speak about the other. In a more concrete register, however, photography is so diverse that blanket propositions with regard to different subjects, contexts, kinds of objects, genres of photography, or intended and unintended uses and outcomes cannot be very productive. While sensitivity to the importance of diversity informs the discussion of the cases, here I would like to emphasize the significance of repetition in our context. The significance of repetition in social life was already recognized by Moritz Lazarus, the nineteenth-century founder of Völkerpsychologie, a predecessor of modern sociology, and was later reformulated by his student Georg Simmel in terms of Verdichtung, or the “condensation” of social interaction: The repetition of interactions condenses into social forms, which, in turn, shape individuals’ patterns of thought and behavior, and those, in turn, in an endless dynamic

process, condense again into social forms.39 To tie this in with the discussion of photography as a component of reality: Since its invention, the tremendously diverse forms of repetition in which photography is involved have solidified into a virtually infinite and evolving variety of social forms. From this perspective, then, it is easy to see how photography generates forms of conviction about its referential power and, at the same time, their opposite, namely forms of doubt about that very capacity: These are closely connected facets of one and the same process. The notion of repetition, especially the issue of the class of “photographic objects” as the outcome of repetition, is therefore key for this current study. In my attempt to show how photography constitutes reality in general and solidifies that even more delicate and slippery category of “photographic objects” in particular, however, I emphasize the generation of conviction over that of doubt. But if the referential power of photography and doubt about that power are both facets of the same process, I will be the first to admit that doubt is inherently built into the history of photography in general and into this specific class of objects in particular. Repetition also alters the perception of photographs, in several senses. The claim that photography alters typicality or the exotic, within the broader discussion of ideology, touches on the perception or experience of photographs more generally. And we will see that the discussion of a photograph can change not only how the photograph is perceived and experienced but even how the very object depicted in the photograph is perceived and experienced. But this last point only sharpens the question of how we can know how the photographs were perceived in the first place. At a presentation I gave of a part of this project, one colleague of mine, a sociologist, contended that the only way to

Introduction  25

know how photographs were perceived was to study documentation of the responses they elicited. But as we have no record of responses to the respective corpora of photographs, with the exception of the case of Robert Frank, this would mean that our knowledge of how they were perceived is basically blocked. My sociologist colleague’s response was based on the assumption that the perception of the photographs was historically and socially specific, and that we cannot know what it was without a direct record; another colleague of mine, however, a social psychologist who takes a more psychological and universalist notion of perception as his starting point, proposed a different approach. He suggested devising controlled experiments in order to recreate the conditions of the perception of the photographs. This suggestion, however, while it would address the problem of the lack of any direct documentation of the experience of the photographs, raises a different complication from the perspective of this current study: How can one devise experiments that study the mediation of photographs in processes of perception if we want to avoid the assumption, found in the standard use of photographs in psychological experiments, that what is actually being studied is the perception of an object (while the photograph is merely a neutral, “transparent” means to that end)? The question of perception troubles me, and to a certain extent remains open for me, but my inclination is to reject the notion that, if we have no direct and immediate record of the perception of the photographs, we have no access to how they were perceived, experienced, or judged. While I agree that certain features of perception of the photographs could be recreated through controlled experiments (though such experiments would necessarily be selective and abstract), there remains the questions

of whether and how the experiments could be adapted to recreate the ways photography was linked to ideological visions of the racist and antisemitic kinds. My answer to these two challenges draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Legend has it that Wittgenstein abandoned his earlier philosophy once and for all when his friend Piero Sraffa undermined one of his assertions about the form of propositions with a meaningful but dismissive gesture. In his later philosophy Wittgenstein inverts the hierarchy of meaning and reality, suggesting that meanings derive from practice or reality: “If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in the definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments.”40 This perspective moves us in the direction of the conventionality of meaning, as derived from reality, and if it applies to gestures, we can see how it can apply to the perception of photographs. Using this approach, we can analyze perceptions as deriving from practice, based on the social reality and conventions in which they are immersed and enveloped. This is a dynamic, cyclical process in which actions (which include photography) constitute reality and the perception of photographs is tied to action and meaning. Therefore, if we can reconstruct the intentions and expectations of the producers and users of photographs, which is certainly practically possible, the question of perception is obviated, because the intention and the expectation already anticipate and include or incorporate their perception by the (intended) audience. In this sense, it is fair to say, perception is in fact built into the act of taking or using photographs. Of course, there can be errors or gaps between the intended and anticipated perception and the actual one—the chapter in this book on Lerski is primarily about this very

26  Introduction

gap—but what this orientation allows for is an appreciation of the perception in terms of (changing) action. Perception of the same photograph will change over time when it is seen over and over again, when its presentation is framed in one way rather than another, when the context of its perception changes, or when it is reframed by way of serialization or a title, for instance. If perception is an ongoing process grounded in reality, it depends on and is shaped by patterns of social interaction and mediation; hence, while we can assume as a starting point that perception is individual, fluid, and evasive, a degree of stabilization can nonetheless be achieved by the reconstruction of its surrounding social and historical realities. The advantage of this approach is not only that it provides access to the perception of photographs as socially mediated and constituted (with historically specific features) but, furthermore, that it de-idealizes and demystifies the question of perception as basically inaccessible to historical analysis. In this approach the perception of photographs is less independent of the prevailing social conditions and hence less methodologically enigmatic.

“Photographic Objects” If the dispositions of photography address the medium itself, and ideology addresses the contextual frameworks in which the cases are embedded, in the third corner of the triangle the objects of photography must now be addressed. The succession of chapters in this book demonstrates the gradual development of “photographic objects,” which are, I argue, the result of the changing agendas of and dynamic relationship between photography and history. But what is a “photographic object”? How is it different from a visual object? And in what way is

something shown by a photograph different from its linguistic description or ekphrasis, from the sociological perspective of the intermediate level of analysis that is our starting point? Photographs show. A photograph of a child shows that child. But one could object that photography is no less subjective or interpretive than a painting or a drawing. I agree with this objection (and in speaking about the dispositions of photography, this is implied). I do not suggest the obsolete notion of the supposed privileged objectivity of photography. The photograph of the child can be no less subjective than a drawing. But this does not change the fact that, as a medium, photography differs from painting, drawing, or language: Both in itself as well as in its social understanding, as predominantly a means of representing the real, it is simply not the same. And in switching perspective from the medium to the objects of photography, it becomes apparent that different kinds of objects possess differing kinds and degrees of capacity to be visually expressed in general and to be handled by photography in particular. In schematic terms it is possible to differentiate among, first, objects that exist in reality; second, the relationship between their existence and their possible visual expression; and third, the relationship between their visual expression and their availability to be photographically handled. Some features of the real do not have a visual expression, whereas others do. Genes (as well as certain genetic disorders) and WiFi waves, for example, exist but cannot be seen by the eye or be photographed. What I am interested in is a particular kind of range of human objects that exist, that do have variable visual expression, and that can be handled photographically in various ways; my examples will therefore be drawn from this range.

Introduction  27

Certain kinds of features, at least in certain conditions and circumstances, do not necessarily involve a visual component: These include a disposition to humor, to certain kinds of response to authority, to political beliefs, or to religious convictions. (Although these do not have to disclose a visual feature, they sometimes do.) Other human features, however, do have clear visual components: These include certain kinds of physical conditions, including certain forms of physical disability; certain kinds of biological differences, ranging from skin color, skull or face shape and size, to gait; the bodily and clothing-related expressions and results of social and economic background; and certain religious affiliations (for instance, those of Christian nuns, ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, or Muslim sheikhs). These examples illustrate that different kinds of objects that exist in reality possess varying degrees of visual expression, from no expression at all to an unavoidable, undeniable expression. None of this range is necessarily fixed or stable, absolute or independent from changing contexts, or automatically carries meaning or significance; in the current context I am only interested in the implications of our recognition of this range for the history of photography, as a technological medium that is intimately tied to recording the visibly real. The recognition of this range implies that objects possess forms and degrees of possibility for being photographically handled, an implication that greatly shapes how the objects come into play in the relations between photography and ideologies of vision. An example: Whereas it could be claimed that members of certain kinds of minorities are visually identifiable (by way of skin color or eye shape, for example), such identification is, with regard to members of other kinds of minorities, either not

possible or at least a matter of debate. This is a question that interests people to varying degrees and about which people have different beliefs: Some people believe that the differences are clearly visible and identifiable, while others believe equally strongly that they are not visible (and that it is a form of prejudice to claim that they are) or that they are, at best, only visible in some cases (and that others mistakenly conflate the clear cases with the class as a whole). Photography has played a role in discussions of this kind: As we will see in Chapter 5, focusing on the ethnographic project of documenting the life of Jewish communities in the Pale of Settlement, Solomon Yudovin employed the camera to cluster some Jewish visual features in such a way as to suggest that they are identifiable as a class. At the same time, however, he also gently undermined that clustering by recording cases that belong to the class but do not share that particular visual expression. My point, in this current context, is that to unpack Yudovin’s photographs one has to bring together these three components: the dispositions of photography, the ideologies in which the photographs are embedded, and the dispositions built into the handling of the photographed object. Another example: Many scholars have noted that in The Americans Robert Frank deals with African Americans with greater empathy than he does with white Americans; it should be noted, however, that Frank’s photographic treatment emphasizes this empathy without decreasing the markers that make African Americans visually distinguishable from white Americans. (Compare Philip Roth’s very different strategy in The Human Stain, where he uses a narrative of similarity as a necessary underlying foundation for the narrative of “passing.”) Here, again, to analyze the rela-

28  Introduction

tionship between photography and an agenda with regard to vision, it is necessary to bring together the same three components. In the chapter on Frank, however, I will also show that, with regard to other objects, Frank employed other photographic strategies. For instance, he invented or established objects out of nothing: He would use the composition of the photograph to suggest to the viewer a visual object that did not exist in reality for the subjects of the photograph; it existed only in the frame. And because he employed different photographic strategies for different objects, unpacking his photographic strategy requires connecting it with the dispositions of the relevant object to being photographically treated. Let me now move closer to the kinds of “photographic objects” that were, I argue, established and stabilized in the trajectory of photography between 1900 and 1980. To do this I need to look at a specific category of objects, namely those whose existence relies, to a greater extent than for others, on the gaze or on their being seen. Certain objects depend on the gaze more than others because they are harder to stabilize, express, or quantify. The aesthetic experience of the landscape, as a view, depends far more on the gaze than other objects do, because the degree of its existence or the judgment of when a landscape qualifies, aesthetically, as a “view,” is in fact dependent on the gaze. How do we know what is a beautiful view and what is not? A photograph of a gas station seen out of a hotel window? Not a view. (Consider: No hotel would advertise such a thing on its website.) A photograph of the English countryside out of a hotel room? A view! One need only ask a child what a view is, or try to explain it to a child who has not come across this term before, to realize how difficult this is. The view is a visual object, but it is greatly depen-

dent on the process of socialization. For such objects it is particularly difficult to create a category that exists in a stable and objective manner. For this category of objects, a competent beholder is simply a person who has undergone the right sensual and intellectual socialization. One cannot explain to a child what a view is; one can only show the child: The child will make errors at first but will, in the end, grasp and use the term correctly, although there will still have been no explanation. Much of the energy required for stabilizing objects of this kind goes into the intellectual and sensual education required to comprehend and recognize them, because without such an education such objects are not intuitively or immediately understandable and consequently will not be seen. For this category of objects, historically, photography is particularly important, and in contexts of this kind, its significance primarily has to do with its usefulness for purposes of the aforementioned sensual and intellectual education. Photographs show; to return to the example of the category of “view,” for example, photographs can be used to teach the observer to see what is not a view, to distinguish it from what is considered a view, and to appreciate the beauty of the view created through the combination of nature and human activity. One learns to recognize what a view is and to see how beautiful it is. How? For instance, by seeing photographs taken from the same place before and after changes in the landscape.41 This is a form of critical activity, because it stabilizes an object, the view, as one that can be obstructed; it teaches the observer that the object is fragile, potentially temporary or under threat, something that can be lost. A photograph can teach what one is observing (in this case, what a view is); it can stabilize the object; and it can make it graspable.

Introduction  29

With regard to the ability of photography to contribute to the stabilization of the object, it could be claimed that certain facial expressions are similar to a view (how can you identify an ambivalent facial expression?).42 But this ability to stabilize depends to some degree on the object itself, and there are differences between the objects in this respect. Georg Simmel wrote perceptively about the opposing forces at work in ruins: There is something aesthetic in the tension between the creativity of mankind and the force of nature, the one pulling it up and the other pulling it down; taken together, these forces create the aesthetic experience of late-nineteenth-century Europeans.43 But, Simmel continues, we do not see this same combination in the same way in the face of an old person, because the effect of the passage of time on the aging of one single human being is not the same as the effect of time on a monumental architectural building. In this line of argumentation, photography could be used with regard to any of these—a scenic view, ruins, or facial expressions—in order to stabilize a certain category of visual object, but the photograph would work differently in each case because of the difference in the inherent nature of the object. “Photographic objects” thus make up a particular subcategory of the much broader category of visual object. Not every visual object depends equally on the eye. An ice cube is a visual object. The cube can be described linguistically; it can be weighed, measured, smelled and touched, and sensed with the hands. It can also be viewed visually, but it is not dependent on the eye in the same way as, for instance, a doubtful facial expression could be said to be. Imagine a photograph of two people caught in the middle of an exchange. Their facial expressions can be described. Is that a faint

smile of agreement, or more the expression of mockery? A facial expression can be described linguistically, but such a description involves an interpretation of the facial expression and is qualitatively different from the description of the cube or the showing of the expression in the photograph. While all the senses can be involved in interpretation, vision has the greatest interpretive capacity, and photography plays a constitutive role in vision’s distinctive ability to broaden interpretation, in a manner that is essentially controversial and can transcend what is practically given. This capacity is particularly important in the gray areas on the spectrum of expressible meanings. Some facial expressions can be represented with something as clear and unambiguous as a smiley-face emoticon. Others, however, which are equally visual, can be described only at the price of their reduction or interpretation (the most famous example in the history of art being of course Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa). The cases investigated in this book are what awakened my interest in the relationship between photography and this category of “photographic objects,” and I have come to recognize the category as offering a strong vantage point for understanding one important strand of the changing configurations between photography and history. The chapters included here will demonstrate a certain progression with regard to photography and photographic objects. But as the photographic objects about which photography could sensually, intellectually, and politically educate us are closely tied to broader ideologies of vision, it should come as no surprise that this is not a harmonious story of advance or progress but, rather, one of struggle concerning the kinds of objects (ranging from delicate physiological differences to opaque facial expressions) and the

30  Introduction

kinds of seeing (from the simplification of vision to its complication) that have been advanced. In this historical progression photography elicits relations; alters subjects, objects, and vision; and generates and sta-

bilizes the visual objects that depend on it. Even while it appears to only represent reality, photography subtly and gradually alters that reality, according to its distinct tendencies and characteristics.

Chapter 1

UTOPIA and PHOTOGRAPHY CIRCA 1900 Albert Kahn and the Archives of the Planet

A

utopian vision of global scope, explicitly tied to a forward-looking conception of photography, is at the center of Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet (Archives de la planète). Kahn was a French banker of Alsatian Jewish background who spent his legendary wealth creating his Archives of the Planet, the world’s largest color photography archive of his time, comprised of tens of thousands of photographs from all corners of the earth. Kahn was motivated by a utopian vision that photography could advance peace among peoples, but why and how could a large-scale project to photograph the world promote world peace? What assumptions about photography and history could have been the basis for such a goal, and were these assumptions realistic? To answer these questions we must delve into the particulars of Kahn’s historical context, looking at photography and utopia around 1900, while also keeping in mind that Kahn’s project anticipated the globalization processes of the second half of the twentieth century, which sped up enormously with the creation and spread of fast

means of information and communication, the World Wide Web, and particularly Google’s project of mapping and photographing every corner of the planet. Kahn’s ambitious endeavor was a precursor of this tremendous expansion of technology, including the unprecedented spread of photography and involving processes that are inseparable from the political processes of decolonization and democratization. These processes, which took place in the second half of the twentieth century, transformed the world but left wide areas of unresolved conflict in the Middle East and Africa. Kahn’s endeavor was considerable in size, coherent in its underlying philosophy, systematic in its execution, and consistent over a long period of time. Like Henry Dunant and Frédéric Passy (who in 1901 were awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize for their involvement in creating the International Red Cross and the International Peace League), Kahn sought to create an elite international network for the purpose of promoting peace in the world, and his ambition and commitment were widely recognized and appreciated during his lifetime (though Kahn never

32  Chapter 1

won the peace prize). And while studying Kahn’s vision of a photographic archive to promote world peace involves studying photography and utopia around 1900, it also, simultaneously, offers the opportunity to contemplate, from the postcatastrophic perspective of the early twenty-first century, the ostensibly inherent capacity of photography to rationalize sight, expand communication, and enhance understanding among peoples. One of the most important pieces written on Kahn’s photographic project, Jay Winter’s compelling and moving appreciation of Kahn’s work, situates it in precisely this broader context of the twentieth century: specifically, the twentieth century’s violence and utopian visions of peace.1 While deeply sympathetic to Kahn, the chapter leaves the overall impression that Kahn’s vision in general and his photographic project in particular are uplifting, but finally illustrative of a naïve outlook on history, politics, and photography. In this respect Winter judges Kahn’s work as a failure overall.2 And looking at Kahn’s photographic project in the light of the two world wars that followed, one of which Kahn experienced and the other of which he escaped only because he died shortly after the German occupation of Paris, seems to prove Winter’s assessment. When I embarked on researching and writing this chapter, I shared the slightly melancholic sense that Kahn’s vision illustrated a beautiful but ineffective idea about photography and its possibility of human uplift. But the more, and the more deeply, I read about Kahn’s various engagements, the more I realized that this understanding had to be reassessed. Among the very few things that Kahn wrote was a short, programmatic document in which he sought to explain the institutions he had established.3 The recontextualization of the photographic project thus has to be undertaken pragmatically, by

reconstructing and reinterpreting its relative place within the larger structure of Kahn’s philanthropic endeavor. I devote the first part of this chapter to analyzing the relative position of the Archives of the Planet within Kahn’s more comprehensive philanthropic efforts. When the photographic project is situated within this larger structure, it appears less naïve than it does in Winter’s account. Photography, as employed in Kahn’s project, was a form of action. His project linked photography with a conception of the rationalization of human communication. I propose that Kahn’s projects cannot be seen as a failure, even if they finally succumbed to more powerful historical forces. After situating the Archives of the Planet, I go on to show that photography was not arbitrarily or naïvely chosen for the task given to it by Kahn but was in fact picked as the result of very clear reasoning. To determine what photography was expected to do, I reconstruct the specific logic that underlay its introduction and use. Fundamentally, as I seek to show, it was intended to enhance communication and to transform human vision. But first, I briefly describe the photographic project and outline several aspects of Kahn’s projects that involve tensions and even apparent contradictions within his outlook. These tensions, I believe, not only serve as instruments of historical contextualization but point to the inherent boundaries and blind spots of Kahn’s outlook. The question of Kahn’s agency with regard to the photographs in the archive is a thread that runs through the chapter as a whole, and to which I return in the concluding part of the chapter. Although the archive as first initiated by Kahn was a collection for still photography, he later added moving images, and the two categories of images are at least partially integrated within the archive.

Utopia and Photography circa 1900   33

Other writers, most notably Paula Amad, the author of the only monograph on Kahn, have studied both of these components, but their primary focus is on the moving image. Because this book concentrates on still photography, however, my treatment of Kahn’s photographic archive is necessarily partial. But as we will see, this partiality is not without its advantages. The unique aspect of Kahn’s case, as compared with the subjects of the subsequent chapters, is particularly interesting from a performative perspective and pertains to Kahn’s agency with regard to the photographs that were produced for an archive he established but which were not taken by him. This issue is present throughout the chapter and directly addressed in three contexts: first, concerning a decision to standardize the archive technologically; second, with respect to the role of Jean Brunhes, whom Kahn appointed as the scientific director of the archive; and finally, in the concluding part of the chapter, with regard to the rationalization of sight and vision.

CIRCUMSTANCES, CONTEXT, AND QUESTIONS Several writers have suggested that Kahn’s idea to create a photographic archive had its origins in a trip he took in 1908 to the United States, Canada, Japan, and China. Alfred Dutertre, his chauffeur and traveling companion, took photographs during the trip, and this was what triggered the idea of the archive for Kahn.4 His basic idea was simple: to send photographers to every possible corner of the earth, have them take photographs, and collect the photographs in a central archive. This would reveal the fundamental similarities among people from distant parts of the world.5

Photography was particularly suitable for this purpose. As a neutral, objective, mechanical means of communication, photography had clear advantages over other means of imaging or illustration. The archive, which opened in 1908 and operated until 1931 (when Kahn’s fortune eroded following the stock market crash), consists of more than seventy thousand autochrome photographs. These photographs were taken all across the planet with the intention of capturing and containing a world that stood on the threshold between the traditional and the modern, the local and the global, and all with a view to facilitating international peace and cooperation. During the two decades of the archive’s activity, eleven independent cameramen and photographers were employed in more than forty countries.6 After Kahn lost his fortune, the archive ceased to operate as an active project, but Kahn’s passion for the “mutual comprehension of peoples and international rapprochement” continued until his dying day.7 Kahn’s disposition, as a person and as a philanthropist, probably has something to do with the fact that the photographs in the archive are traditional in their visual language and do not partake of the kind of aesthetic experimentation associated with the modernistic avant-garde. What the photographs do share, irrespective of the photographer and of the society photographed, and what goes to the core of the archive, is the fundamental dignity of humans. Humans are treated with dignity regardless of skin color, nationality, class, or geography. This feature of the archive is consistent, and it is maybe most apparent where an element of inhumanity is present in the subject of the photograph: where, with a slight shift in treatment, the photograph might otherwise have expressed mockery, voyeurism, or ridicule. I have in mind several extreme

34  Chapter 1

and atypical photographs from the archive: a horrifying photograph of the decaying corpse of a soldier from a World War I battlefield; disquieting photographs of chained or incarcerated individuals in Mongolia; a person in handcuffs being led by policemen in Greece. In all of these, human dignity is preserved. It is not unrelated to this preservation of human dignity, in my view, that the autochrome photographs taken before the outbreak of World War I offer a reassuringly optimistic depiction of Western Europe. One can find evidence of hardship and poverty, but even there, the Europe that is shown is content and, on the whole, at peace with itself. There is a certain irony built into any retrospective observation of these photographs of Western Europe: Seen from our postcatastrophic viewpoint, the progressive, forward-looking perspective of the times that is evident in the images strengthens the viewer’s sense that the photographers partook in the blindness that characterized the societies they were photographing. This feature of the photographs, however, is not accidental, but seems to be related to the status of politics in the photographic archive and in Kahn’s outlook. This is not the only apparent tension with regard to any attempt to contextualize Kahn’s outlook and projects. Several tensions and even contradictions seem to touch the core of his photographic project and of his outlook and vision. Some of the tensions were surely much less clear to his contemporaries than they became later. For instance, Kahn made his fortune through a set of successful investments in diamond mines in South Africa. From our postcolonial perspective, there most certainly is a tension involved in using a fortune made in the context of the colonial exploitation of African laborers to establish a philanthropic

foundation for the advancement of humanistic ideals. But if this tension is diachronic or historical, there are other synchronic or horizontal tensions that also appear. Kahn perceived himself as a universalist and a humanist who, like many of his contemporaries, abhorred anything German as chauvinistic and antihumanist, without seeing the contradiction between the two stances. Universalism was synonymous with French nationalism, and hence there was no problem with centering the projects in France and using the French language exclusively.8 These tensions span all of Kahn’s projects; other tensions are specific to the photographic project. The explicit aim of the archives was to advance mutual knowledge and mutual recognition through acquaintance with foreign peoples, landscapes, environments, and forms of life. But the archive was closed to the broader public; it was only accessible to a very small group of invitees.9 I will return later to the discussion of utopias, but for now let me just say that attempting to classify Kahn’s activities within Karl Mannheim’s classical opposition between “ideology” and “utopia” seems to lay bare a basic tension in Kahn’s utopian outlook. According to Mannheim, “utopian” ideas are those that attempt to undermine the social and political status quo, whereas “ideology” attempts to maintain it.10 From this perspective it is difficult to conceive of Kahn’s vision or projects as utopian. Kahn’s photographic archive was supposed to advance human liberation, but the very notion of the archive became deeply problematic in the second half of the twentieth century and would come to be understood as a site of domination and repression. Appreciating this tension, Paula Amad, the author of the most comprehensive and thor-

Utopia and Photography circa 1900   35

ough study of Kahn’s Archives of the Planet, depicts the project as a “counter-archive” instead. While I appreciate this designation, and it is pretty clear what she means to indicate by it, there is little in Kahn’s own understanding of the archive that would support this depiction, and for the sake of historical understanding it may be more beneficial to face what now reads like the oxymoron, built into Kahn’s vision and project, of a “utopian archive.” When we look more closely at the photographic project itself, additional tensions crop up. As Winter and other observers have noted, Kahn’s photographic documentation was intended to undermine the pattern of white men photographing nonwhite others as animals in the zoo.11 It was built on a deep respect for human heterogeneity and on a notion of mutual interaction and exchange of ideas. But in practice the photographers were in fact white, European, French, and almost exclusively male, reestablishing the already existing asymmetries of power. For me, however, the most puzzling tension pertains to the status of politics. Kahn’s vision was a political vision; it was, after all, a vision of peoples living in greater mutual recognition and in greater peace. Conflict was not understood to be necessary, nor was there any implicit understanding that tensions among states, nations, or classes resulted from conflicts of interest. Yet Kahn did not attempt to conceptualize or define the political, to classify kinds of political expressions, or to explicitly formulate what the sources of divergence between peoples were that his projects were intended to bridge or overcome. Rather, what stood between peoples or nations in his view was the lack of mutual knowledge and communication. Photographers were not instructed to pay any particular attention to the political life of the places and societies they studied. In-

deed, if we work from the photographs upward to see the world they depicted, we find that it is a world almost devoid of politics in the narrowest understanding of the term. While there are exceptions to this absence of politics, the utopian energy of the photographic project derives in certain respects from this very fact: The photographs are able to show fundamental human similarities and commonalities, despite superficial differences, between peoples and cultures, and to bring peoples closer, because the world they depict is devoid of political conflict or clashes of political interest. I will return to this; I do not, however, attempt to offer a fully satisfactory account of it.

THE ARCHIVES OF THE PLANET IN RELATIONAL TERMS The utopian aspect of Kahn’s Archives of the Planet is closely entangled with his broader philanthropic network of projects and institutions. Any appreciation of it is thus dependent on an understanding of its relative and relational place within Kahn’s overall network of activities, which comprise an “economy,” by which I mean a form of necessary mediation between idea and reality.12 Kahn had an idea, and in order to materialize the idea in reality or in social life he had to find a way to mediate between the idea and reality. Kahn’s idea was to use his wealth to improve the world; the various institutions and projects he conceived, established, and funded constituted the economy that mediated between his idea and reality. Kahn created a multilevel and multifaceted network of partially interconnected projects that together were intended to realize a particular utopian outlook in a pragmatic fashion. Studying the place of the photographic project in

36  Chapter 1

this broader economy will bring us closer to what the photographic project was intended to perform. The Archives of the Planet was neither Kahn’s first project nor his last. His first project both was and was not part of his entire economy of projects, related to but also differing from the rest in important respects. Kahn purchased a large plot of land in one of Paris’s expensive neighborhoods and created a garden there that was a literal utopia. He brought plants to this garden from various parts of the world—plants that were characteristic of each of those regions—and in each of the various sections of the garden, separated from each other, he recreated the original environment and culture of the flora gathered there. Color photographs from the Archives of the Planet depict the garden’s breathtaking beauty. The reason I say this garden only partially belongs to the overall economy of Kahn’s projects is that it was intended not for the public but for his own private use. Unlike the Archives of the Planet, which were open to a selected elite (though even they were not open to the wider public), the garden was Kahn’s private property, and when he occasionally invited prominent individuals there, it was exclusively on a personal basis. In one sense, then, like his villa on the same grounds (and more so than two other properties he held in the south of France and in the south of England, which were even more private in their use), the garden was part of his private estate but occasionally used for his public activities. In another sense, however, the garden embodied and exhibited a vision similar to the one that underlay other projects that were indeed public, emphasizing a humanistic outlook on the intertwinement of geography and human environment: The garden harmoniously brought together the uncultivated and cultivated environments

of different regions in the world, celebrating their variety and beauty. Maybe the closest in certain respects to the photographic project was the first of his projects that unquestionably belonged to the overall economy, the Société autour du monde (Around the World Club), which existed from 1906 to 1949. Kahn’s idea was to select a number of talented young men and women each year, offer them a generous fellowship, and allow them to tour various parts of the world according to their wishes and interests. Fellows were not instructed where to go, what to look for, how or how much to write, or what particular stance to take toward the areas they toured or visited. Each fellow was given a one-year term, and all they were required to do was travel; write; and document their thoughts, encounters, and experiences or reflections.13 The Archives of the Planet, which were created only a few years later, were based on a similarly humanistic outlook and shared with the Autour du monde club the premise that it would be beneficial for humanity to send authors or photographers to tour the world; to encounter close and distant cultures and societies; and to record, and to collect the records of, those experiences. Both projects covered the entire world and engaged in producing what Marc Bloch would later define as “intended evidence”: that is, purposely creating (written or photographic) documents for a self-identified archive rather than merely collecting documents that already existed.14 Both projects were also close, in their general dispositions, to the chair in human geography at the Collège de France, endowed by a gigantic donation from Kahn equivalent (in today’s dollars) to a billion dollars. Professor Jean Brunhes, who had pioneered the study of the dynamically evolving interaction between humans and

Utopia and Photography circa 1900   37

their environment, was selected to occupy the chair, which existed from 1912 to 1930. Kahn’s own definition of the archives, as a study of “the surface of the globe as inhabited and developed by Man,” could also serve as a layman’s definition of human geography, elsewhere abbreviated by Brunhes as “the interaction or the result of reciprocal actions between the natural milieu and man,” thus including culture, customs, and costume in the conception of the geographical landscape, in opposition to the formalist and static concerns of physical geography.15 Brunhes’s chair was not only an external and symbolic sign of recognition but was also integrally related to Kahn’s two earlier projects, the Autour du monde project and the Archives of the Planet. Both earlier projects shared Brunhes’s general outlook on geography, bringing together the study of geography with the study of its human populations and their distinct cultures. The earlier projects also shared with the chair in human geography an encyclopedic vision of classifying, mapping, and documenting the world.16 The three projects were based on the same broad humanistic vision. The Autour du monde project dealt with the education of a young, elite group, through travel grants for the purpose of encountering foreign cultures; the archives project was based on the idea of documenting and circulating photographic images of foreign cultures; and the endowed chair was intended to create and advance the scientific field of human geography. Kahn went on to create three more projects which, while tied to science and academic life and intricately expressing a utopian vision, were more concrete and political in their orientation than these first three. The National Committee for Social and Political Studies (Comité national d’études sociales et politiques, or CNESP), which

was established in 1916, in the midst of the Great War, functioned until 1931. With this committee Kahn managed to create a body comprised of the highest echelon of French political and academic leaders, who met on a regular basis in Kahn’s mansion to learn about, discuss, and set political policy on social, economic, and political events and tendencies at the national and international levels. Similar to the three earliest projects in its hands-on and interventionist orientation, the Centers for Social Documentation (Les centres de documentation sociale) was established in 1920 and continued to operate until 1940, the year of Germany’s occupation of France and the year of Kahn’s death. Like the CNESP, this body was national in composition; by collecting, classifying, and archiving documents relating to French society, it was intended to fill a gap that Kahn saw. While the first body dealt extensively (politically, economically, and ideologically) with foreign affairs, both bodies were intended to strengthen French society and French political and intellectual systems. The Centers for Social Documentation also shared its emphasis on documents and documentation with the more idealistic bodies mentioned earlier. The final body Kahn was involved in creating was the Organisation de coopération intellectuelle (Organization for Intellectual Cooperation). This body was formally established in 1922 and operated until 1939. Established after the Great War and known as the advisory committee to the League of Nations, this was an international body comprised of twelve to nineteen of the most renowned intellectuals and scientists in the world, including Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, and Marie Curie. Following the breakdown of European civilization because of the war, the intention of this body was to

38  Chapter 1

reinforce international collaboration among intellectuals, scientists, artists, and universities to consolidate world peace, in the hope that a dense international network of such social and professional relations would minimize the threat of another such deterioration into conflict and war. Although this did not happen, and the European continent again sank into conflict and war in the 1930s, the fundamental belief in the power of cultural, economic, and political communication—of the social network as a political defense mechanism—was adopted even more comprehensively following World War II and served as one of the cornerstones for the foundation of the European Community. The enormous proliferation of this kind of phenomenon can make us think that this belief was a necessary historical course, although it was not, and the proliferation conceals aspects of the ideological history of the phenomena. The foundation of Kahn’s projects was the desire to create social and cultural encounters (the Autour du monde project; the Archives of the Planet; the Centers for Social Documentation; the Organization for Intellectual Cooperation) and to create, produce, circulate, and use material objects (including travel reports, photographs, films, social documents, and news bulletins) not only as ends in themselves but also as a means of communication. If we look at Kahn’s various projects jointly, we can see that they form a kind of economy, all translating vision into reality, attempting to realize an idea in the world. This perspective recontextualizes our understanding of the Archives of the Planet and makes it possible to reassess Winter’s interpretation. Viewing the photographic project within the more comprehensive economy of Kahn’s projects, we are led to appreciate it not as an isolated endeavor but as

one component in a closely thought-out and carefully executed network of projects and institutions undergirded by a single vision. The reinterpretation of the project applies to the medium of photography as well. When we look at it within the context of Kahn’s vision or economy of materialization, we can see that we are less justified in speaking about photography (or about film for that matter) in isolation or in assigning photography a special status as a medium. Instead we are led to view it as similar in status to the travel reports and social documents that appear in Kahn’s other projects. This reinterpretation diminishes the singular status, but not the importance, of photography within Kahn’s overall vision. I turn now to one technological decision Kahn made that unquestionably stamped the archive as a whole and deeply influenced the later perception of the photographs.

“MAN CAUGHT IN LIFE”: THE ARCHIVES OF THE PLANET Color Kahn decided to have all his photographers use one particular kind of color technique, involving glass-plate cameras, developed by the Lumière brothers. If, as Gilles Baud-Berthier, the director of the Albert-Kahn Museum, states, “color images have changed the way we see the world”; and if, as David Okuefuna notes, “Albert Kahn . . . amassed what is indisputably the most important collection of early color photographs in the world”; then it is fair to say that Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet project was involved in changing the way we see the world.17 In the first decade of the twentieth centu-

Utopia and Photography circa 1900   39

ry, black-and-white photographic technologies were greatly improved, and equipment was made far less expensive and lighter to carry, easier to operate, and faster. Color photography, however, which had been a dream for photographers and audiences from the outset of photography, was far less developed. In June 1907 the Lumière brothers presented to the world a technology that was a remarkable breakthrough at the time, opening the door to new possibilities in recording reality. Color enhanced the value of photography as a means of documentation because it was seen as being “truer to life.” Auguste Lumière demonstrated the superiority of the new technique by successively showing monochrome and autochrome slides of the same subject.18 Confident in the superior quality of their new product, the Lumière brothers promoted and marketed it by sending kits to some of the most prominent photographers in the world at the time (including Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Heinrich Küen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and the most famous amateur photographer of that time, George Bernard Shaw), asking them to test the product.19 Rolf Sachsse speculates that the Lumière brothers themselves photographed Kahn’s Japanese garden in 1907 using their autochrome technology, which is what inspired Kahn to adopt their technology for the project as a whole. According to David Okuefuna, Kahn was fascinated by the medium of photography and intrigued by the Lumière brothers’ ingenious technological breakthrough, viewing the arrival of color as standing at the threshold of a new world of creative possibilities. Moreover, he believed that color photography was a particularly suitable way to advance his vision.20 All other existing color technologies, including Adolf Miethe’s Kaiserpanorama method and Sergei Prokudin-Gorski’s pro-

cess, left a far more artificial impression on viewers than did the Lumière brothers’ new technology. 21 The Lumière brothers’ color technology, on the other hand, was ten times as expensive as black-and-white photography. Kahn never explained or justified his decision to use color photography. It is possible that the decision was taken simply because he had the means at his disposal to afford the technology. But it is also possible that the decision was the outcome of deliberation about the qualities of color photography with respect to the aims of the archive. As we will see, this decision had important implications for both the contemporary and later perceptions of the photographs. The Lumière brothers’ autochrome technology, based on potato starch, possessed several particular qualities. Compared with images created using competing technologies that were developed slightly later, their prints have a more granular appearance, causing them, oddly, to resemble both impressionist paintings and the quality of overstretched digital images in which the image starts to disintegrate and the pixels become visible. The colors are brighter than with other color-photography technologies, and the general impression is of a greater contrast. Even within Kahn’s lifetime, other color technologies proved more inexpensive and easier to develop, and the Lumières’ techniques, which had been considered highly advanced, became obsolete. (In fact, even illustrations of this technology are now produced using other color-printing processes.) The fact that this technology later lost out in competition with the technologies to which we have now become habituated affects our perception as well. The photographs from Kahn’s archive now appear somewhat aloof or unreal, as if they belonged to a historical past more distant than it actually is. In addition to the much greater cost, the

40  Chapter 1

autochrome color technology had two further drawbacks in comparison with blackand-white photography: exposure time (which was ten times as long as for blackand-white photography) and reproducibility (it could not be reproduced on paper).22 For certain kinds of photographs in Kahn’s archive, such as photographs of architecture, landscape, or the insides of picturesque churches or castles, the beauty of the color photographs is unmatchable by any blackand-white photographs. Here the color contributes substantially to their breathtaking quality (Figure 1.1). The more social photographs, however, involve a different dynamic. Although rationally we know that the past did not exist in black and white, as twentiethand twenty-first-century observers we have become so accustomed to its photographic documentation in black and white that we imagine it that way. We are so culturally habituated to associating the historical past with black-and-white photographs that even fictional films about the past sometimes opt for black and white to produce the sense of a more authentic history. This becomes clear if we compare photographs from Kahn’s archive with some of the photographs taken at more or less the same time by Solomon Yudovin, specifically with regard to the way our perception of photographs projects onto them our knowledge of events that took place later. It is difficult to imagine Yudovin’s photographs in color, and the fact that they are in black and white contributes to their overall authenticity.23 This sense of authenticity is itself historically and culturally shaped (and recent documentary films in which color has been added to black-and white footage to enhance authenticity, for instance for the arrival of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz, may in fact indicate that this is changing). Although of course the past took place in color, the black-and-white photographs gen-

erate a stronger sense of historical authenticity than do the color photographs. This, on top of the fact that the particular color technology Kahn employed has now been discontinued, further diminishes the sense of authenticity of the photographs in Kahn’s archive.

Gender The Archives of the Planet were established on the basis of a firm classificatory grid that did not explicitly recognize gender as a class. Women were represented, as well as men, in the materials collected in the archive, but without the subject of gender being acknowledged as such. The question we might want to ask is whether Kahn was directed by a progressive vision with regard to gender. The answer to this question requires interpretation and speculation, which in itself is at least a partial answer to the question. Kahn never made any explicit statement on the subject of gender and, unlike with other classificatory categories, addressing gender was not an expressed goal of the Archives of the Planet. But the Société autour du monde scholarship was open to female teachers (which, according to the historians Paula Amad and Shelley Rice, was in itself a very progressive aspect of Kahn’s philanthropy). Women participated in the Société autour du monde gatherings at Kahn’s villa in Paris; outstanding women such as the writer, actress, and journalist Colette, a radical for the era, attended meetings at the villa; Mariel Jean-Brunhes Delamarre (Jean Brunhes’s daughter) and Mira Devi (the daughter of the literature Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore) worked along with their fathers and accompanied them during their stays at the villa.24 No women were employed as photographers in the Ar-

Utopia and Photography circa 1900   41

figure 1.1. Left column, from top to bottom: Auguste Léon, Boulogne, France; Frédéric Gadmer, Tlemcen, Algérie; Auguste Léon, Boulogne, France; Auguste Léon, Boulogne, France (Archives of the Planet: B 284, A 60 614, B 1 004, B 28). Right column: Auguste Léon, Boulogne, France; Fernand Cuville, Noyon, France; Auguste Léon, Boulogne, France; Auguste Léon, Boulogne, France (Archives of the Planet: B284, A60 614, B1 004, B 28, B 507, A13 452, B574, B694). From Collection Archives de la planète—Albert-Kahn Museum/Hauts-de-Seine Department.

42  Chapter 1

chives of the Planet, however; this may have been because the photographers were considered to be more technicians than the “moral and intellectual elite of the nation” (which is how the writers of Société autour du monde were thought of), and the choice of photographers would hence have been less of a site for the expression of gender progressiveness. The comparative analysis of gender within Kahn’s economy of philanthropic projects, taken together with its multiculturalism, global outlook, and Dreyfusard stance, yields a complex, ambiguous picture, and displays a pragmatically progressive outlook on gender for its time.

Globalization and Multiculturalism: The Flow of Images and the Architectures of Communication Recent scholarship places an increasing emphasis on globalism and early twentieth-century multiculturalism as the metacontext for the Archives of the Planet.25 The project was global in scope and multicultural in its guiding values, as we see when we bring together Shelley Rice’s analysis of the flow of the images and Flusser’s architecture of communication. Photography (together with modern forms of communication and transport) contributed to what Rudyard Kipling called “making the world smaller” (as cited in Kahn’s Bulletin). 26 Viewed within the  broader context of the globalization of images in the early twentieth century, Kahn’s archive announced, anticipated, and prepared the ground for our own age by creating a vast repertoire of photographic images, a “world culture” of exchangeable images.27 The crucial question, according to Rice, pertains to their role

within the economy of the circulation of images (111). Rice situates Kahn’s photographs within the complex hierarchy of values attached to photography and art at the end of the nineteenth century. She compares the photographs from his archive with those of the renowned New York–based photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who strove to combine modern forms of communication with high art (116–19), and with the commercial postcards produced by the Orell Füssli Photochrom, which had a global reach from its base in Zurich. Rice also shows that, in comparison with the Orell Füssli Photochrom images, Kahn’s photographs— sometimes of the same places—were not touristic but scientific (124). In terms of the new emerging “world culture” of the image, according to Rice, this was an important moment, because it brought together alternative class, racial, and gender perspectives (115). The gaze of this emerging “world culture,” again according to Rice, was shaped by commercial postcards, images that lived on. The reason for this may be found in Allan Sekula’s statement that, ultimately, photographs made the observer either aspire and envy or look down and pity—the touristic postcards doing the former. The photographs of Stieglitz, Orell Füssli, and Kahn partook in the trafficking of images but followed different structures of communication. Kahn’s Archives of the Planet were a scientific project that aimed, ultimately, to diffuse the images to a limited group of research or university institutions within a restricted French and international elite. The photographs were aesthetically conservative (“romantic, pastel, impressionist”) and never intended for broader public exposure.28 In terms of “the four methods of discourse” elaborated by Flusser, the project, which was global in scope, displayed the

Utopia and Photography circa 1900   43

first three: “a semi-circle around the sender, as in the theatre” took the form of gatherings in Kahn’s villa; the “series of information conveyors” were the photographers sent out to sites to bring back photographs from there; and “the sender distribut[ing] the information to dialogues which they pass on in an enriched form, as in scientific discourses” can be seen in Brunhes’s use of the photographs for his scientific work (50). The one method of discourse that is absent from Kahn’s archive is Flusser’s fourth: “the sender transmits the information into space, as on the radio” (ibid.).

Kahn and Bergson The question of authenticity with regard to the photographs in the archive brings us to the role of Henri Bergson, which various authors, and in particular Paula Amad, have seen as seminal for the archive. Bergson played a significant part in Kahn’s life. Kahn lived an extraordinarily private life, and Bergson, a towering intellectual and public figure (who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927), was one of Kahn’s only (relatively) close friends.29 There is no question that Kahn admired Bergson, who was a year older and who mentored Kahn as a young student; nor was there any question about the fact that Bergson cared about Kahn, lending his name, prestige, energy, and presence to Kahn’s projects. But it is not clear what the importance of Bergson’s philosophy was for the archive. Amad argues that Kahn’s conceptualization of the archive was deeply influenced by Bergson’s philosophy. Although her discussion centers primarily on the moving image, she does not distinguish between the moving image and still photography, and her argument encompasses the two. She pro-

vides a sophisticated and learned reading of Bergson, illustrating her argument with several well-chosen examples from Kahn’s archive. She is most compelling in her discussion of photographs depicting everyday moments from the streets of Paris, which fit aspects of Bergson’s understanding of habit and the everyday. To a great extent her discussion stems from the relationship between Bergson’s idea of lived experience in terms of duration (durée réelle) and the moving image. In fact, the debate about the relationship between the two had already begun during Bergson’s lifetime. In Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory; 1896), Bergson develops the concepts of “movement-image” and “time-image” (exactly when the moving image was invented). 30 Bergson declares images to be superior to concepts, because they are able to evoke thought content in a more fluid and less abstract fashion. In lectures held at the Collège de France between 1902 and 1903, which were later published in L’Evolution créatrice (Creative Evolution; 1907), Bergson briefly discusses the possibility of comparing the mechanism of conceptual thought with that of the cinematograph. 31 Bergson contrasted duration as it is experienced by the human consciousness with scientific definitions of time, which tend to “spatialize” time. In a later essay, entitled “The Cinematographic Illusion” (also included in L’Evolution créatrice), Bergson rejects the possibility of using film as an exemplification of his ideas. But none of this discussion seems to be very relevant to still photography. Let us remember that Kahn first established the still-photography archive, and only later added to it the moving image. We thus have little ground for conjecturing that the idea of the archive drew significantly from Bergson’s philosophy. In fact Bergson,

44  Chapter 1

like some of his peers in France and Germany (such as Baudelaire, Proust, Wöllflin, and Simmel), viewed photography with a certain amount of resentment.32 As a purely mechanical instrument, photography was emblematic of the modern distance from actual experience. The autochrome, which required a much longer exposure time than did black-and-white photography, was particularly ill equipped to capture life in the instant. Photography could, in effect, be viewed as an anti-Bergsonian technology: While Bergson understood movement as indivisible, photography recorded it through segmentation.33 What Kahn may have drawn from Bergson’s philosophy, however, was his understanding of perception. Bergson argues that, since perception occurs in time, it requires the support of memory to function. Perception consists of an incalculable multitude of memory fragments, and, in truth, all perception is already memory. To simplify Bergson’s ideas somewhat, it could be said that he is suggesting that perception seeks, in the depths of memory, the image of an earlier perception which it resembles. Bergson calls the operation that coordinates the incoming sense data of perception with memory images “attentive recognition.”34 The incoming sense experience, imprinted on the body, calls to memory, which in turn spontaneously generates memory images to match the perceptual experience. These then, in a circular way, contribute to the act of perception and the cognitive construction of the object at hand. This definition of perception in terms of action rather than representation could, even if only indirectly, provide a form of justification for Kahn’s decision to create the photographic archive for his various purposes, because photographs have the capacity to filter or mediate between the real and the specific selection of

memories and images Kahn may have wanted to embrace and reinforce. Let us now turn to the geographer Jean Brunhes. I will show that Brunhes, even much more so than Bergson, with his notions of experience and memory, was central to the Archives of the Planet and to what Kahn expected from the photographs.

Photography as Objective Evidence of Subjective Observation Institutionally and conceptually, the photographic archive was tightly connected to Jean Brunhes, the scientific director of the project. Recognizing Brunhes’s pivotal role in the archive makes the choice of subjects, their photographic treatment, and their intended outcome legible. Epistemologically, Brunhes conceived of photography as supplying objective evidence for subjective observation.35 He wanted the autochromes to serve as “a record of mankind caught in life.”36 He developed a simple and easily applicable classification scheme for the new field of human geography and guided the focus of the professional photographers employed by the archive project. The moment this classification scheme is recognized, the general order underlying the vast photographic archive becomes visible, and individual photographs from distinct missions can be easily related to the classification scheme. While the archive sought to serve as a “sort of photographic survey of the areas of the earth occupied and developed by man as it was in the beginning of the twentieth century,”37 Brunhes’s (and Kahn’s) goals were both broader and deeper than that: The (practical and utopian) aim of these controlled photographs was to transform human vision; to teach people to see, recog-

Utopia and Photography circa 1900   45

nize, and appreciate human variety and basic human similarity. Jean Brunhes was a prominent geographer when Kahn approached him in 1912 and invited him to serve as the scientific director of the photographic archive. 38 At the same time Kahn donated an almost unimaginable sum of money (as noted earlier) for the establishment of a chair in human geography at the most prestigious French scientific body, the Collège de France, and Brunhes was selected to occupy that chair.39 Brunhes linked the two institutions, and he brought the archive into the Collège de France by using photographs from the archive in his lectures; his double appointment thus gave Kahn’s archive the prestige of being associated with the highest scientific recognition France could offer. Kahn’s archive focused primarily not on France but on other countries and other parts of the world. But Brunhes’s conception of geography, which greatly affected Kahn’s archive, marked a distinct moment in the development of French geography.40 Earlier French geography treated the various parts of France in an abstract geometric fashion; the different areas were outlined with straight, clear lines. Brunhes, however, in the footsteps of his teacher Paul Vidal de La Blache and in growing contrast to the earlier tradition, strove to develop a different kind of geography. While Friedrich Ratzel’s geography was gaining influence in Germany, Brunhes, going in a very different direction, studied the relationship between societies and their environments out of a commitment to contingency, human freedom, and indeterminism.41 Brunhes, along with others in his generation, had a growing interest in the landscape and the interactions between the landscape and various aspects of human life; he paid increasing attention to the particulars and peculiarities of the

different regions of France. As opposed to the indifference of the abstract geometrical approach, this generation’s methodology sought to identify and appreciate what was typical of and distinct about each of France’s various regions. Consequently, the typical now served as a yardstick for the classification of the various regions of France and for drawing the boundaries between them, which in turn led to a new and different mapping of those regions. What Brunhes brought with him to Kahn’s photographic project and then, through the archive, expanded to the entire globe was a great sensitivity to geographical variety underscored by a staunch humanistic conception of that variety; Brunhes called this approach “human geography.” Because Brunhes was interested in what was typical of a region and of a society, the photographers were instructed to first tour the places they were to photograph. Only after they had become acquainted with the local landscape and society—after they had learned to distinguish what was apparently typical from the atypical or singular of that place—were they to begin photographing. And although they were allowed to photograph whatever they found worthy of being photographed, they were clearly guided toward documenting the typical, routine, and even banal of everyday life over the exotic or exceptional.42 This interest in diversity and in the regionally typical, along with this special sensitivity to the dynamic interactions between landscapes and human forms of life and habitat, formed the scientific core of the Archives of the Planet. Brunhes gave his scientific outlook an almost formulaic definition, emphasizing the negative correlation between the diversity of phenomena and methodological simplicity (“Devant la variété des faits, on apprend à se défier de la simplicité

46  Chapter 1

des formules”).43 In 1906 he gave concrete form to this notion by way of the following classificatory outline: Group 1: facts concerning unproductive use of the land: a. houses b. pathways Group 2: facts concerning the constructive exploitation of the land (animal and plant life): a. domestic animals b. fields and gardens Group 3: facts concerning the destructive exploitation of the environment or nature: a. exploitation of plant and animal life b. exploitation of the land (minerals, mines) This simple geometrical outline of points, lines, and surfaces comprised what Brunhes viewed as the “essential facts” about all varieties of housing construction devised by humans; all kinds of pathways used for movement and human communication; and all human exploitation of the environment and nature.44 Before they were dispatched to their missions in various parts of the world, photographers were instructed to follow this outline. The outline, though simple, encompassed the entire purview of human geography. And while my first impression of images from the vast archive was that of a magnificent multitude, reflecting a degree of random chance in the gaze of the photographers, I realized, after reading the Kahn Museum’s book about Jean Brunhes, that the photographers were in fact following a very clear directive.45 This classificatory outline is the grid for the photographic archive. Each photograph in the archive can be fair-

ly easily allocated to one of the categories in the outline. This recognition feels almost like a revelation. But even more significantly, recognizing the grid allows us to see that the photographs were meant to lead to a sensual, cognitive, and political learning process, in which viewers were to gradually acquire the ability to observe photographs in the way intended by the photographers and by Brunhes. Yet the ultimate purpose was not to be able to read the photographs but to be able, with the aid of the photographs, to observe and appreciate the kinds of reality the photographs documented.

Photography as “Demonstrative Proof ”: Brunhes’s Work with Photography It is possible to demonstrate how the photographs serve as what Brunhes called “demonstrative proof ” for the goal of the archives when one looks at them via the issue of control. As Allan Sekula has shown in his seminal essay, Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon attempted to develop what Sekula terms “two-sided control,” which refers to control over both the photographic treatment of the object and the object that is placed before the lens. By deciding, as we have seen, that photographers would use the autochrome color technology exclusively, Kahn set one technological standard for the archive. But aside from this one technological parameter, Brunhes and the photographers limited their control to the (geographical) object alone. From the perspective of control, it is particularly interesting to compare “type” photographs from Kahn’s archive with arguably the most famous typologists in twentieth-century photography, the German photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher.

Utopia and Photography circa 1900   47

figure 1.2. Bridges in Afghanistan, France, Italy, and Algeria, 1916–29. Left column: Fernand Cuville, Soissons, Aisne, France; Frédéric Gadmer, Constantine, Algeria; Georges Chevalier, near Avallon, France; photographer unknown, Saint-Cloud, France (Archives of the Planet: A 12 227 S, A 61 640, A 9 337, A 73 347). Right column: Frédéric Gadmer, Constantine, Algeria; Frédéric Gadmer, Laghouat, Algeria; Auguste Léon, Rome, Italy; Frédéric Gadmer, Maidan, Afghanistan (Archives of the Planet: A 61 640, A 61 350 S, A 25 682, A 57 721). From Collection Archives de la planète—Albert-Kahn Museum/Hauts-de-Seine Department.

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These eight archive photographs from various parts of the globe feature bridges (Figure 1.2).46 From our current historical perspective, in which every utopia is colonialist, imperialist, and Western, we can easily see how the photographs exemplify photography’s ability to center, fix, and stabilize the gaze on the “East.” A romantic photograph can show an impressive bridge, while the majestic mosque subtly suggests the superiority of secular France and the French citizen. And if we apply Flusser’s hierarchy of communication, the unilateral direction of the flow of communication becomes apparent: French photographers were sent out to take photographs all over the world and bring them back to the center, Paris. Although all the bridges meet the functional definition of a bridge, the bridges differ in size, length, shape, material, architecture, and aesthetic design, and in the relationship between the bridge and the surrounding landscape. And the photographs differ in terms of their distance from the bridge, the angle from which the bridge was photographed, the lighting employed, and the photographs’ background. If we now turn to the photographs of Hilla and Bernd Becher, it is apparent that they were far more concerned with their control over the photographs. The Bechers operated in the second half of the twentieth century, so they were not contemporaries of Kahn’s photographers. But their work can be traced back through a photographic genealogy that includes August Sander, Karl Blossfeldt, and Albert Renger-Patzsch (discussed in Chapter 2, on Lerski), with whom they shared an interest in developing a distinctly formal photographic language, one that emphasized the ability of photography to bring out and express aspects of reality in a sharper way than human perception could do, while studying

subjects that were within the purview of Kahn’s archive. This emphasis becomes even more apparent when we pay special attention to serialization. Over decades of photographing in Germany, Britain, France, and the United States, Hilla and Bernd Becher amassed thousands of photographs of various objects that could be easily classified according to Brunhes’s outline. Although they also photographed houses, they are most associated with the typological approach to various kinds of industrial constructions. While the photographs in Kahn’s archive were organized geographically, according to the different missions, the Bechers’ photographs are normally displayed and published according to series of subjects. Several years ago I saw an exhibit of thousands of their photographs in Berlin, walls and walls of series of standardized photographs depicting almost identical objects: water towers, cooling towers, gasonomers, industrial façades, blast furnaces, winding towers, house façades, and more. Although these are landscape photographs that study the interplay between the observed object and its environment, their emphasis clearly lies on maximal control over the photographic treatment of the focal, industrial object, which is key to showing the similarity of constructions over great national and geographical distances and to creating series of almost identical photographs. Not only are camera and film or plate identical (as in Kahn’s archive), but great care is taken to strictly control distance, angle, lighting, background, depth, relative size of the photographed object within the frame, and shades of black, white, and gray (a degree of control that would not be possible with color photography). One could choose a series of photographs almost randomly to demonstrate the different senses of control at work in the Bechers’ work and in Kahn’s archive. Here is a series

Utopia and Photography circa 1900   49

figure 1.3. Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gas tanks in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, 1963–67. © Estate Bernd and Hilla Becher, represented by Max Becher; courtesy Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—Bernd and Hilla Becher Archive, Cologne.

of gasonomers from Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, photographed by the Bechers between 1963 and 1997, in a four-by-four grid (30 x 40 cm) on one single page (Figure 1.3).47 To recognize the degree of photographic control exerted here, let us look at just one element: for instance, the background. With one exception (the third image down in the second row from the left), which shows electric wires, the backgrounds of all the photographs are entirely bare, and all share the same constant and homogeneous light-gray sky in the background. The background emphasizes that the focal point of the photographs is the industrial construction. To achieve such con-

trol over the photographs, the photographers had to locate constructions that were similar enough, find identical angles and distances from which to photograph them, wait for similar weather conditions, most likely take the photographs while holding prints of earlier photographs of similar constructions in order to maintain the parallels, and do all of this while using large 8-by-10 cameras, which correct the distortion in the lines that would otherwise appear in photographs of architectural buildings. The strict control that is maintained accentuates and is to a great extent what in fact generates the similarity among the gasonomers. Sander, as we will see in the chapter

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figure 1.4. Auguste Léon, Photos of young boys. Left: Serb; middle: Muslim; right: Croat (Archives of the Planet: A 1 739, A 1 736, A 1 625). From Collection Archives de la planète—Albert-Kahn Museum/Hautsde-Seine Department.

figure 1.5. Auguste Léon, Photos of entrances. Left: Mosque; middle: Eastern Orthodox church; right: Synagogue (Archives of the Planet: A 1 714, A 1 688, A 1 545). From Collection Archives de la planète—­ Albert-Kahn Museum/Hauts-de-Seine Department.

focusing on Lerski (Chapter 2), was also engaged in a typological study of a kind, not of industrial construction but of people in society. There is some overlap between what these photographers were doing and Kahn’s project, but their respective onuses were different: The first was placed on creating a formal photographic language; the other on generating geographical facts. How Brunhes used such “geographi-

cal facts” scientifically, in terms of what he viewed as “objective evidence for subjective observation,” can be shown using the example of two additional series by Auguste Léon from the archive, one showing young boys (Figure 1.4)48 and one showing entrances to a mosque, an Eastern Orthodox church, and a Jewish synagogue in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Figure 1.5).49 The similarities among the photographs result from an emphasis on

Utopia and Photography circa 1900   51

showing the similarities among the objects themselves (the boys and the entrances) rather than on the production of serialized photographs. Why, one might ask, three boys, in particular? To demonstrate the essential similarity among these rival groups, the photographer and the scientists would in fact have had to choose boys rather than girls. Boys are (ideologically, subconsciously) the symbol of universalism; women (like Jews) are always “tainted” by particularism. Nevertheless, subtle expressions of ideology can be discerned in this series, in particular with respect to the Muslim boy in the middle: There is a suggestion of femininity in this figure (more noticeable if you look at the figure while covering the head), and , unlike the (Christian) Croat and Serb, who are photographed in situated landscapes, this figure is photographed against a closed, unidentifiable background, without time or place. The three boys all look more or less the same age. They are photographed outside: one in a fenced garden, one against the wall of a building, and one on a hill, with a valley in the background. Their posture and their faces bear a certain resemblance (as does their clothing, the greatest difference being their footgear, as only the middle boy wears proper shoes). What draws my attention and emphasizes their similarity is their headgear: They are all wearing almost identical caps. Brunhes thus advances his argument by controlling one particular (cultural) variable. The three entrances—to the mosque, the church, and the synagogue—also point to great similarities. All three photographs were taken frontally (although the one of the synagogue is taken from an angle skewed slightly to the left, probably because the straight frontal angle was unavailable). The three entrances show similarities in their ar-

chitectural styles: Observe the play of arches and rectangular shapes enclosing each other in each of the three entrances. In all three photographs, the top line is a straight line, but underneath it there is an arch; in the mosque and the synagogue, there is then another rectangular shape inside the arch. Here, then, are two sets of photographs, from the same general geographical context and showing similarities—but how does Brunhes make use of these “essential facts”? His lectures at the Collège de France, based on his research sojourn in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1912 (two years before the beginning of World War I), make a remarkable argument about the society and culture of Bosnia-Herzegovina and make brilliant use of photographs to demonstrate that argument.50 His main contention is that there is a discrepancy between the self-identification of the main populations of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the true situation. For various reasons (Brunhes enters into a detailed historical and political analysis), the different groups (Muslim, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox) identify themselves as stemming from and belonging to different ethnic, racial, or national collectives (the Muslims as Turks, the Catholics as Croats, and the Eastern Orthodox as Slavs—Brunhes does not reference the Jews at this particular point in the discussion51). He, as a scientific observer, can observe that all the groups, irrespective of their self-identification or self-understanding, are ethnically Slavic and partake of the same culture. The three boys, with their similar appearances and similar caps, are an Eastern Orthodox, a Muslim, and a Catholic. The houses of prayer, likewise, be they Muslim, Christian, or Jewish, partake of one architectural and aesthetic culture. These two series thus beautifully demonstrate his conception of photographs as capturing “geographical facts” and their

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epistemological status as “objective evidence for subjective observation.” Photography was particularly pertinent to Brunhes’s program because he conceived of geographical facts as essentially physiognomic in nature.52 There was thus a structural analogy between his scientific strategy to “atomize the world” into “geographical facts”53 and the essentially atomizing capacity of the medium of photography. But in another respect photography was only an instrument, and the goal, which Brunhes shared with Kahn, was far more ambitious: The aim of the photographic archive, conforming to a particular set of progressive social and political goals, was nothing less than to transform human vision. 54 Here, then, we have to address utopia directly.

Excursus: Photography and Human Similarity Kahn and Brunhes understood the power of serialization. As a thought experiment, imagine looking at photographs of human faces. When we look at two photographs of human faces, we begin to compare them, and the differences between the faces come to the fore. But once a third photograph is added, the photographs turn into a series, and it is now their similarities that come to the fore instead. In a different but not ideologically unrelated context, Milan Kundera expressed something similar: “If you put the pictures of two different faces side by side, your eye is struck by everything that makes one different from the other. But if you have two hundred and twenty-three faces side by side, you suddenly realize that it’s all just one face in many variations and that no such thing as an individual ever existed.”55 This ability to point to variety and similarity is what Kahn and Brunhes provided,

only with seventy thousand photographs instead of two hundred and twenty-three. Kundera made his observation in the first part of his book Immortality, in a chapter called “The Face.” Interestingly, however, much of Kundera’s discussion of the subject is carried out by way of photography and photographs. (Unlike the English translation from the Czech, the Hebrew translation also speaks explicitly of “photographs” rather than simply “pictures” in the paragraph quoted.) The role of photographs in Kundera’s thought experiment about human similarity is not entirely accidental. Kundera’s oscillation in the quoted passage between two “pictures” and “two hundred and twenty-three faces” probably has something to do with his perception of photography’s capacity for serialization. Or, to be even more precise, it has to do with our intuitive conceptual understanding of the capacity of photography to show similarities through serialization: We can imagine the effect of placing two hundred and twenty-three photographs of faces next to each other (without having to actually do it) with far greater ease than we can imagine mustering two hundred and twenty-three actual people for the same effect.

Utopia Brunhes’s 1912 lectures on Bosnia-Herzegovina, for which he made brilliant use of photographs from Kahn’s archive, touched on a conflict-riddled area of Europe. The decisions about where to send photographic missions for the archive were based on the dispositions of Boasian cultural anthropology, with priority given to areas that were seen as being transformed or disintegrating in a world rapidly moving toward homogenization.56 This conception of a world

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facing dramatic changes, however, was not unidirectional, and Kahn’s archive was not intended merely to rescue what was still possible to save nor simply to document, but rather to normatively transform society and human vision. The feasibility of Kahn’s intentions for his philanthropic activities are corroborated by the findings of recent scholarship on utopia, namely that utopian thought and utopian projects have an immense impact, whether positive or negative, on reality. But with regard to utopia I have ascribed to Kahn’s photographic project two contradictory attributes, or at least two attributes that stand in tension with each other, namely ideology and utopia. Using Karl Mannheim’s opposition between “ideology,” which works toward maintaining the social and political status quo, and “utopia,” which attempts to undermine and replace it, I have suggested that Kahn’s projects, including the photographic archive, cannot be understood as utopian but must be considered as ideological. At the same time, however, I have argued that Kahn’s photographic project was indeed utopian, and that its ultimate goal was to transform human vision. I am not sure whether it is possible to completely explain away this tension, but I hope that situating Kahn’s archive within the history of utopia, particularly the history of utopia around 1900, will at least clarify some of the tension. Kahn’s photographic project participated in the general nineteenth-century tendency that can be observed with regard to utopia. In the nineteenth century, which is viewed by many as the most utopian century, the main change is considered to be the shift from utopian literature to the attainment of social utopias. 57 Utopian literature was almost completely absent throughout the nineteenth century, and when it began to re-

appear toward the end of the century, it was most frequently in the form of a platform for the achievement of sociopolitical utopia. This attitudinal change could be ascribed not only to philosophical ideas about history and materialization (such as Hegel’s) but to rapid scientific, technological, and industrial advances, and, above all, to a belief in progress and the possibility of uplifting humanity.58 Utopian visions were not so much about impossible, fantastic places that did not and could not exist in space and time; instead, and far more concretely, they were connected to historical and political processes of progress and justified by ostensibly rational ideas. An almost necessary result of this change (the other side of the same coin) was a certain limitation of the scope and extension of utopian goals. Theodor Herzl established the Zionist movement in 1897, the same year in which Kahn established his first utopian project. When he envisioned the future Jewish society, Herzl did not envision a fantastic society, one that could exist only in some abstract imagination. Instead, as he stated (in what became the central motto of the Zionist movement) in his 1902 utopian novel, Altneuland, its materialization was a matter of human will: “If you want it, this is no fairy tale” (Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen). The statement goes on: “But if you don’t want it, then it is and will remain a fairy tale” (Wenn ihr aber nicht wollt, so ist es und bleibt es ein Märchen).59 Kahn’s various projects, including the photographic archive, belong to the same moment in history. Ernst Bloch described this moment in his monumental philosophical work The Principle of Hope, where he defined utopia as any orientation that transcends reality and breaks the bounds of existing order (based on rational rather than chiliastic certainties of hope, without transcendental support or

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intervention).60 Kahn envisioned a transformed reality, one that differed from the world in which he lived, but the economy of which his photographic project partook was one of institutions that were practically oriented, through gradual, incremental steps and processes, toward what he believed were practically achievable utopian goals.61 Mannheim’s conception of utopia, alluded to earlier, emphasizes realization. In this respect it, too, belongs to the shared late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century conception of utopia that also includes Kahn’s and Herzl’s concepts. But Mannheim also conceived of utopia as necessarily undermining the existing social order or status quo. His Ideology and Utopia, first published in 1936, thus encompasses the communist movement and specifically the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia within its conceptualization of utopia (irrespective of the fact that Marx and Engels vehemently denied that socialism was utopian). Kahn and Herzl, meanwhile, did not believe that the materialization of their utopian goals necessarily had to undermine the existing social and political order. By photographing the world according to specific guidelines in order to transform human vision, Kahn intended to reshape and accelerate already existing progressive philosophical, anthropological, and political forces and ideas. It was not required, or advantageous, to overturn the existing order—and it was not a necessary component of the contemporary understanding of utopia. Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jew, had been covering the Dreyfus affair in Paris for the Viennese newspaper Die Welt when, in 1896, he was moved to write Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) and to establish the Zionist movement. Also in Paris, but much

closer to the circles of exiled Russian socialist and communist leaders there, S. An-sky, a Russian Jew, envisioned a future Russian society that would free not only the serfs but also Russian Jewry, which at that time was excluded from the right to full citizenship. We have no indication that Herzl, An-sky, and Kahn were acquainted, came across each other, or influenced each other’s ideas. While there were utopian moments in all three visions, Kahn’s vision was the most universal in scope, paying no direct attention to anything Jewish and geared toward humanity at large.

CONCLUSION: PHOTOGRAPHY AND COMMUNICATION Within the performative framework this book attempts to develop, one of the most interesting questions with regard to Kahn’s case pertains to agency. What kinds of agency did Kahn exert over the photographs produced for his archive, given that he did not himself take any of them? Kahn initiated, established, and funded the photographic archive, and I have also discussed earlier two decisions taken by Kahn that greatly influenced the photographs in the archive: first, his decision to standardize the archive through the use of a particular color technology, and second, his decision to employ Jean Brunhes, who, as the scientific director of the photographic archive, provided it with its conceptual grid. In the remainder of this chapter, I wish to discuss two additional aspects related to Kahn’s agency: first, pattern-setting as a condition for transforming human vision, and second, photography as a means of communication.

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Pattern-setting and the Transformability of Vision: Kahn and Warburg Kahn and Brunhes employed photography to answer a question that others were also raising at that time, namely the question of the transformability of human sight and vision in the age of photography. It is an essential component of Kahn and Brunhes’s conception of the photographic archive that vision was habituated and that amassing thousands and thousands of photographs could therefore transform human vision. While I was researching this chapter, it became increasingly clear that there was an uncanny connection between Kahn and his almost exact contemporary, Aby Warburg (1886–1929). Warburg, who was born into a German Jewish family of bankers, declined to enter the family business and, with the family’s resources, established the Warburg Institute in Hamburg. Warburg’s studies and experiments also provided an answer to the question of the transformability of human sight and vision. One of the threads that runs through Warburg’s studies on Renaissance art and culture pertains to the (visually subconscious) forms and images, powerful conveyers of expression, that he analyzed in terms of “pathos.” Showing how images from late antiquity appear and reappear in Western culture, Warburg pointed to their relative permanence. From 1924 to his death in 1929, Warburg, too, created an archive. At first, at least, this was a “private archive,” not intended for public display, although Warburg did intend to eventually complete it and have it published. Called the “Mnemosyne Atlas” (Memory Atlas), it was comprised of various kinds of documents from art-historical and

cosmographic contexts, such as newspaper scraps, photographs, and reproductions of artworks and maps, which he collected together on panels. Warburg used the archive to study deep, often hidden, structures of visual signification by way of intuitive associative organization.62 He believed that these symbolic images, when juxtaposed and then placed in sequence, could foster immediate, synoptic insights into the afterlife of pathos-charged images depicting what he called bewegtes Leben (life in motion or animated life). The Kahn and Warburg archives both could be seen as circulating around the same question of the transformability of human sight and vision in the age of photography. If Kahn, forward-leaning in his disposition, hoped to transform human vision, Warburg was disposed to suggest the deep structural boundaries of any such attempt, and his archive was a study in the persistent, arational and irrational powers that underlay, shaped, and bounded visual perception and experience across time.

Communication If, in Kahn’s project, we strip photography of its various important but intermediate functions—such as documenting different cultures and peoples in a transitioning world, studying the dynamic relations between man and environment, and showing the basic similarity of humans throughout the world—we find at its core, alongside transforming vision, that it is a means of communication. The broader context of the attempt to standardize photography as a means of visual communication is contemporary attempts to standardize weights, measures, time, and transportation as well.63 All of Kahn’s projects were “bridges” (to use Miri

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Eliav-Feldon’s metaphor) between a utopian vision and reality, and all were based on the advancement of communication: through oral discussion, through the generation of written documents, and through the generation of visual documents (photographs and moving images). By communication, I mean both a technological means of communication and communication in its broader definition as connections between people for the exchange of ideas or information. In this regard photography was similar to other contemporary technologies, such as the telegraph and the telephone. Kahn’s photographic archive signaled its participation in a rational discourse entrenched in advanced modern society, technology, and science. Photography facilitated communication, and communication facilitated rationality and a rational outlook on society and the world. I would like to briefly discuss two issues that flow from this acknowledgment— one narrower and one broader. The narrower issue relates to Kahn’s photographic project with regard to what William M. Ivins, the first curator of the print department at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, called the “rationalization of sight.”64 Ivins first introduced this term in 1938 with respect to the development of visual communication as a technique for conveying repeatable information, primarily the development of linear perspective in art. In 1953 he extended this view to photography. Given its accuracy, amount of detail, and the geometrical perspective of central projection and section, photography became “the norm for the appearance of everything,” and “it was not long before people began to think photographically.”65 Kahn may never have formulated the relationship between his photographic archive and the rationalization of vision in such a direct form, but such an interpretation sits well with his own

overall outlook on photography as a medium and the roles he desired for the photographic archive he established. The creation of a photographic archive of the world was intended to foster, increase, and sharpen sight and communication in practice. The second point, related but much broader, concerns the relationship between the photographic archive and the philosophical ideals of the Enlightenment. Kahn’s project existed deep into the interwar period, but conceptually it belonged to the precatastrophic era—that is the era before 1914—based as it was on a belief in modern progress and rationality. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Enlightenment project and its key metaphor of vision fell into deep disrepute, becoming the subject of criticism from Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and many others (mostly on the political left) as an idealization of mankind that carried within it the seed of twentieth-century violence.66 Seen from this perspective, Kahn’s photographic archive and the role that it ascribed to vision in particular were not only flawed but also dangerous. After 1945, however, the political understanding of communication changed. Communication, as a political instrument for establishing networks of political, commercial, cultural, or scientific communication, as a precondition to mutual recognition and understanding among peoples, and as a powerful hedge against hostility, stands at the core of post-1945 Europe in the form of the European Community. The conception of humanity in which it is embedded is, however, a humbler one, less confident in mankind’s rational, forward-looking capacity for progress. I would like to conclude with a look at Kahn’s photographic project in the context of the political and ideological trajectory

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of photography in the twentieth century. If we take a step back to appreciate the bigger picture, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, with which attitude toward photography did history side? With Kahn’s aspirations to bring peoples closer together and to show their relative similarity? Or, on the contrary, with Kahn’s antidemocratic political and ideological opponents, such as Eugen Fischer, and their vision of difference and inequality? The foundations of photography have changed dramatically since Kahn’s lifetime. We live in an endless

and exponentially growing photographic archive. But maybe the most significant change is the fact that the enormous proliferation of photography in the second half of the twentieth century, including the results of the digital revolution and the creation of the World Wide Web, was accompanied by democratic reciprocity of a kind and degree that Kahn could never have imagined. The seed of the ideological antecedent of these processes can be found around 1900, in Kahn’s utopian vision of photography.

Chapter 2

THE BOUNDARIES of PHOTOGRAPHIC INTENTION Helmar Lerski’s “Failed” Project Lagrange said to me in French that Lerski’s work is incredibly typical for his country. I asked him: which country?

A

—Walter Marti, “Metamorphosis as a Provocation”

lbert Kahn’s early twentieth-century photographic project, the focus of the previous chapter, featured in a protean fashion some of the most important educational uses of photography that were found again in the second half of the twentieth century. And if his archive intended to use photography to transform vision and change reality, it was more successful than scholarship has previously acknowledged. At the center of this chapter stands a failed project of Helmar Lerski’s—but what a failure!—one that failed both practically, because it was never published, and fundamentally, as it was intended to convey one thing and conveyed something else altogether. Lerski, the focus of this chapter, was one of the most renowned and distinctive photographers of his time, the most prominent photographer in 1930s and 1940s pre-state Israel, and a photographer whose art is so unique that after one has seen just a few of

his ­photographs, his others are instantly recognizable. After he developed his unique mirror technique in Berlin before the end of World War I, Lerski employed the same technique to advance the same set of artistic, conceptual, and political ideas on closely interrelated social and political subjects. In his first major project, while still in Germany, he used photography to dissociate image and social class. In his third project, in Palestine, he demonstrated his power to endlessly recast the image of one single person. In the failed project, in between, he exercised this same dissociating strategy in a national and ethnic (or “racial”) context. His aesthetic, conceptual, and political consistency only sharpens the question: Why did this particular one fail? Within the broader historical context of 1930s Palestine, Zionist culture, and the formation of the image of the “new Jew,” as well as the rise of Nazism in Germany, with its aesthetics and

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visual imagery, this case demonstrates one of the core arguments of the book, about the close connection between photography and the things in the world. This case will help to make visible the changing and moving ground of photography, embracing as it does both producers and end users. One photograph from this failed project fired my interest in Lerski and anchors this chapter. This spectacular photograph was taken on his Tel Aviv roof studio in the early 1930s (Figure 2.1). It was the first of his photographs that I came across, and, enchanted by its deep humanism, I ended my book Race and Photography with it. Because Lerski’s transnational career brings together photography and Zionism in 1930s and 1940s Palestine, I decided to focus on him as one of the cases of this book, but the more I researched, the more I discovered interrelated technological and ideological complexities. The print I had come across was first published in a book, Man My Brother, that was produced in Lerski’s honor in

figure 2.1. Helmar Lerski, Portrait of a Jewish Yemenite man, 1930s. © Museum Folkwang Essen.

communist East Germany in 1956.1 This photograph expresses many of the unique qualities that have come to be associated with Lerski’s photography: It uses his special mirror technique that enhances and manipulates natural light to create highly contrastive lighting; the subject’s face fills almost the entire frame; it is taken from very close up, with a large-format camera; and it combines depth with visible and tactile details, thereby taking on a quality akin to that of a three-dimensional sculpture. In addition, the frame contains no direct information about its location or time. Nor does it betray any social or individual context for the person being photographed. And in contrast to what we expect from a “good,” professional studio portrait, in which light is expected to fall softly and evenly on the subject, here parts of the face are so overexposed that they appear burnt, while other planes of the face, in almost complete darkness, are eclipsed. What is this a photograph of? What larger project was this part of? What was it intend-

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ed to convey or to do? To what extent was it successful in doing so? To answer these questions, we will delve into Lerski’s biography and career, apply existing frames of interpretation, compare the project of which this photograph was a part with other projects, and compare this photograph with others in the same project. All this reveals Lerski as the subject of controversy, with interpretations that see his work as Jewish Orientalism, as a quasi-racist photo-documentary project, as using the 1930s fascist “language of light,” or as an expression of antifascist, humanistic ideas. His philosophical clarity and his mastery of the medium make Lerski a useful study. He accompanied his photography with propositions: that photography was about “painting with light,” that it was a “double site of projection,” or that in “every human being everything can be found.”2 These propositions expressed his intentions and attempted to define how he wished his art to be viewed and understood. I will say more about photographic intentions in what follows; at this stage, however, what is important to me is to stress that both his propositions and his photographs can be understood as taking part in controversy. And where there is controversy, there is a question or, to be more precise, a complex of interrelated questions about photographic intentionality.3 To uncover these questions, I will treat Lerski’s photography as a site of controversy, drawing on the method of studying controversy developed by Bruno Latour and exemplified with regard to the controversy between Louis Pasteur and Félix-Archimède Pouchet over the fermentation of lactic acid and the existence of microbes.4 What is crucial, in the current context, is that Latour provides both a method and terms for a nonanachronistic study of a controversy as an ongoing process over time. He terms the

degree of success in a controversy the ability of one side to “gain reality” for its position; part of Pasteur’s difficulty in “gaining reality” for his discovery and for his claim for the existence of microbes lay in the fact that they were taken to be impossible from the perspective of the science of his time and in the fact that, if science was viewed as progressive, Pasteur’s discovery would have to be seen, scientifically, as a form of regression. Latour follows the controversy from its inception in 1864, when the majority of scientists did not believe in the existence of microbes; he continues to follow it as, gradually and against serious opposition and resistance, a growing number of scientists came to believe in their existence—hence the “gaining of reality” or, as Latour also puts it, the “extension of existence.” Latour can only study this process based on a kind of symmetry that he posits between Pasteur and his opponents; that is, by suspending or ignoring the question of which side possessed the truth and, instead, following the process by which one of the sides managed to gain more reality for its views. But certain complications cannot be avoided here. For instance, some of Lerski’s actions, as expressed in his selection as well as his treatment of photographic subjects, led to his “losing reality” in Latour’s terms (not entirely unlike Pasteur, in fact). And these actions, I wish to argue, contributed to the controversy over his later interpretations. At times it also seems that, for a historical appreciation of Lerski’s work, one cannot ignore the thought that it embodies certain displacements—that photographing Yemenites in Palestine, for instance, was an intervention in German photography and politics. Addressing such complications is crucial for appreciating how Lerski’s photographs were able to generate such opposite interpretations, and they go to the core of this chapter in the history of photography.

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The first part of this chapter is comprised of three interpretations that have been applied to Lerski, and it explores how they frame the understanding of Figure 2.1 that we focus on here. The second part of the chapter shifts the perspective to the question of photographic intention and contextualizes the photograph by comparing it with some of Lerski’s other projects. The third, concluding part addresses the conditions that made the controversy possible and argues for the boundaries of photographic education. While I tend to agree with Alain Tanner, who said that “photography and film have nothing to do with each other,”5 this view becomes harder to defend in the specific case of Lerski. After he was educated as a bank clerk in Switzerland and worked as an actor in a German theater company in the United States, Lerski moved into photography in 1909. In 1915, in the middle of the Great War, he relocated to Berlin to work in the theater and film industry there, returning once again to photography in the late 1920s. In Palestine, where he moved in 1931, he continued alternating between the two. (In his autobiographical essay, Lerski explains that he moved to Palestine not because of any Zionist creed but because of the land’s “Lichtmöglichkeiten” [light possibilities]— though virtually all photographers complain about the flat yellow light—and he left Palestine again, for Zurich, a month before the establishment of Israel.6) This chapter, then, which deals only with his photography, is of necessity limited.7

FRAMES OF EXPLANATION Lerski as Orientalist Three frames of interpretation were applied to Lerski. If we follow the historians of pho-

tography and curators Rona Sela and Guy Raz, the photograph in Figure 2.1 exemplifies Jewish Orientalism in photography. Lerski, a northern European Jew, is photographing a Yemenite man. In this asymmetrical relationship, the man remains nameless, anonymous. The photograph was classified and later published under the title “Yemenite.” The photographic treatment, accentuating his non-European nose, eyes, and facial structure, portrays him as “other.” In this Lerski shows his work to be organically related to the photography that developed in Palestine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and this photograph continues a long Orientalist tradition in photography. From the inception of photography in the nineteenth century, according to Sela, the native inhabitants of Palestine were photographed as exotic, romantic, otherworldly, ur-specimens, expected to fit a preconceived image of the “Holy Land.” For Westerners the land was an undeveloped, primitive, backward space, and Arabs and Jews were photographed in such a way as to project these features.8 Using this broader context as a background, Sela interprets Lerski’s photography in Palestine together with his film Work (Avoda;1934). In her interpretation, the film shows the beautiful, modern, light-skinned, blond “new Jew” arriving in a primitive and backward land. Most of Sela’s account centers on the Jewish Orientalist photography of Arabs in the context of the Arab-Jewish conflict; she views Lerski as integral to this pattern. While she does not directly discuss his photographs of Yemenites, they fall well within her framework of a white, northern European Jew who represents his non-European photographic subjects as backward, primitive, native others. Like Sela, Guy Raz, in his 2012 exhibi-

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tion on the photography of Yemenites in pre-Israel Palestine, situates Lerski’s photographs of Yemenites in a Saidian interpretive framework.9 Raz shows that almost all active artists or photographers present in the Palestine of that time photographed Yemenite Jews. By putting this photograph in the context of a series of photographs of Yemenites made by Ephraim Moses Lilien, Erich Brauer, and many others, Raz establishes the Yemenite subject as the referent. Yemenites, according to Raz, had replaced Arabs as the modern conduit for the biblical Jew in the service of Zionist ideology. Raz presents Lerski’s photograph as one of the last instances of European Ashkenazi photographers photographing Yemenite Jews in Palestine. (To remain consistent in his Saidian interpretation, Raz excluded photographs taken by Yemenite photographers from the exhibition.) Orientalist motifs and ideas were built into the photographic gaze of these photographers, resulting in a patronizing European gaze on the non-European (Jewish) other. Some practical questions arise here. How did Guy Raz know that these were Yemenites? Raz’s answer is that he traveled to Essen to see the prints, and when he asked the archivist for photographs of Yemenites, these are the photographs he was given. He added that, after working on photographs of Yemenites for a long time, he instantly recognized photographs of Yemenites.10 But when I showed this photograph at a conference in Tel Aviv University, without disclosing who the subject was supposed to be, people in the audience guessed that he was from India. In a conference at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, in which “Yemenite” was in the title of the lecture, one scholar initially thought this was a self-portrait of Lerski; another, a scholar of Yemenite background, approached me after

the lecture and questioned whether this was indeed a Yemenite man, only to inform me, the following day, about the part of Yemen from which that man supposedly came. I will be arguing that Lerski intended to elicit this kind of confusion and doubt about the subject’s background in the minds of viewers as they try to spontaneously discern it, but that this intention works differently for this photograph than for others in the same project. However, if we are not basing our judgment simply on visual impressions, how can we know that this is in fact a photograph of a Jewish Yemenite man? Apart from celebrities, or acquaintances of his in Milwaukee, Berlin, or Tel Aviv, Lerski’s subjects were always kept unnamed. The Museum Folkwang in Essen, where Lerski’s estate is found, also provides only partial and problematic answers. The photographs of Yemenites are found in a box that groups together photographs from Lerski’s “Jewish Heads” project. The information provided in the card catalog is drawn from what is written on the back of each print, where the photographs have various markings that are not entirely consistent, such as “ jemenitische Mutter” (Yemenite mother; L327a/79), “Alter Jemenit in Palaestina” (old Yemenite in Palestine; L323/70), “Yemenit” or “Jemenitischer Haendler” (Yemenite or Yemenite merchant; L301/79). But when Florian Ebner, a Lerski scholar and, at the time, the director of the photographic collection, was asked who gave the photographs these labels, he replied that it was almost certainly not Lerski himself. The photographs were most probably labeled by Lerski’s (second) wife, Anneliese, very likely not until after Lerski’s death. Ebner recalls having seen a partial list from which Anneliese Lerski most likely drew the labels, but this list can no longer be located. At least in some instances, the classification was most

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likely deduced from the images themselves. Out of roughly five hundred photographs in this project, I counted more than a hundred whose labels indicated a Yemenite subject. Anneliese Lerski testified to her husband’s fascination with Yemenite Jews as manifesting the traits of “a noble, pure race.”11 But as for the original question: In fact we cannot know for sure that the subject was a Yemenite. We can push our understanding of Lerski within the context of Jewish Orientalism further if, following Raz, we turn from these practical considerations to a comparison of Lerski with Lilien. Lilien, “the first Zionist artist,” visited Palestine three times, in 1906, 1910, and 1914, but his

photographic series of Yemenite Jews, taken from three different angles, dates to his first visit, in 1906 (Figure 2.2).12 Lilien, who was well known during his lifetime for his illustrations and engravings, was swept up by the Zionist idea in its earliest phase, and his art of that time was intended to advance that idea, to endow Zionism with images as well as with a philosophical and aesthetic vision. Lilien’s depictions of the Jordan River, Jerusalem’s mountains, or “Jewish heads” were thus deliberately idealized, and his idealization of Yemenite Jews was an integral part of his general outlook. The specific form it took was the depiction of beautiful, allochronic, biblical figures.

figure 2.2. Ephraim M. Lilien, Jewish Yemenite men, private collection.

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figure 2.3. Ephraim M. Lilien, Jewish Yemenite man. © Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

In his letters to his wife, Lilien insists on the centrality of photography to his working process and form of observation, but it is not an end in itself.13 If his representations of Yemenite Jews depict them as “other,” this is an internal other, part and parcel of the same Jewish people or race to which he commits his own belonging. Lilien respects his Yemenite subjects, and his photographs magnify the beauty he ascribes to them in his letters. The racial angles and the settings he employs depict them as ancient Hebrews, Semites, fusing myth, fantasy, and the shock he experienced at the state of the land and its inhabitants on his first visit there.14 The series of three photographs of the same man, taken from three different angles, is not a standard anthropological series (Figure 2.3). The photographs, taken against a stone wall, of an adult man dressed in a striped jacket and collarless buttoned shirt with an Oriental hat, sidelocks, and a very thin, wispy beard, possess a distinct sense of movement. In the frontal photograph, the eyes of the subject cannot be seen, as he is looking downward; the profile is achieved by the man turning his head slightly backward, because the photographer is standing

behind his shoulder; only in the semi-profile angle, centering on the face, are the eyes visible. They look directly at the photographer and beyond him, the gaze expressing transcendence and distance. This same sense of almost terrible beauty, transcendence, and distance can be felt in Lilien’s other portraits of old Yemenite Jews as well. Photographed frontally or in profile, holding the Talmud or reading it, they are dark and different. The light falls from above onto their foreheads, and the pictures thus express interiority and piety. If Lilien viewed photography as a mere preparatory tool for his work as an artist, however, for Lerski photography was the goal itself. But Lerski also wanted to advance a universal and humanistic view of man. Though Sela’s and Raz’s interpretations appear to mistake Lerski’s intention, they are nonetheless based not only on Lerski’s own selection of subject—a nameless Yemenite man (at least that is what we must assume him to be)—and how he treats that subject, but also, and equally important in the current context, on his inability to disambiguate his intention.

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Lerski and the “Face of the Nation” Projects While Sela and Raz frame Figure 2.1 as an expression of Jewish Orientalism, other historians have viewed Lerski’s photography as part of the late 1920s and early 1930s German “Face of the Nation” projects. What these projects all shared, in one way or another, was a conviction that photography was particularly suited, artistically, scientifically, and politically, to capturing and documenting the essential features of a given society, nation, or “race.” This belief was sometimes expressed directly, as by Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, who described the moment she grasped the face of the German nation, for the first time, in a photograph. August Sander (discussed in Chapter 1) also used the camera to study and document German society, but in a different way. At the same time photography was heavily used in the study of “race.”15 All of these photographic projects were also related to contemporary theories of physiognomy. According to this line of interpretation, Lerski’s photograph of the Yemenite man was part of a larger project, a careful study of Jewish types and part of an attempt to establish and stabilize an image of the Jew. In the text accompanying a volume of Lerski’s “Metamorphoses Through Light” project, Florian Ebner situates Lerski’s photography in Palestine in the context of several contemporary German photographic projects. After the great success of his “Everyday Heads,” Lerski was looking for another major project. According to Ebner, Lerski contacted Charles Peignot’s publishing house in 1930 to propose an ambitious project: to produce a high-quality photographic book (Bildband) that would show the face of Jewry or Judaism (das Antlitz des

Judentums), including its original types (ursprüngliche Typen). In addition, Jan-Christopher Horak notes that Lerski first traveled to Palestine in mid-1931 while planning a new photography book to “document the Jewish race.”16 Horak quotes Lerski: “I want to show only the prototype in all its offshoots, and what is more, I want to show him so intensely that the prototype is recognizable in all later branches.” When Horak states that Lerski’s motivations were “pure,” he seeks to differentiate Lerski’s project from contemporary völkische projects, but Horak nonetheless views the work as uncomfortably close to the antisemitic Jewish character studies found in antisemitic newspapers and considers this to be a central reason why the book did not see the light of day, although the photographs were all ready.17 Nor was Lerski’s publisher alone in seeing an uncomfortable similarity between Lerski’s images and the antisemitic ones they were intended to counter. Historians found similarities between Lerski’s project and those of Lendvai-Dircksen, Erich Retzlaff, Paul Wolff, and Sander.18 In Das deutsche Volksgesicht (1930), Lendvai-Dircksen concentrated on typical German peasants in various districts. The heads of elderly people, in black-and-white closeups, fill the entire frame of each photograph (Figure 2.4). Her selection of individuals and her photographic treatment emphasize rootedness (Bodenständigkeit), toughness, and belonging.19 Her photographic albums, which classified Germans geographically, as members of the Volksgemeinschaft, continued to study individual physiognomies and to celebrate the German Volk through the 1930s and 1940s.20 After Germany invaded other countries, Lendvai-Dircksen extended her photographic studies to members of the German Volk in areas now annexed to the German Reich.

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figure 2.4. Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, “Bauer aus der Erzgebirge.” From Das deutsche Volksgesicht (Berlin: Kulturelle Verlagsgesellschaft, 1932).

figure 2.5. Erich Retzlaff, German man. From Die von der Scholle (Those Who Till the Earth [Göttingen: Verlag der Deuerlich’schen Buchhandlung, 1931]). © Dr. Anna-Claudia Guimbous, daughter of Erich Retzlaff.

Although Lendvai-Dircksen, like Lerski, photographed faces from very close up and filling almost the entire photographic frame, as I have already mentioned, there are crucial differences between her and Lerski in the conception of photography, in their photographic practice, and in their political outlooks. Unlike Lerski, who viewed himself as a “painter with light,” Lendvai-Dircksen viewed the advantage of photography as lying in its documentary character, which enabled authentic representation. Lerski reiterated his belief that “in every person one can find everything.”21 Lendvai-Dircksen used the camera to document the various geographical, ethnic, and racial types of which the German whole was comprised. If we observe closely the meeting of the

face and the background in Lendvai-Dircksen’s portrait, we will notice that it is blurred. Lerski worked in a studio and used not only a stabilizing chair but larger equipment, which allowed him to photograph from very close up while keeping the image in sharp focus. Lendvai-Dircksen used smaller, portable cameras and photographed on site, which meant that in her close-ups parts of the image were not in full focus. This technical difference was an indicator of philosophical and ideological differences concerning photography in the 1920s. Lerski sided with the modernists and functionalists, who insisted that the strength of photography lay in its optical precision. 22 Lendvai-Dircksen’s photography, on the other hand, was aesthetically and politically embedded in

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the conservative camp, much more closely aligned with pictorialism and photographic impressionism, with their soft focus and blurred lines of demarcation which resembled those of oil paintings. This combination of similarities and differences with regard to conceptions of photography, photographic practices, and ideological beliefs can also be found when comparing Lerski with Erich Retzlaff. Retzlaff defined himself and was understood by others as a photographer of the Volk and later of the Third Reich. Retzlaff’s Das Antlitz des Alters (The Face of Age; 1930) was a photographic study of old age. Startling portraits of aged Germans filling the entire frame merged the real with the ideal. His Die von der Scholle (Those Who Till the Earth; 1931) showed frame-filling black-and-white photographs of individuals from the laboring classes (Figure 2.5). Retzlaff’s subjects, like Lerski’s Köpfe des Alltags, are anonymous. Unlike those in Lerski’s work, however, these photographs appear in albums with titles identifying the photographed subjects with professions such as “fisherman” or “farmer,” so that the subjects included within each album embody a type. Even before the National Socialists’ rise to power in 1933, Retzlaff clearly celebrated ideas of Heimat and Blut und Boden. Many of Retzlaff ’s portraits, like Lerski’s, are reproduced at close to life size. This emphasizes the eyes, creases in the skin, wrinkles, stubble, and roughness. But the closely cropped photographs, with their large amounts of detail, also constitute an essay on beauty in simplicity, a sympathetic rather than critical vision; their apparent goal was to create strong symbols of the German peasant stock, photographs that emphasized the beauty and harmony of (German) men and women in their natural landscape. 23 With regard to the first

two dispositions of photography, eccentric versus normal and the simplification versus complication of vision, Retzlaff, like Lendvai-Dircksen, is fairly close to Lerski. They only differ with regard to the third—the relationship that photography forms with the real—as Retzlaff and Lendvai-Dircksen suggest a direct relationship to the real, while Lerski’s photographs intend to undermine this relationship. The most complicated comparison is between Lerski and August Sander. Sander always preferred photographing the whole body and avoided close-ups of the face; aesthetically, Lerski’s portraits bear a much greater similarity to the photographs of Lendvai-Dircksen and Retzlaff than to Sander’s. Sander was not driven by völkische notions of blood and soil, but his Antlitz der Zeit (The Face of Our Time) and his uncompleted “Citizens of the Twentieth Century” were based on an elaborate sociological conception of society as an organic “whole” and a conception of photography as an instrument of documentation and representation.24 In the 1920s Sander, like Lerski, rejected pictorialism and espoused optical sharpness—note the deep photographic perspective and the sharp focus of objects in the frame (Figure 2.6). But there are elements of naturalism in Sander’s photography, whereas Lerski was clearly closer to expressionism.25 In contrast to the extraordinary, functional angles we find in Lerski’s work, Sander’s innkeeper (1925) is facing the photographer directly.26 And while Lerski removed virtually all social cues (apart from eyeglasses) from the frame, Sander operated a complex strategy of staging his images in carefully chosen environments, with the careful use of clothes, gestures, and material objects. Sander photographed the innkeeper

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figure 2.6. August Sander, Innkeeper. From Antlitz der Zeit (The Face of Our Time [Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1977 (1930)]). © Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur—August Sander Archiv, Köln; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

three times: in front of the hotel doorstep, with his wife outside their home, and in the hotel bar. In the photograph taken in the hotel bar, he is standing in a comfortably wide stance, dressed in a three-piece suit, with dark shoes, dark gray trousers, and an open black jacket over a buttoned vest, in turn over a clean, buttoned white shirt with a bow tie. A neat white handkerchief sticks out of his outside jacket pocket. His left arm hangs easily at his side, while his right elbow is propped on a cabinet. He is standing on a black-and-white-checkered floor, the shadows of his legs casting two parallel black lines behind him. The light is coming into the picture from the left (the innkeeper’s right), falling unevenly on the man’s face

and reflecting off the spotless, gleaming coffee server. Behind him we see shelves filled with shining coffeepots, teapots, and milk pitchers; slightly farther behind and above him, to the right from our point of view, are rows of neatly arranged glass cups and bottles. Three-quarters of his face is illuminated; only the left side of his forehead and his left ear are partly in the dark. The man is not smiling, but his high trousers over his firm belly; his large, bold, round head; his double chin encircling almost the entire lower part of his face; and his short, proud, roundish stature are markers of his straightforwardness and homeyness, which in turn can signify his (and hence the hotel’s) hospitality. In this photograph, the innkeeper is posi-

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tioned in both his material and his professional environment. Sander’s photographs study the person’s individuality along with his social and professional identity. In presenting them this way, Sander suggests that this is a “type,” but in a different sense than that of Retzlaff and Lendvai-Dircksen. The individual, social, and professional are so closely intertwined as to be indissoluble.27 Sander developed a notion of projection, too, but one that was quite different from Lerski’s. Lerski’s projection had to do with the photographer and the photographic plate or film, reducing the subject of the photograph to an object for the photographer to manipulate. Sander’s understanding of projection was performative: He encouraged his subjects to project their social and professional identities into the photographic act. He did this because he believed that the projection expressed the social or professional aspirations of the person being photographed and advanced a form of sociological study. In this sense, this photograph is a careful study of how the innkeeper performs or projects his social and professional identity and how this is a constitutive part of the type. Based on his belief in physiognomy as a classificatory tool, Sander reclassified his photographic collection after 1927, and photographs originally made for commercial purposes were now used for the study of society.28 Sander’s concept of projection involved creating distance between the photographed person and the photographer, with a kind of Brechtian, alienating effect on the viewer. But it was an instrument for his photographic-sociological approach.29 Both Lerski and Sander kept individual names out of the titles of their photographs, but for different reasons. Sander did so as part of a strategy to study what was typical

in the interaction between individuals and their professional environments, to focus on the type; Lerski did it to destabilize and undermine the prejudices and preconceptions of viewers. If Sander wished to create a sociological atlas of German society as an organic whole, Lerski’s project was closer to an anti-anthropological approach. I have compared Lerski with art photographers and commercial photographers. But the boundaries between photojournalism (including photography in the context of the earliest beauty contests in the 1920s), popular racial publications, anthropological publications, and art photography were never fixed or stable. Indeed, it is quite possible that Lerski was driven to the “Jewish Heads” project in response to the antisemitic literature and images in Germany around 1930. Hans F. K. Günther, the most popular writer on race in Weimar and Nazi Germany, published a photographic album, German Heads of the Nordic Race (1927), jointly with Eugen Fischer, as well as extraordinarily popular books on the racial components of the German people (1922) and the racial components of the Jewish people (1930), each with more than four hundred photographs. Even closer to Lerski’s photographs, however, are the photographic studies of Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß. Clauß, who studied with the founder of modern phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, photographed during his sojourn in Palestine in the early 1920s as part of what he believed to be a racial phenomenological method of close observation. Ebner points to striking visual similarities between Lerski’s photographs of Yemenites, one of which I show here as a typical example (Figure 2.7, left), and Clauß’s 1931 photograph of an old Jew from Aleppo, Syria (Figure 2.7, right).30

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figure 2.7. Left: Helmar Lerski, Jewish Yemenite man, 1930s, © Museum Folkwang Essen. Right: Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß, Old Jew from Aleppo (Syria), from Arthur Freiherrn Von Hubl, Das deutsche Lichtbild (Berlin: Verlag Robert & Bruno Schultz, 1931).

Both photographs show an old “Jew” with a long beard, photographed in profile from a low angle, and both break the normal conventions of portrait photography to accentuate the harsh and almost caricatured facial contours of the “Semitic type.” Both photographs touch on the racial discourse in terms of expression (Ausdruck) rather than anthropometric conventions. And yet Clauß’s and Lerski’s ideological motivations and conceptions of photography were more or less diametrically opposite—Clauß used photography as a scientific instrument to establish a somewhat idiosyncratic science of race; Lerski employed a somewhat idiosyncratic conception of photography to undermine documentary beliefs about photography and to counter racist notions of humanity. Clauß viewed photography as science; Lerski viewed it as art. The two also differed in terms of the third disposition of photography discussed in the Introduction, namely the relationship that the photograph

forms with the real; nevertheless, the visual similarities between the work of the two photographers cannot be overlooked. These obvious visual similarities sharpen questions concerning the relationship between visual language and photographic intention. Lerski both conquered and surrendered existence for his views: In Latour’s terms, he both gained and lost reality.

The 1930s Language of Light In the two previous sections I have looked at Lerski’s photography in general and his photographs of Yemenites in particular in the context of Jewish photography in Palestine and of German documentary projects; now I would like to look at it in terms of more specifically visual considerations. Here Lerski’s practice once again appears as a site of controversy, and once again he is also an active and ambiguous contributor to the contro-

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versy. The key for understanding Figure 2.1 lies in the sharp contrast it displays between light and dark and, in particular, in its use of the man’s face less as a portrait, a way to study his identity or personality, than as an instrument for aesthetic, visual effects. The photograph, in these ways, partakes of the “language of light,” which in the 1930s acquired a clear antihumanistic significance. The aesthetics of Lerski’s photography have been discussed a number of times over the years. The most explicit of these discussions centered on his 1936 “Metamorphoses Through Light.” Lerski’s aesthetics were clearly related to his conception of the photographer as an artist who sculpts with light.31 In a conversation on Lerski’s project among several filmmakers and artists, in Nyon in 1982, much of the discussion dealt with Lerski’s language of light and its relationship to 1930s fascist aesthetics. Some of the participants were personally acquainted with Lerski and acknowledged that in his politics Lerski was anything but a sympathizer with fascist ideas. But the participants nonetheless noted that the desire to shape and form with light, along with lighting the face from below to harden it and show a coldness or lack of humanity, were important elements of fascist aesthetics, and that all of these elements were present in Lerski’s photography.32 The question of photographic intention, therefore, surfaces again, this time with regard to the language of light. While clearly sympathetic to Lerski, Horak claims that “Lerski’s lighting was not ideologically neutral, but preferred by politically conservative directors with a predilection toward symbolism.”33 In the 1930s the implications of this kind of lighting clearly located Lerski’s work in a specific place on the cultural and political map. Horak acknowledges that Lerski’s photographs of Jews and Arabs countered the Nazis’ con-

ception of them as Untermenschen, but he also emphasizes Lerski’s decision to employ the same aesthetic and expressive means as those very Nazis. Experiments with light were a priori dangerous. As an agent, again, Lerski both gained and lost reality for a particular notion of photography: While he wanted to advance a conception of photography as a site for the photographer’s sovereign projections, what he employed for these projections, as Reinhard Matz notes, was a human face, for centuries the site of the institution of identity.34 German historians of photography would be careful about comparing Lerski, a refugee defined by the Nuremberg Laws as a Jew, with Leni Riefenstahl, who had direct links to Hitler and produced National Socialist propaganda films. And yet not only are there parallels between the two, but before Riefenstahl’s Nazi career, their paths in fact intersected: Lerski made a film in the 1920s in which she acted. Both of them moved back and forth between still photography and the moving image, and both made films in the 1930s combining art and propaganda, although for very different ideologies. Yet the essential elements they share are the use of the expressionistic “language of light” and the use of humans for visual effects. The aesthetic language of Riefenstahl’s photograph of a nude woman against the clouds (which, as noted in the Acknowledgments, I was not granted permission to reproduce) is expressionist, with sharp contrast between light and dark, and with the woman serving as a center of light. But the distance and angle are conventional (rather than functional). Despite the similarity in the use of light between this photograph and Lerski’s work, Riefenstahl’s photograph is kitsch, idealizing the “Aryan” feminine body as unreachably beautiful and sublime rather than as an object of erotic desire. As I see it

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Lerski actually shares less with Riefenstahl than he does with Lendvai-Dircksen or with Retzlaff. Riefenstahl’s photography deals in clichés of “beauty,” while Lendvai-Dircksen’s and Retzlaff ’s work has more to do with “authenticity”; Lerski’s, meanwhile, has mostly to do with the institution of an image. Bringing gender into the comparison between Lerski and these contemporaries, as will be shown in Chapter 4, further accentuates the distinction between him and Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Leni Riefenstahl, and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß, all of whom, embedded in a völkische ideology, were engaged in instituting a specific racialized gender aesthetics. But contemporaries nevertheless saw similarities between Lerski and Riefenstahl. Reviews of Lerski’s 1938 exhibition in London noted their visual affinity. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reviewed Lerski’s film Avoda in the same breath as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and both were screened at the Venice Film Festival in 1935.35 Resistance to the “language of light” grew considerably after 1945. This affected the experience of viewers of Lerski’s work in 1950s Switzerland, with responses to his work falling into two opposite groups. While some appreciated and even admired Lerski’s photographs, the majority found his photography hard and offensive: His sharp, contrastive treatment of the Yemenite man, based on the manipulation of strong light and the particular language of expressionism, partook of a visual culture that was for many no longer acceptable.

PHOTOGRAPHIC INTENTION The three preceding interpretations were intended to situate Lerski’s photography

within broader tendencies in the history of photography. Ofer Ashkenazi’s analysis of one of Lerski’s films, Avoda, in contrast, provides a nuanced and ambivalent close reading. Ashkenazi argues that the film merged labor-Zionist ideology and symbolism with the ideology of liberal bourgeois urbanites of 1920s Germany, and that the film expresses a “variety of contradicting sentiments, from sympathy for socialist objectives to pro-capitalist propaganda; from Jewish ethnocentrism to cosmopolitanism.”36 In the remaining part of this chapter, I will adopt a strategy that is almost the opposite of Ashkenazi’s. Rather than point to contradictory sentiments in Lerski’s photography, I will try to reconstruct Lerski’s intention in Figure 2.1, the photograph with which I began this discussion, by reconstructing his intention in several additional projects. The idea behind this strategy is to sort out tensions of different natures and belonging to different registers of Lerski’s work, assessing their respective significance within his overall photographic economy, and, consequently, to reveal the grounds of failure as residing in the audience’s understanding. Lerski’s photography is particularly suitable for discussions of intention, as his photographic projects expressed ideas, and he also provided propositions expressing his credo. He kept a journal, comprised of several scrapbooks, which is now kept in the Museum Folkwang. In the undated entries Lerski clipped reviews of his book and of exhibitions, wrote down quotations from books he read, and offered discussions of the work of artists (Rembrandt and Liebermann), authors (Buber, Simmel, Thomas and Heinrich Mann), politicians (Lenin and Marx), and political events or processes. Two subjects interspersed throughout his journal are particularly relevant to our discussion. The first is his discussion of the effects of

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light in art, from theater to photography: For instance, he includes a quotation from E. Quertfeld’s Das deutsche Lichtbild (1930), contrasting Das Licht schreibt (“light writes itself ”) with Ich schreibe mit Licht (“I write with light”) and emphasizing that light is the photographer’s instrument of expression; through a quotation from Adolf Behne’s Über “entartete Kunst,” he also includes the view that a work of art is never merely “a copy of reality” (Kopie der Wirklichkeit). He often returns to “formation with light” (Gestaltung im Licht). The second subject of interest here concerns questions of “race,” in entries such as a quotation from Arnold Zweig that “there is no yellow threat or black threat, but only a white threat” or, bringing together the subjects of physiognomy and photography, the statement “Denn es gibt nichts subjektiveres als das Objektiv” (playing on the German word for the photographic lens: “nothing is as subjective as the camera lens”). In this context Lerski’s self-identification as an artist is particularly important, and critical to his historical contextualization in Jewish Palestine and to the problem to which his photographs were an answer. While the relationship between the intentions expressed in propositions and those expressed in images does of course in some sense require interpretation, in another sense the separation between the two is not sustainable, and in the following I address both. I draw on art historian Michael Baxandall’s Patterns of Intention, although for some of Baxandall’s qualifications, applying them to Lerski can be complicated. Baxandall states that for centuries pictures were explained based on linguistic descriptions, as the originals were unavailable for direct observation; as a result what was actually explained was not the unmediated picture but the picture as considered under a partially interpretive description. 37 It is

undeniable that language is intricately involved in the case of photography, but photography’s mechanical reproducibility and the repercussions of that reproducibility are specific to the medium and to its historical understanding. What will be particularly important for us in what follows, however, is Baxandall’s theoretical stance that “historical objects may be explained by treating them as solutions to problems in situations, by reconstructing a rational relationship between these three.”38 This is complicated, however, by the fact that the solution is visible, whereas the problem is not.39 The problem to which the object is a solution, then, must itself be reconstructed, and this can be done only on the basis of the circumstances or resources from which the solution can emerge.40 “Intention is the forward-leaning look of things,” according to Baxandall, the “relation between the object and its circumstances.”41 With Lerski we have a different configuration than in the examples studied by Baxandall, as Lerski’s intentions can sometimes be identified more clearly from his statements than from the visual images he produced. Already prior to his arrival in Palestine, Lerski developed a unique idea about photography. If the assumption of most practicing photographers and of their audiences was that a well-executed photograph expressed a real relationship between the photograph and the referent that it depicted, in the project that is the subject of this chapter, Lerski intended to unsettle this assumption. Jean-François Chevrier claimed that Lerski’s photography tried to free the portrait from its traditional task, so that rather than the photograph being used to reproduce or represent identity, in this sense the face of the photographed is not a site for making the personality visible, but a theatre stage for the

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photographer.42 Lerski viewed photography in terms not of mechanical reproduction but of an artist manipulating light on the surface of a photographed object. When Lerski repeatedly states his motto that “every human being embodies everything, it is only a question of how the light falls.”43 I understand him to mean that photography is about an artist who employs an object to create whatever image he or she wants to express. Lerski defined photography as “two-pronged surfaces of projection” (Projektionsflächer)— that of the photographed object and that of the photographic plate or film.44 Lerski’s problem, which he formulated differently in different projects and to which the projects were solutions, always had to do with the relationship between photography as a document of the real and photography as a projection of the photographer. His answer, found in the images and their accompanying propositions, is the separation of the image from the real referent. Potentially, this notion of photography could be applied to

any object. In practice Lerski focused almost exclusively on humans, and the photograph as image and the photograph as document of the real sometimes collided after all. While intending to extend existence, or gain reality, in Latour’s terms, for his conception of photography, Lerski in fact both gained and lost reality simultaneously. This simultaneous gain and loss was intimately tied to which things in the world Lerski chose to photograph. His most important photographic project before he moved to Palestine appeared in Germany in 1931 in book form as Köpfe des Alltags (“Everyday Heads”). The book features individuals of various social backgrounds, all of whom are given the same photographic treatment. Close-ups of faces fill almost the entire frame in each case, and any contextual clues that would normally indicate social status are removed from the frame (Figure 2.8). Names are not disclosed. But in a separate list the reader can discover the social status of each of the photographic subjects,

figure 2.8. Helmar Lerski, photograph from Köpfe des Alltags (Everyday Heads [Berlin: Verlag Hermann Reckendorf, 1931]). © Museum Folkwang Essen.

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figure 2.9. Helmar Lerski, photograph from Verwandlungen durch Licht (“Metamorphoses Through Light” [Duesseldorf: Luca Verlag, 1982]). © Museum Folkwang Essen.

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ranging from beggars to factory workers. The expressive portrait of the beggar, for instance, could easily be taken for that of a theater celebrity or a poet.45 Lerski couples his conception of photography as a two-pronged surface of projection with his motto, already mentioned, that “every human being embodies everything, it is only a question of how the light falls.”46 In this project, then, Lerski separated image from social class. If the “Everyday Heads” project integrates Lerski’s conception of photography with his social ideology, his project Verwandlungen durch Licht (“Metamorphoses Through Light”) demonstrates his photographic philosophy in a startling way: 176 photographs of a single individual portray the subject so differently that on many occasions it is not even possible to discern that it is the same person (Figure 2.9). Once again this project demonstrates Lerski’s motto that every human being embodies everything. With this work Lerski demonstrates his sovereignty over the medium: He can present this subject in whatever way he wishes. The project and its title allude to Franz Kafka’s story Die Verwandlung (translated into English as The Metamorphosis) as well as to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.47 Lerski’s interests in projection and transformation were intertwined.48 In his communications with his publisher, Charles Peignot, Lerski stated his intention to focus only on “original types,” as focusing on “modern Jews” would mean taking a position on the racial question of modern Jewry. This focus on the ur-types of the Jews, he argued, would render all later developmental stages (Entwicklungsstufen) legible.49 Lerski was differentiating here between European Jewry, which he called modern, and all the rest, which he perceived as being closer to more primordial Jews. This statement, however, surrendered existence, or “lost reality,” for his conception of photography, which put

the weight on the photographer, not the visible properties (Günther) or hidden essences (Clauß) of the photographed. If Lerski was intending to practice a form of photography counter to theirs, in making these arguments he could gain reality, extend existence for his political views, but simultaneously lose reality for his conception of photography. There are further complications. Lerski’s intention to exclude European Jews from his photographs and focus only on non-European ones, viewing them as more original, could be interpreted as an expression of European Orientalism, in Sela’s and Raz’s vein. But his statements from 1930 stand in contrast to his actions, because he did in fact photograph European Jews both in Berlin and then in Palestine. These are unquestionably tensions and inconsistencies, but they can be sorted out and their relative place in his overall artistic and conceptual economy classified and weighed. We are now in a better state to return to Figure 2.1 and treat it as a solution to a problem. Lerski’s agenda here consists of his decision to photograph this Yemenite man, along with the particular photographic treatment he chose. The exact degree of Lerski’s acquaintance with the particulars of the racial discourse on Yemenites cannot be determined, but the structural question that made Yemenites, more than any others in the Jewish diaspora, an object of scientific and artistic fascination may be important. In the case of Yemenite Jews, two assumptions about the racial constitution of contemporary Jewry clashed. These assumptions were, first, that Jews were racially defined, and, second, that the Jewish type persevered over time and space. But the physical anthropologists noted that the skull shape of European Jews tended to the brachycephalic, while the supposedly Semitic skull, as manifested by the desert Bed-

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ouins and the Yemenite Jews, was identified as dolichocephalic. Scholars committed to a racial account of the Jews thus faced a contradiction. What was the (racial) relationship between European and Yemenite Jews? Which of the two reflected the ancient Jewish type? Because of the assumed shared skull shape of Yemenite Jews and Bedouins, and this difference between them and Ashkenazi Jews, it was therefore Yemenite Jews, rather than, say, Ethiopian or Afghan Jews, who drew particular attention. While integral to the Zionist political project of establishing a Jewish nation in Palestine, this racial moment certainly embodied a moment of ambivalence. Almost all descriptions of Yemenite Jews emphasized their long skulls, dark skin and eye color, and small stature, along with their high degree of literacy, the presence of talmudic learning among them, and their high intelligence. Lerski’s decisions about whom to photograph and how were guided by these circumstances. If Lendvai-Dircksen and Günther were employing photography to observe, study, and classify human physiognomy in minute detail, if Sander was attempting a sociological study of German society, and if Clauß was employing the camera to study human expression as a racial phenomenon, Lerski was trying to do something different from all of these. In “Everyday Heads” Lerski employed the camera to undermine notions of social class; in “Metamorphoses” he used it to undermine both the idea of a fixed, inherent identity and the correspondence between appearance and identity in the photographs of Yemenites: The common thread was that Lerski was undermining the discourse of race. In fact, all three of his major projects (on social class, individual identity, and racial types) are facets of the same consistent photographic philosophy: that photography is about the artist manipulating

light, applied to a social and political subject, to determine the photographic image. (Given this consistency and comprehensiveness, the category of gender is conspicuous for its absence. While Lerski sought to queer categories, this effort did not relate to gender. We know that Lerski was politically progressive, but clearly, gender, unlike class and “race,” was not yet understood as an expected target of disruption.) Of the approximately five hundred photographs that Lerski took between 1931 and 1935 (from which he intended to choose sixty for the book), more than a hundred were of Yemenites, according to the Folkwang card catalog. For these photographs, Lerski used his standard mirror technique on glass plates of 30 centimeters by 40 centimeters, producing images that were almost 1:1, that is, almost life-sized. Figure 2.1 is one of the three photographs Lerski took of this individual. The man’s face fills almost the entire frame. The functional angle breaks the conventions of studio portraiture. Lerski’s manipulation of the strong Tel Aviv sunlight removes the most essential marker of difference associated with Yemenites—namely, skin color—from the image. The man’s hair and beard look gray or maybe blond. In the book reproduction, the blemished spectacles reflect the light falling on the face from our left; only one of the man’s eyes is visible. Apart from the eyeglasses, there are no markers of social context. The bridge of the glasses, wrapped with some kind of thread, serves as a punctum, that is, an individual element in the photograph that pierces the observer, in Roland Barthes’s terms.50 These round, modern glasses distance Lerski’s portrait from the allochronic practices that differentiated between peoples of “culture” and peoples of “nature,” between “modern” and “primitive”; between “us” and “them,” “white” and “non-white,” European

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figure 2.10. Helmar Lerski, Two possible series drawn from the “Jewish and Arab Types” project. Series 1 shown this page, series 2 on facing page. © Museum Folkwang Essen.

and non-European Jews. This individual is subject to the same photographic manipulations and the same idiosyncratic techniques Lerski applies to all his subjects. This is far more a photographer applying light to the face of an individual human being—his “stage”—than “a photograph of a Yemenite Jew.” As such it is a powerful and effective solution to the problem of the photograph as an anthropological record of the real. Or so I first thought. To see the photograph within the larger project of which it was a part, I traveled to the Museum Folkwang in Essen in 2015. This proved to be a confusing experi-

ence. Having seen the project as a whole, I was compelled to modify my understanding of the photograph, as the cumulative effect of seeing all the prints together establishes and deepens the image of a “Jewish type.” In the context of the clustering effect of the series as a whole, Figure 2.1 appears atypical. The more time passed, however, the more I suspected even this revised impression. In July 2018 I visited the archive again, which further complicated my response. Now I could see in the five hundred prints not only the clustering but also how, out of the same series, Lerski would have been able to shape

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figure 2.10. Continued.

the impression left on the viewer in a variety of ways simply by his selection of photographs for the intended book. We do not know, however, which he finally intended to select. He could, for instance, have used the gaze of the subject, either closing off the frame by choosing gazes directed inward or, in the opposite direction, opening up the image by choosing gazes directed outward. But in the context of my argument— that the failure of this project has to do with its subject, and with the thing in the world to which Lerski applied his photography—I have selected two series here (Figure 2.10) to

demonstrate how the selection could either, as in the first series, focus on a cluster to create the impression of a shared Jewish type or, alternatively, as in the second series, at least partially undermine that impression by suggesting a plurality of types. The first series of photographs I have chosen, of old, bearded, “Jewish” men, represents the impression left on me by the collection as a whole. The second series—showing variety in terms of age, gender, and degrees of stereotypical “Jewishness”—demonstrates how a different selection could shape the general impression in a completely different way.

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figure 2.11. Helmar Lerski, Jewish collectives or working communities. From “Working Hands.” © Israel Museum: Jerusalem, 2011.

I wish to end this analysis of the failed project with a look at Lerski’s subsequent work, where, turning to Jewish productivity, he seems to have brought his photographic philosophy to its logical conclusion. In the 1930s, using a smaller-format camera and working on film negatives rather than glass, Lerski photographed in several Jewish collectives

or working communities, including Nahalal, Kibbutz Givat Brenner, and Givat Haim. In the project, which was not exhibited in the Israel Museum until 2011, Lerski photographed men and women as productive people. Some of the photographs name their subjects, while others are simply described as “working hands” (Figures 2.11–13). In-

figure 2.12. Helmar Lerski, Jewish collectives or working communities. From “Working Hands.” © Israel Museum: Jerusalem, 2011.

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figure 2.13. Helmar Lerski, Jewish collectives or working communities. From “Working Hands,” © Israel Museum: Jerusalem, 2011.

deed, in a concretization of the metaphor, Lerski created beautiful abstractions out of their hands. But for us the important photographs are those of men and women at work in the factory or the field, sweating while carrying out their manual labor. From the strong and uneven light falling on their faces, it is possible to deduce that, here on site, and with a smaller camera, Lerski

staged his photographs using his famous mirror technique. The people are shown in harmony with their natural environment as well as with modern machinery. These photographs depict the “new Jew” Nordau and Herzl called for: productive, strong, tall, healthy, blond, and blue-eyed—the new Jew as “Aryan” in Sela’s interpretation of the hero of Avoda. But they are also shown as

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“old Jews,” with small eyes, massive (Jewish) noses, large ears, receding hairlines, and broad foreheads. 51 Lerski forces the viewer to ask what exactly is going on. Extracting his intention here from the images, I think Lerski specifically intended to document those “new Jews” who, in terms of appearance, also displayed features of the “old Jew.” In other words photography was an instrument for calling into question the correlation between appearance and identity. In the opening of this chapter, I characterized Lerski’s project of “Jewish types” as a “spectacular failure.” But what does it mean to speak of photography as a “failure”? In truth, could anything testify more strongly to the opposite than the fact that, almost ninety years after he took these photographs, they still elicit our interest and attention? What catches the eye in later photographs Lerski took of people in their natural and social environments throughout Palestine, on site and without his mirror technique, is the gentle treatment, humor, and affection they lend to their subjects (Figure 2.14). Why are these features, then, absent from his projects? Was that absence an intentional decision or a side effect of his mirror technique, limiting his treatment to a theatrical range of posing? By way of an answer, observe this photograph by Lerski’s student, Yaacov Ben Dov (Figure 2.15). It shows an elderly Yemenite man with modern glasses (very similar to those worn by the man in Figure 2.1) as he sits with his grandson on the doorstep at the entrance to a house and the two study together. 52 This is a moving photograph. It expresses warmth and empathy and the bond between grandfather and grandson. Though the two images are politically very similar, this photograph differs from Figure 2.1 in its photographic philosophy, which finally

brings us once again to the main subject of this chapter: the moving and changing historical ground of photographic intention.

PHOTOGRAPHIC INTENTION AND CONTEMPORARY ART AND CULTURE An essential thread running through this chapter pertains to the visual language of Zionism and the image of the “new Jew.” Given that Lerski was the most prominent photographer in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, and that some of his projects were created for and funded by Zionist institutions, the way his photographs complicate and intertwine the images of the “new” and “old” Jew compels us to reject any reductionist historiography of Zionism as chauvinistic and exclusionary or to see the “new Jew” as a rejection of the “old Jew.” And if Lerski was engaged in art and propaganda, we must also acknowledge that the meaning of the latter is rather different in this context from its common understanding today. Lerski’s outlook was humanistic and pluralist (in the sense of both moderate and plural), and the Jewish image he established was productive, open, and inclusive; Lerski’s equivalent in literature is the great Hebrew poet Shaul Tchernichovsky, whose “I Believe” (1892) embodies similar values, which make up the core of modern Israeli culture and literature. In this respect Lerski’s case pushes back against the tendency, found in recent work on photography in the context of Zionism, to view it through (and even reduce it to) the prism of ideology and politics. As with the painters who were his contemporaries, Lerski, even when exploring social and political questions, was working as an artist; to consider his work instrumentally, or in the same

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figure 2.14. Helmar Lerski, Scene in the market, 1930s or 1940s. Photo © Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme (mahJ)/© Succession Helmar Lerski, Museum Folkwang Essen.

category as, say, Zionist posters, is an anachronistic mistake.53 Nonetheless, as a site of controversy, Lerski’s work could be seen as typical of contrary tendencies, and in what remains of this chapter, I want to bring to the surface the conditions that made the controversy possible within broader coordinates. In 1917 Marcel Duchamp famously took an object defined by its functional use in one context and redefined it by moving it

into the space of a museum. In so doing Duchamp indicated that recontextualization could make the same object become different; in other words, its essence was defined by its context. In various projects, from “Everyday Heads” through his “Metamorphoses Through Light,” Lerski attempted something similar. In each of these projects, as we have seen, Lerski attempted to use the camera as a device to strip what he was studying

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figure 2.15. Yaacov Ben Dov, Yemenite Jew with grandson. © KKL-JNF Photo Archive.

down to its “essence” by recontextualizing or relocating it. Lerski understood himself as belonging to the modernist movement. But modernist German photography of the 1920s was itself constituted around a controversy. Both sides believed that photography had to follow its inherent potential rather than emulate other plastic arts. But whereas Albert Renger-Patzsch viewed the particularity of photography as lying in its optical ability to produce images that were sharper than the reality available to the human eye, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy introduced chemical experiments to produce photograms, images that no longer referred to objects existing in reality. And Lerski renders the situation even

more complex, because photography and art intersected in his work in yet another respect. When I presented Lerski’s photographs in a workshop in Göttingen in 2018, the art historian Martin van Gelderen asked me whether Lerski was not positioning himself within the line of the Italian Renaissance portraitists. Lerski did indeed still belong to a generation that aspired to raise photography, as an art, to the same heights occupied by painting, and in 1920s Germany there raged a lively debate about the return to the Renaissance, a discussion that included Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Cassirer, and Hans Baron. If Italian Renaissance portraits were marked by their decontextualized,

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idealized explorations of the face, and the Dutch tradition that followed was flooded with contextual detail, Rembrandt—whom Lerski discusses, as we have seen, in his scrapbook—was understood as doing both (raising doubts as to whether some of the people he portrayed ever existed). And when I asked van Gelderen what led him to this thought, he answered, “The aesthetics, in particular the chiaroscuro light”—that is to say, the creation of composition through the use of contrastive light. Though he was sitting in 1930s Tel Aviv, and studying Jewish and Arab types, Lerski managed to be artistically engaged in German discussions of Italian Renaissance portraits and the artistic status of photography. Philosophically, Lerski was maybe closer to Moholy-Nagy than to Renger-Patzsch, as can be evinced not only from his statements about photography but from the extreme angles he used, which followed Moholy-Nagy’s propositions. But while Moholy-Nagy’s photograms were exclusively focused on abstract patterns, Lerski played out his photographic manipulations almost exclusively on humans, particularly human faces. Thus Lerski, while following Moholy-Nagy in freeing the photograph from its documentary or indexing function, intersected, at this exact moment in time, not only with conservative portrait photography but, more specifically, with studies of peoples and “races.” If Duchamp redefined the essence of the urinal in 1917 by repositioning it in the space of a museum, Günther, just a few years later, in 1922, redefined the family photograph as scientific evidence by resituating it in his racial studies. Redefinitions and repurposing could work in different directions. In the 1920s and 1930s, when the discourses of race were the site of extensive controversy between proponents of the principle of essential racial difference and their

antiracist opponents, the realist uses of photography were increasingly aligned with the former. From within the racial discourse, Yemenites were the most difficult case to settle in the context of Jewish Palestine, and were taken to be visually particularly marked. Given his intentions, then, Lerski was setting himself the highest bar with his decision to photograph Yemenites. If Figure 2.1 can be seen as a successful attempt to undermine the fixity of social (class) and biological (race) identities, some of his other photographs of Yemenites bear visual similarities to Clauß’s photographs produced for opposite purposes. As historians, what we can draw from this is that visual similarity does not necessarily imply ideological correspondence. But even more importantly, this difference reveals the role of the audience and the degree to which it is willing to go along with the photographers’ respective purposes. Lerski’s images were inseparable from his propositions, and photographic practice in general was inseparable from the public discussion surrounding it. The two most important voices in this respect were Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, both of whom advanced complex understandings of photography as a technological, social, and political phenomenon. What may be most important for our analysis here is that both of them disconnected photography from authorial intention in order to look at its broader social and political effects. Irrespective of Lerski’s expressed intentions, he could not escape from Benjamin’s statement about Sander’s or Lendvai-Dircksen’s projects as a “practice atlas” (Uebungsatlas), serving to acquaint the eye, sharpen visual perception, and produce forms of social regulation. Nor could Lerski escape Kracauer’s opposition between art and photography.

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Based on the conception that “photographs are likenesses,” Kracauer determined that photography only “presents a spatial continuum”; that is, as opposed to the painter’s portrait, photography lacks history and is a document of absence.54 Only art can grasp the essence of objects (by negating likeness), rather than simply presenting their spatial presence. If, for Kracauer, then, only artworks are able to negate likeness and present their objects “as they wish to be or as they fundamentally are,” Lerski most certainly qualifies as an artist.55 But Kracauer also states that the “artistic photographer is a dilettante artist who apes an artistic manner minus its substance,” thus prejudging Lerski’s photography as a failure in accomplishing its artistic intentions despite Lerski’s propositions to the contrary.56 Lerski could not conquer existence, or gain reality, for his ideas without surrendering existence, or losing reality, at the same time. Lerski was using the medium that was most strongly believed to be an instrument of documentation in order to try to undermine that very belief; he tried to undermine the discourse of race using an instrument

strongly associated with that discourse; and he attempted to demonstrate the power of projection on human faces, the most innate site of human identity. A recent exhibition characterized Lerski as a portraitist, 57 but the contradiction in his philosophy is this: He used the real to establish images that were removed from the real, while the portraitist interprets the “is,” and photography, because of its documentary nature, cannot do both at the same time. It was not accidental that this particular project failed; it had to do with its subject, one with which the audience was unwilling to go along. It was only at a later moment in time, as we will see in Chapter 4, in the context of a different photographic exploration and historical and political moment—and, even then, only following a fierce and contentious reception process—that the audience was willing to accept, with Robert Frank’s The Americans, the claim that photographs could at the same time be images, entirely the subjective expression of the artist’s volition, and also documents of reality, with which the ontology of the photograph changed.

Chapter 3

ALBUM of an EXTINCT RACE Eugen Fischer and Photography

T

his chapter explores photography in the context of the ideology of racial inequality. It does so through the case of Eugen Fischer, a medical doctor, an early pioneer of the study of human inheritance, a German professor, and a Nazi, who, in various contexts between 1908 and 1943, advanced the use of photography for the study of race. While the chapter explores this use of photography from within the case of Eugen Fischer, there is a broader context of parallel and opposite practices, as others were using photography to advocate equality. Fischer applied photography to Jews relatively late in his career, and therefore, given that this chapter follows him chronologically, we only reach Jews later in the narrative. But Jews were certainly an essential part of the ideology of inequality, and so it may be that the most interesting question that arises here has to do with the possible lack of synchronicity between the image of something and its photographing; indeed, when we come to the explicit discussion of Jews, this will be our central issue. Fischer first introduced photography as

part of a study of racial inheritance among a “racially mixed” population in Africa in 1908, the very year Albert Kahn arrived at the idea of a photographic archive to advance peace among peoples and four years before Solomon Yudovin, as part of S. Ansky’s expedition, subtly undermined the assumption of a visual difference between Jews and non-Jews in areas of the Ukraine. Fischer subsequently returned to photography numerous times; the last time he made significant use of photography was in 1943, in a book he coauthored with Gerhard Kittel, which appeared at the same time Lerski was working in Palestine on the “working hands” project in which he attempted to use the camera to separate identity from appearance. If there is something that holds Fischer’s diverse uses of photography together, it is the ideology of racial inequality in which they were embedded, and which they also, whether with regard to medical observation or the establishment of a mental image for an extinguished race, subtly modified. From his first study in Africa to his last one in German-occupied Europe, Fischer’s

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photography spanned almost the entire first half of the twentieth century. He introduced photography into his work for scientific purposes, and though it intersected with art and art history, this case becomes hard to contextualize due to the change over time in the attitude of science toward advocating racial inequality. When Fischer started his scientific career, and for major parts of that career until he formally retired in 1942, he understood himself and was understood by many of his academic peers to be pursuing academic or scientific questions. But for at least one generation of historians and historians of science after the Holocaust—starting with Max Weinreich’s description of Nazism as the combination of Genghis Khan and Eugen Fischer—Fischer’s name stands much more for obnoxious racist pseudoscience,1 which means there is little point in discussing Fischer’s ideas or drawing attention to flaws in his assumptions, practices, or conclusions, as that would imply he is being taken seriously as a scientist. Because I have already dealt with the issue of science versus pseudoscience in my book Race and Photography, I will sidestep that issue here, where I have different questions: namely, what the subjects were with which Fischer’s photography was interwoven; what kinds of relationships or discussions his photography elicited; and how the photographs and the discussions, taken together, modified the subjects of the photographs and shaped the encounters with the actual subjects of the photographs in reality.2 Photography will be revealed as being entwined with science, politics, art, and propaganda in an ideology of inequality. In my Introduction I defined ideology as that which is so enmeshed with reality that it seems to be self-evident or natural; because we no longer participate in the same ideology of racial inequality, I

will conclude this chapter by discussing, as a parallel, other photographic practices— practices that are so self-evident in our own reality that their source is obscured to us.

PHOTOGRAPHY FOR MEDICAL/RACIAL/ GENETIC OBSERVATION Fischer was born in Karlsruhe, in the south of Germany, to a Catholic family; he studied medicine and natural sciences in Berlin, Freiburg, and Munich, completing his studies in 1898. His major breakthrough occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century, as he moved scientific attention from the study of race in terms of types to racial mixing. He can be credited with pioneering an original use of photography for the study of race in terms of Mendelian inheritance, but this originality can be appreciated only in relation to the other existing methods and practices with which it interacted and to which it responded. Fischer’s 1913 study, Rehobother Bastards, was seen as pioneering, as he shifted scientific attention from race and “racial types” (assumed to be “pure”) to the study of racial mixing, which he investigated through “racial bastards.” An analysis of his work reveals the close tie between his use of photography and the newly defined scientific aim of studying the racially mixed. Rehobother Bastards focuses on Africans of mixed descent.3 Fischer’s use of photography is systematic and integral to the project and the method: When we compare it with the two main strands of Central European racial photography, “type” and anthropometric photography, the close tie between Fischer’s use of photography and his newly defined subject becomes apparent. The study of racial type was based on the assumption

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that the individual being photographed represented a distinct racial type, and anthropometric photography was based on the assumption that what was being measured was a distinct racial group. In turning his attention to the study of racial mixing, Fischer rejected these photographic practices and developed a distinct use of photography for his new purpose. The basic assumption underlying Fischer’s study was the identity between inheritance and race. (This assumption was certainly possible to make at the time, although even then it was by no means undisputed; from the late 1920s on it was recognized as an oversimplification, and even in Germany it was recognized as simply false by the 1960s.) Based on this assumption, Fischer wished to see what would happen to traits identified as racially inherited in individuals of mixed racial background. Neither type photography nor anthropometric photography would be useful here. Fischer reproduced close to fifty photographs out of three hundred he claimed to have taken.4 The photographs were intended for the observation of traits he believed to be racial and to follow Mendelian patterns of inheritance.5 Fischer’s photographs, which were free of anthropological standardization or strict technical photographic constraints, allowed him to represent, store, communicate, and continue to catalog and analyze those traits (kinds of hair, shapes of noses or eyes) long after he had left Africa and returned to his German university. Fischer’s book consists of a close examination of a number of families of mixed descent belonging to one community.6 The photographs focus on parents whom Fischer viewed as racially pure (Dutch or Khoikhoi [Hottentot], respectively) and their racially mixed children. The photographs are tied to his attempt to demonstrate the alternation

of specific traits according to Mendelian patterns of inheritance. There is nothing humanist, then, in the fact that each photographed person is named and his or her family genealogy provided on separate genealogical sheets attached to the book’s back cover. To demonstrate the alternation of traits in offspring, Fischer portrays each mixed offspring next to his or her “pure” Khoikhoi and Dutch parents. In an example of how photographs elicit active forms of observation, the reader/viewer of the text and photographs is asked to identify different traits found in the offspring and to track each of these traits to one of the parents. This exercise does not affect only how these specific photographs are viewed. It will necessarily be transported, mostly unconsciously, to how the viewer then looks at social reality at large. The relationship between Fischer’s (relatively restricted) intentions with regard to the photographs and their broader social uses is quite complex. The subject of Fischer’s study is racial inheritance in the broadest sense, but he uses photography here to carry out the study of inheritance in several families he considers test cases. He focuses on individual characteristics in the Diergaart family, tracing the evolving patterns of inheritance over two generations. The photographs of the children can thus be studied only in conjunction with the photographs of their parents (Figure 3.1). In other words the photographs are to be understood purely in relation to the family’s genealogical history. Analytically, for Fischer, the photographs are subordinate to the family tree, and no valid scientific knowledge about race or inheritance can be derived from independent photographs. Fischer breaks down racial type into racial mixture, perceiving the individuals he studies as manifesting a pattern of the two

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figure 3.1. Top: Eugen Fischer, photos enumerated as figures 1, 2, 3, and 4. Bottom: Genealogical chart of families of mixed race. The chart enables the readers to match between the individuals in the photographs and in the family tree. From Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen (Jena: Fischer, 1913). © Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt (ADEVA).

races, white and African, from which they are comprised. His use of photography epitomizes the Mendelian logic of traits that exist irrespective of a whole type—Fischer is not observing the “whole” person but merely following the distinct racial traits that appear or are absent in respective mixed offspring. Comparing a photograph of the offspring with that of the parents, Fischer wishes to observe and determine whether the nose, skull, or ear shape, for instance, was inherited from the one parent or from the other.

Fischer, then, frees racial/medical photography from anthropological standardization or control and connects it— introducing a shorthand to classify the individuals as “Eu.” (European), “Hott.” (Hottentot, i.e., Khoikhoi), or “Mittl.” (middle, i.e., a mixture)—with symbols used in psychiatry. His form of observation is technical, involving no insight, no subjective or emotional response, and no probing of anything beyond the visual; it is solely intended to identify isolated v­ isible

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traits on the photographic surface. The captions associate the visual information available in the photographs with background knowledge about the individuals’ bloodlines and, ultimately, when there is a discrepancy between the two, affords priority to true (wirkliche) bloodlines over appearance (Aussehen).7 Throughout the book Fischer treats the population of his study with affection and appreciation, although he is clearly patronizing and asserts that no one with a basic knowledge of biology could dispute the inferiority of “Negroes” to Whites. Although this study has nothing to do with Jews, at least not directly, the scientific “logic” of the Nuremberg Laws of almost three decades later can probably be traced directly back to it: Despite the cliché that those laws resorted to genealogy because no biological or genetic instrument could distinguish nonJews from Jews, the logic of the laws was the one Fischer develops in this study, according to which one must give priority to true bloodlines (genealogy) over appearance (phenotypes). According to this Mendelian model of inheritance, if one assumes that Jews are of a different race from non-Jewish Germans, as Fischer and many of his contemporaries believed, then a Jewish German who looks Aryan or Nordic is no less Jewish because of this appearance; nor is a non-Jewish German, in terms of (“true”) bloodlines, who looks Jewish any less Aryan because of his or her appearance. Because photography has to do with appearance, while race is found in bloodlines, there is the possibility of incongruence between the two. The prioritizing of bloodlines is based on Mendelian reasoning, on the fact that recessive genes remain unseen and cannot be captured by the camera or the eye, although they must nonetheless be assumed to be present. The racial inequality in which

this photography is embedded, then, has a visual component, but it is not exclusively visual, as can be seen with regard to the expectations and limitations of photography when appearance and the “deeper reality” (the bloodlines) clash.

THE PUBLIC ROLE OF THE SCIENTIST Following the publication of this 1913 study, Fischer increasingly turned to human genetics. In his long list of publications between 1913 and 1927, he made no significant use of photography; in most of them, in fact, there was no photography at all. In 1927 he became the founding director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Human Genetics in Berlin. That same year, together with Hans F. K. Günther, a humanist by education and the most famous theoretician of race in Weimar and Nazi Germany, Fischer published a popular book of photographs, the culmination of a photo contest for the most beautiful Nordic German head. We can ask a number of different questions in comparing the 1913 and 1927 books: Who took the photographs in each case? Who was the intended audience? What was the interface between scientific and public discourse in each case? What was the role of aesthetics, beauty, or gender? We can note how such studies affect social relations by inviting some viewers in and foreclosing the participation of others, within socially asymmetric processes of habituation involving real, imagined, observable, and invisible information. These two books, individually and in comparison, present us with many ways to look at how photography partakes in reality. The 1913 work is a book of photographs that Fischer took himself, as part of a study of a clearly defined set of families from a

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geographically determined human population, and their scientific status is defined and limited, intended for an audience of scientists. The 1927 book, on the other hand, was based on photographs sent in by the public at large in response to a competition that Günther and Fischer had announced.8 The audience for the book, as well as the source of the photographs, was the public, and the selections for publication were made according to a racial and an aesthetic standard. As a study in inheritance, the 1913 book featured both men and women, yet the photographs did not express any gender-specific aesthetic. The 1927 volume, intended for broader public consumption and in the context of Fischer’s own Volk, expressed a clear racialized and gendered aesthetic of nonerotic (sublime) feminine beauty on the one hand and male vitality on the other. One context for the contest, with its emphasis on beauty, was most likely the proliferation of “Miss Europe”–style beauty contests in the 1920s and the increasing photographic coverage that celebrities received in the press. Thus the 1927 book bridged the boundaries between the general public and academic discourse in several ways. And though the two studies share the framework of the ideology of racial inequality, there is much that separates them. Fischer brought the prestige of science to the subject, introducing a politicized and aestheticized notion of race into the national German discourse. Citizens were invited to compete by sending in their photographs; at the same time the definition of the contest excluded various kinds of citizens from participation, and both the contestants and those barred from entering internalized the guidelines as part of the reality in which they lived. While no formal criteria for the definition of a good photograph were communicated, the photographs selected for publication reflected certain conventions concerning

angles, distance, and lighting that were carried over from the scientific domain. Many of the photographs that were reproduced in the book show a person depicted from frontal and profile angles, for instance, thus introducing into the domain of beauty angles associated with scientific photography. Several other things stand out as well. With few exceptions the photographs feature young men and women. They look fresh and clean; without exception they sport tidy haircuts and are neatly dressed. In all of the photographs, the light falls on the subject’s face, hair, or eyes or is reflected off their straight, light hair in a way that makes the person glow. Women’s necks are long and elegant (for example, in figures 2, 4, 7, and 10 in the book [not reproduced here]). Men are serious and stern, on the whole, and, whether the men are in uniform or not, the photographs emphasize their straightforwardness, power, and natural authority—expressions of the iconography of “the master race.” Names are not disclosed, but captions that appear under the photographs state the subject’s geographical area or noble background. Not all of those photographed are beautiful according to our contemporary standards (although none are hideous). Figures 34 and 35 in the book (Figure 3.2a here) show two uniformed men, both from the same semi-profile angle. (It is interesting to note that when I have shown these photographs to audiences, some classified the man on the right as young, while others considered him middle-aged.) Their haircuts are short and tidy. The light is reflected off their hair and foreheads, accentuating the lines of their faces, their straight noses, and their head shapes. Their skin is light and free of wrinkles. Their respective white and black collars—probably the reason they were placed next to each other—emphasize their long necks. Their posture, according

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figure 3.2a. In Fischer’s original publication, these photos are captioned “[Fig.] 34: Eltern aus Schlesien” and “[Fig.] 35 Aus schlesischen Adel.” From Eugen Fischer and Hans F. K. Günther, Deutsche Köpfe nordischer Rasse: 50 Abbildungen mit Geleitworten (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1927).

with the characterization of the Nordic person, is free and athletic. In the Introduction I elaborated on the role of contrasts in the study of ideology; here is an example of how it is sufficient to present only one side (the Nordic German) for its opposite (the Jewish, understood as non-German) to be implied. The portraits of the women are presented separately from those of the men, but correlated with them so that, jointly, they express the Nordic person as inherently noble, civilized, clean. and fresh. Figure 3.2b shows

figure 3.2b. From Eugen Fischer and Hans F. K. Günther, Deutsche Köpfe nordischer Rasse: 50 Abbildungen mit Geleitworten (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1927).

two soft photographic portraits of women: On the left is a young woman whose long, slightly wavy, blond hair and light skin glow from the light falling on them from the right side from above. Her gaze gently but steadily faces the viewer. The photograph on the right shows a woman from an angle between a full profile and the back; she is possibly slightly older than the woman on the left, and the light falling on her from her back accentuates her straight, dark, upswept hair and her elongated neck.

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Unlike in the photographs of the mixedrace African population, here there is an accentuated political aesthetics of race and gender. The ideal characteristics of Nordic men and women are different: For men they are power, resilience, and authority, while for women the key trait is nonerotic beauty. Each gender is discrete and segregated from the other. In this Fischer can be grouped with Leni Riefenstahl, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, and Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß (all discussed in Chapter 2) and contrasted with Lerski. Within this ideology of race and gender, Fischer’s work—compared to, say, the photographs of Lendvai-Dircksen—emphasizes beauty more than they do authenticity. And yet they are not photographs of models or of celebrities, of the kind that one could find in the photojournals of the 1920s; rather, they seem to establish a more specific notion of “scientific beauty.” The implied strength of the photography here is that it merely represents a reality “out there.” The photographs cluster around (and in actuality subtly alter the image of) a Nordic type represented as beautiful, young, straightforward, energetic, and noble. The message they seem to convey to members of the class is empowering: This could be you. What the 1913 book and the 1927 book have in common, notwithstanding their different declared purposes, is that they both present photography as if it were merely representing racial reality, whereas what the photographs actually do, to speak with Flusser, is to tear out some parts of social reality and (using photography) define those parts as racial. In the process the photographs seek to transform the perception of their viewers, making the viewers sensitive to race in social life. This involves teaching viewers to experience reality as a deeply racial phenomenon, fulfilling a specific racial photographic imaginary by way of identity (classification according to society) and

identification (how the viewers classify themselves). In short, Fischer’s books compel individuals to encounter themselves as racial beings. If we try to break down this encounter, we must recognize that not only does it take place within socially framed asymmetric processes of habituation involving real, imagined, observable, and invisible information, but it also involves, along with direct encounters with the photographs, the mere knowledge of their existence as well. Of particular importance in this context is the ability of the viewer to mediate between photographs and reality, between ideal type and empirical social reality. Fischer’s photographs teach viewers to assume the presence of pure types even when they depict racially mixed individuals. This is an example of the complex way photography can serve a sensual, intellectual, and political education: Photography can show one thing (Nordic German heads) and teach the eye and the intellect to contrast that with surrounding reality (non-Nordic Germans and, worse, Jews), where both are understood as carrying direct and unequivocal political implications.

PHOTOGRAPHS ELICITING PHOTOGRAPHS In 1931 Eugen Fischer sent Hans Lichtenecker, a photographer and artist, to photograph the same individuals Fischer had studied in 1908. By comparing photographs of the same individuals from these two different time periods, Fischer wanted to explore the subject of racial characteristics in the process of aging. As we have no evidence that Fischer had expressed interest in the study of racial aging before he asked Lichtenecker to rephotograph the individuals Fischer had photographed in 1908, it seems likely

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that his interest in racial aging was aroused by the availability of the 1908 photographs. It is interesting to observe, first, Fischer’s working process with the photographs, and, second, how the method he introduced in 1908 had now become part of the protocol for the study of groups taken to be racially mixed. In 1938 Fischer published an article, based entirely on a comparison of the 1931 photographs and the 1908 photographs, in the journal where he served as editor.9 Lichtenecker had no specific anthropological qualifications. Nor did he need any, for Fischer’s purposes. In his diaries Lichtenecker often describes himself as an artist who wishes “to accurately depict the face of the Southwest” (das Gesicht vom Südwest akkurat abzubilden). He traveled to Africa on his own initiative and with his own funding to create an “archive for races on the verge of extinction” (Archiv aussterbender Rassen). The German anthropologist Annette Hoffmann, paying particular attention to material objects and to the testimonies of subjects, reconstructs the violent and highly repressive character of Lichtenecker’s entire project and shows, as well, that this character was apparent to Lichtenecker himself. The anthropological measuring and photographing took place at a police station, in an atmosphere like that of a police interrogation. There is no evidence that the way Lichtenecker proceeded was a matter of concern for Fischer, either, for whom the photographs were simply a form of transmittable visual evidence. The originals, however, were purchased and are now held by the Namibia Scientific Society in Windhoek, Namibia, not out of any interest in racial aging but as a form of repossessing the history of these images.10 Reproductions of the photographs can also be found in Fischer’s scientific estate, in the wealthy neighborhood of Dahlem,

West Berlin, in the basement of a villa that was once a private residence. (The photographic materials in Fischer’s archive are not complete, however: Some of the photographs that were originally in the archive, namely those showing Jews, were destroyed in the final stages of the war. This act is important because it incriminates Fischer and his colleagues, making it clear that they understood that the studies they had been carrying out, which were purportedly purely scientific, in fact implicated them in criminal activity from which they now wished to distance themselves. This marks an important moment in the history of scientific photography, signaling its association with persecution and murder by the scientists who took the photographs.) Fischer’s estate is unique in that the materials it possesses enable us to reconstruct aspects of his actual working processes with photographs. Fischer carefully indexed hundreds of cards, each showing a subject as photographed in both 1908 and 1931, and with Fischer’s handwritten comments and observations in pencil. Fischer’s question was about what happens to racial traits during the process of aging. To answer this question, he compared the earlier and later photographs. His remarks on the cards are short, focusing on changes in various specific traits between 1908 and 1931 and explicitly connecting the new materials with his earlier genealogical analysis of family trees (Figures 3.3 and 3.4): Elisabethe Wiese Then 10 years old now 33 She has back [. . .] problems her father pure Boer, her mother apparently F4 As a child—10 years old—looked like pure Boer. As an adult she was [. . .] [. . .] also not expected [?] by the inhabitants

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Hair [. . .] Cheekbone [. . .] [. . .] Nose stayed small [. . .] [. . .] (Abteilung III, Repositur: 94, BestellNr.: 36 Vol. 2 p. 3) Or: Malcolm MacHapf [?] (57) En Gr. [??] Then 35 years old now 58. Did not change. (Abteilung III, Repositur: 94, BestellNr.: 36 Vol. 2 p. 4) Or: Sophia Wieinyaart nee van Wyk (71) Hott. G[. . .] then 42 now 65 years old Rather a little bit more [. . .] [. . .]

In old age [\] Expression/features unfriendly [Züge nicht freundlich] (Abteilung III, Repositur: 94, BestellNr.: 30 Vol. 3 p. 1) The conditions under which the photographs were taken were clearly not strictly controlled: The subjects, as I have mentioned, are photographed against different backgrounds, at different distances, and in different light conditions. But when one peruses the photographs in the archive, the relative consistency of frontal and profile angles becomes apparent. While the published version of the article gives only a selection of the material found

figure 3.3. From the archive of Eugen Fischer (materials used for “Neue Rehobother Bastardstudien,” Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 37.2 [1938]: 127–39).

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figure 3.4. Eugen Fischer and Hans Lichtenecker, Photographs of Sophia Wieinyaart née van Wyk. From the archive of Eugen Fischer (materials used for “Neue Rehobother Bastardstudien,” Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 37.2 [1938]: 127–39).

in the archive, the tables of photographs that are included closely resemble Fischer’s handmade index cards. However, a comparison of the 1938 article with the 1913 book reveals differences in the visual presentation of the photographs: In the article the layout is much more crowded, the reprints are smaller and lose much of their portraitlike characteristics, and the cropping is more tightly centered on the subjects’ heads (Figure 3.5). Returning to some of the issues I developed in the Introduction, we can look here at how the expectations Fischer had for the photographs are expressed in the way Lichtenecker took them in the first place, and how Fischer and his colleagues perceived them. Here is an example from Abteilung III, Repositur: 94, Bestell-Nr.: 26, Vol. 2, made up of the original photograph from 1908 and, underneath it, the same photograph but

with part of it removed (Figure 3.6).11 The original frame shows a family group: On the left we see the left side of the body of a man in a dark suit, from just below his shoulder to just above his ankle. With the fingers of his left hand, he is holding his two-year-old daughter by the short sleeve of her dress. The girl, in her fancy dress, stares anxiously at the photographer. On the other side of the little girl, holding her other arm, is her slightly older sister, also wearing a short summer dress. Both of the two-year-old’s arms are lifted toward the photographer. The face of the older sister, who is maybe around five years old, also expresses anxiety. Her head is tilted slightly downward, so that she is looking up at Fischer from an even lower angle. The photograph was taken outside, with only a few trees and bushes in the background; it looks like the middle of nowhere. The father and the daughters crowd the

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figure 3.5. From Eugen Fischer, “Neue Rehobother Bastardstudien,” Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 37.2 (1938): 127–39. © Schweizerbart Science Publishers, www.schweizerbart.de

left part of the frame, together filling only slightly more than half the frame. The other half shows nothing but the dark shadow of an object falling on the ground; the object itself is outside the frame. Even in comparison with Fischer’s own other photographs, the repressive qualities of this one stand out. Under this photograph Fischer has glued another reprint, from which the young girl, Helena Baukus, has been removed with a confident hand. In this handling I sense a dehumanization that Fischer most probably did not. The anxiety I perceive in the girl in the photograph was also probably not perceived by Fischer. He and his colleagues were looking only for plain racial characteristics in the photographs. Hence the form of perception

the photographs elicited from them was already built into the context of their generation. The expectation of that perception was, for example, already present in Lichtenecker’s photographic treatment of the subjects (in a way that can be instantly discerned if we compare his photographs with the warmth of Yudovin’s photographs in chapter 5). We should not lose sight, however, of the fact that this whole dynamic—including the biases and predispositions in perception—is the expression of photography partaking in an ideology of racial inequality. At this moment in time, the late 1930s, Fischer’s practices were spreading. This is evidenced from the kinds of questions and photographic practices his students and colleagues were extending to other pop-

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figure 3.6. From the archive of Eugen Fischer (materials used for Eugen Fischer, “Neue Rehobother Bastardstudien,” Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 37.2 [1938]: 127–39).

ulations and contexts. In the commemorative volume dedicated to Fischer on his sixtieth birthday, for instance, the physical anthropologist Viktor Lebzelter published a study of mixed-race Khoisan individuals (Khoisanmischlinge) living in what is now Namibia.12 Gustav Perret, a paleoanthro-

pologist, meanwhile, paired head shots of contemporary Germans with skulls (Figure 3.7): the allegedly longer and narrower Nordic skulls as well as the larger and wider Cro-Magnon skulls.13 The layout of Perret’s photographs emphasizes the similarity of each contemporary German head with the

figure 3.7. From Gustav Perret, “Cro-Magnon-Typen vom Neolitikum bis heute,” Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 37 (1937): 1–100. Courtesy of Schweizerbart Science Publishers, www.schweizerbart.de.

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Nordic or Cro-Magnon skull, respectively, that is placed next to it, in a kind of X-ray layout; that is, suggesting a comparison between the surface and an otherwise invisible deep structure. (The similarity is further emphasized by the captions below each set of images.) It is a deep structure both in the sense that it is beneath the surface of the skin and in the sense that it visualizes the deep biological past of present-day races or population. But these scientific reproductions also interact in the viewer’s mind with other facets of culture, providing a memento mori with the allusion to the skull in European imagination (and bringing Hamlet’s famous scene with Yorick’s skull to the mind of any educated European). To a certain extent this “X-ray layout” anticipates the layouts in Fischer’s 1943 publication, to which the future death of races is also no stranger. The most directly politicized extension of Fischer’s method can be found in the work of his assistant and disciple Wolfgang Abel. Abel, a member of the Nazi Party and the elite Nazi “Protective Squadron” (the SS), studied thirty-nine offspring of German women and nonwhite Arab or African French soldiers in Wiesbaden, Germany, in July of 1933.14 Abel published two versions of the resulting article, one for an academic audience and one for a popular audience.15 The difference between the two versions lies not in their assumptions, methodology, scientific conclusion, or political implications, but rather in their style of argumentation. Although Fischer had developed a photographic method for the trained scientist’s eye, the same photographs could be used for and consumed by the wider public as well. And while the nonprofessional public could probably not observe the details that a physical anthropologist with a medical background would, the scientific and political

objectives were nevertheless communicated, conjoining the more narrowly specialized with the broader public discussions.

THE PORTRAIT OF A SCIENTIST A black-and-white portrait of Fischer in the Dahlem archives, in among the other photographs from Africa (Abteilung III, Repositur: 94, Bestell-Nr.: 11), appears external to Fischer’s career at first glance but on closer examination reveals multilayered intersections between science and art, the professional and the private. The portrait, taken by a professional photographer, Dr. D. H. Gewande of Pankow, Berlin, has aspirations that are almost meta-artistic. Dated July 1940, the photograph stages Fischer as he is seated in his office, leaning gently toward his crowded desk (Figure 3.8). His right hand holds the enlarged photograph of a dark-skinned, dark-haired African girl. The photograph, from his 1908 study, was repurposed and enlarged for the staging of the portrait. The photograph has been glued onto a larger piece of white paper, creating the effect of a white passe-partout around the girl; the fact that she was photographed wearing a white shirt also adds contrast. Fischer, wearing a fresh white doctor’s robe and seen almost completely in profile, is posed observing the photograph carefully from above. The light coming from the window illuminates his forehead and his hair. On the right side of his desk, leaning against the white wooden window, where one might expect to find a portrait of the scientist’s spouse, child, or grandchild, another photograph can be seen. This is a photograph of an African man wearing a black shirt, in a black frame with, again, a white passepartout. The African man is facing Fischer,

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figure 3.8. D. H. Gewande, Portrait of Eugen Fischer, 1940, from the archive of Eugen Fischer. Courtesy of Archives of the Max-Planck-Society, Berlin.

who is facing the African girl; the African girl’s eyes, meanwhile, seem to be facing the viewer, creating an invisible zigzagging line among the four, but without any reciprocal eye contact. There is also a suggestion of the passage of time in this photograph of Fischer. This is not racial aging, though, but Fischer’s own aging. In this photograph, taken on the occasion of the Festschrift as he neared retirement, he is not only looking down but also looking backward in time, from 1940, at persons whose images were arrested in 1908. The portrait alludes to the history of art in general and to Vermeer’s Geographer in particular (Figure 3.9).16 This allusion paints Fischer as an explorer and discoverer of worlds, but maybe even more important, it indicates to an edu-

cated audience the photographer’s, Fischer’s, and hence the audience’s own immersion in the world of classical art. If I try to unpack my sense of awkwardness in the face of this photograph, I realize that it stems not only from the crossing of genres (the explorer of the world; the scientist at work in the lab; the scholar in deep reflection; the anthropologist with his native subjects; a photograph copying a painting) but also from the liminal status—between family members and carriers of Mendelian traits—of the Africans in the photographs. This photograph, more than any of the photographs discussed earlier in this chapter, illustrates the ease with which photography can move between, connect, and bring together distinct spheres of social activity.

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figure 3.9. D. H. Gewande, Portrait of Eugen Fischer, juxtaposed with The Geographer (1668–69) by Johannes Vermeer. Courtesy of Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF AN IMAGE OF THE JEWS AS PART OF THEIR LIQUIDATION Neither in Rehobother Bastards nor in the study of Nordic German heads does Fischer make any direct mention of Jews. But in the short section on Jews in the fourth edition of the classic Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre (Outline of the Study of Heredity), first published in 1923, of which Fischer was a coauthor, he determines that there is a “burning need” to study intermixtures with Jews. Although no such study has yet been carried out, Fischer warns against such intermixing. Even more interesting, Fischer quotes himself, from the 1913 Rehobother Bastards, saying that every European people that has allowed the blood of inferior races to enter it has been punished with cultural

and mental deterioration.17 Fischer’s definition of Jews as racially inferior thus either is now being projected backward or was there all along and is only now being expressed. But not until much later does Fischer introduce photographs of Jews into his work. Fischer turned to the photography of Jews only after Germany’s invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II. But there is a mental image that precedes the photographs of Jews, without which they (meaning both the photographs and the Jews) cannot be understood. This visual image can be strangely sensed, for instance, in a lecture on the “Racial Origin and Earliest Racial History of the Hebrews” that Fischer gave in 1938 (as part of a series in Munich on the Jewish question), although he employed no photographs or other visuals in the talk. But from his linguistic descriptions in the lecture, it is nonetheless clear that Fischer has an image in his

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mind, a vivid visual image that he conveys to his listeners without ever stating that is what he is doing. Indirectly, in long passages that establish racial cues—such as “a very short, high skull with a quite flat occiput [back and lower part of the skull],” or “The coarse face with a perpendicular forehead is dominated by an extraordinarily large, coarse, strongly projecting hooked nose”18—he creates this strong, tangible picture. Several times, most likely in late 1939 or early 1940, Fischer sent an assistant and three students to Lodz (“Litzmannstadt”)— where at that time hundreds of thousands of Jews were being executed, deported to concentration camps, made to do forced labor, or ghettoized in one part of the city— for a study that was most probably made possible, according to the German historian Hans-Walter Schmuhl, by Herbert Grohmann, a graduate of the first SS course at Fischer’s institute in 1938–39 who was now serving as the chief medical supervisor of the medical office in Lodz. Fischer had 250 Jews anthropologically measured, fingerprinted, and photographed.19 After the war, the pathologist Georg Geipel found all of the material except for the photographs in the institute of the geneticist Hans Nachtsheim, and at the end of 1950 he was still deliberating whether to publish it.20 Would he have considered publishing the photographs if they had still been available? Turns in history can be quick and bold. In 1939 the photographs were in agreement with other forms of evidence, and Fischer’s study of Jews was part of the trend of history at the moment. Through Fischer’s correspondence with Alfred Rosenberg and others in 1944, Schmuhl has been able to corroborate the close relationship between Fischer’s study of Jews and his support for the unfolding “final solution” to the threat posed by Judentum (Jewry, Jews, and Juda-

ism), which had “waged war against us” (den Kampf gegen uns geführt) “for decades” (seit Jahrzehnten).21 As early as 1941, in a lecture he gave in occupied Paris, Fischer spoke about the “monstrous mentality” (monströse Mentalität) of the “Bolshevik Jews,” determining that Jews belonged to a different species (anderen Spezies).22 With the film negatives of the photographs from Lodz destroyed in the last days of World War II, our analysis is limited to those photographs Fischer reproduced in the 1943 book Das antike Weltjudentum (The Jewry of the Ancient World), which he coauthored with a prominent Protestant biblical scholar and professor at the University of Göttingen, Gerhard Kittel; the book made extensive use of photographic reproductions and combined the scholarly with the political.23 The English translation of the title, particularly of the word Weltjudentum (worldwide Jewry), does not convey the conspiratorial implications of Weltjudentum in German. The deep structure of the album was to erect an image of the eradicated Jewish race. In terms of ideological contrasts, the 1927 book explores Nordic beauty, while the 1943 book studies Jewish ugliness. It was written at the height of German military success, while the German army was sweeping across Europe and seemed invincible, and while the systematic murder of Jews was going on across the occupied territories. The book’s content and tone are celebratory, in line with the history unfolding before the authors’ eyes. By the time the book appeared in print, however, the Germans had been defeated at the battle of Stalingrad, and the tide of the war had changed. The book makes extensive use of visual materials but uses only a few of the Lodz photographs. To analyze Fischer’s and Kittel’s photographic practices, we must dif-

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ferentiate between materials and layout strategies. This will reveal how anthropology and art history are combined to educate the eye, sensually and intellectually, within an ideology of racial inequality. Although the photographs depict Jews, and represent reality, their general context, which Fischer and Kittel state explicitly, is the “comprehensive solution to the Jewish question” (die Gesamtlösung der Judenfrage), in other words genocide (Volkstod).24 In the same year, 1943, and within the same historical context, but with opposite intentions, the Polish Jewish refugee and legal scholar Raphael Lemkin developed the notion of genocide as the murder of a race or people. But if we want to grasp the social imaginary of the album, it is difficult not to think of Moritz Steinschneider as well, the great nineteenth-century Jewish Orientalist and scholar of Wissenschaft des Judentums (the study of Judaism and Jewry) who was (mistakenly) attributed of having stated that the task of Wissenschaft des Judentums was to “bring Judentum to decent burial.” In The Jewish Question, a short book published in 1933, Kittel named the extermination of the Jews as the first possible solution, though he then ruled it out.25 Thinking about genocide in the context of Judentum was not new. What was new was interweaving photography into this imaginary. And this interweaving is hard to address and describe, not only because the photographs cannot be separated from the things and subjects with which they are entwined, but also because, immediately after Germany’s defeat, Germans were compelled to distance themselves from the murder, and they used the enormity of the events in their defense, claiming that, given the genocide’s inconceivable nature, scale, and brutality, the public could not have known about it. But Fischer and Kitter’s album—similar to the Museum of

an Extinct [Jewish] Race in Prague—reveals that, only a short time earlier, one school of thought in Germany had tried to establish a public image for the eradicated race, and for this purpose made use of photographs. This is the “matching” process between photograph and image. The image is intended for the benefit of future generations who will no longer encounter Judentum directly.26 While the photographs in this album are representational and documentary, there is maybe even a way of understanding the images more deeply, for which I rely on the work of the French philosopher Marie-José Mondzain on the relationship between the image and the icon in the Christian Byzantine context. We are accustomed to thinking about photographs as indexical, in Peircian terms, which implies that both the photograph and what it depicts belong to the realm of the material and the visible. But a more powerful approach here is to use Mondzain’s opposition between the image as fundamentally invisible and the icon as visible: The icon (of Christ), an artificial (visual) object, provides the seeing person with access to the invisible image (of Christ). Could this be called Fischer’s “desire for the invisible,” alluding (with a certain degree of cynicism, though I am not sure what that degree is) to the opening of Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity?27 Fischer’s photographs are material, visual objects: Like the Byzantine icon, they provide access to a phenomenon that not only has been eradicated but also intrinsically escapes representation.28 Fischer in fact notes that, while one can recognize a Jew as such with full confidence, there is nonetheless “something in the Jewish physiognomy that escapes measurement” and “makes it practically impossible to describe in its particulars” (kaum im einzelnen beschreibbar).29 This claim, which

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bears on the image of the Jews, is actually not new; it was voiced in 1795, before the invention of photography, by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the German founder of modern anthropology.30 Fischer’s photographic reproductions cannot be separated from this broader realm of the image, on which they build and which they concretize and alter. Here, though, they are intended to provide access to an essence or a phenomenon that transcends and escapes representation. The image the album establishes is of a rotten, doomed essence. Judentum is beyond repair; there is nothing left to be done but remove or eradicate it. The very last quotation in the first part of the book, which is textual rather than photographic and carries the title Geschwür am Völkerkörper (“Tumor on the Nation’s Body”), is from the Talmud: “A king, who hated the Jews, spoke to the leaders of his kingdom: When someone has a cancerous tumor on his foot, should it be removed, so that the person can stay alive, or should it be left there so that the person must suffer from pain? They answered: remove it, so that he shall live!”31 The cry for the eradication of the Jews is thus expressed using a medical metaphor. But other things stand out in this quotation as well. First, the call to “remove” the Jews, the cancerous tumor, is made by way of a quotation from a Jewish source, implying that the subject itself knows and in fact is calling for and expects its painful but necessary fate. Second, the linguistic structure is passive; the agent of the medical procedure remains unspecified. The way Fischer and Kittel use the partial quotation in their book bears a structural similarity to the function of the confession made by a convicted felon in early modern legal processes against alleged witches: “The convicted felon had to provide a confession of his or her crimes; and so the criminal had to go a certain way

towards agreeing to his or her own execution, or at least, had to appear to be doing so.”32 Christian echoes, too, are impossible to avoid, as the partial quotation inverts Matthew 27:25, the source of the accusation of deicide, where the Jews take eternal responsibility for the killing of Jesus: “Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.” The collaboration between Fischer, the scientist of race, and Kittel, the scholar of Judaism, materializes some of the deeper questions that historians pose with regard to the relationship between racism and antisemitism, because the distinct sources of anti-Judaism, which cannot be separated from their Christian layers, coalesce here with scientific racism (which also draws on other sources both for its ideas and for its visual practices). The textual part of the book is followed by two visual parts. The third part of the book (the second of the two visual parts) in certain ways parallels Perret’s pairings of photographs of heads with photographs of skulls: This section of the book, suggesting as it does the deep structure of the previous part, could be considered the book’s “skeleton.” The book’s photographs, more than the written account, make use of what linguists call implication, or things that derive from the meaning of a statement, and implicature, or the suggestion of something without saying it directly. The reader is invited to fill in the lacunae. The visual part of the book includes numerous portraits. The portraits originate from the Fayum region in Egypt, from the early centuries of the Christian era, and have nothing particular to do with Jews (Figures 3.10a–c). When I saw some of the originals in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Altes Museum in Berlin, my immediate response was surprise at their sharp, high-contrast colors, of which the black-

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left: figure 3.10a. Portrait of a young woman in red, Roman period, ad 90–120. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Resource, NY. center: figure 3.10b. Panel painting of a woman in a blue mantle, Roman period (reign of Nero), ad.54–68. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Resource, NY. right: figure 3.10c. Portrait of a thin-faced, bearded man, Roman period, ad 160–80. © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Resource, NY.

and-white reproductions disclose nothing (and of which the text makes no mention), and their material qualities—some on wood and some on paper—which are purposely repressed by their handling in the book. I took some photographs of the originals on my cell phone to demonstrate how much depends on the actual photographs (Figure 3.11). The portraits are irregular in size and shape. As their original function was to cover the faces of mummies, their edges sometimes show glue marks, material signs of their intended use, which have been removed from Fischer and Kittel’s book. The way the portraits have been handled in the book brings them closer to the visual realm of photography. Page 117 of the book is laid out to emphasize the similarity between an ancient Egyptian and a Jew from Lodz, implying the permanent essence of the Jewish phenomenon as primitive and alien across time and space. The photographic layout on the

right-hand page (the page reproduced here as Figure 3.12) is accompanied by short explanations on the left-hand page. Fischer describes his figure 71, under the heading of the Oriental and Near-Eastern races, as “Near-Eastern nose, narrow, long Oriental facial form, thick, fleshy lips. On the whole a very crude type” (sehr grober Typ). And 71a is described as: “Very similar type: Jew from Lodz, photographed 1940” (116). The axis on which the photograph of the Lodz Jew is centered determines how we see the ancient portrait placed next to it, with our eye drawn down that central axis connecting the nose, the lips, and the eyes: The subject’s massive nose sinks so deep that it covers parts of his moustache and hangs just above the thick lips of his closed mouth and his short beard. The cheeks and the forehead of the Lodz Jew are not the same as those in the ancient portrait, nor is the facial structure. But the physiognomic similarities between the two images suppress our perception of their

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figure 3.11. Al Fayum portraits, Altes Museum display, 2015, author’s photographs. © Altes Museum Berlin.

contrasting expressive qualities. The gaze of the man in the ancient portrait is directed at the observer; he is looking slightly down at us from above. The eyes of the man from

Lodz are wide open, but he is numb, his gaze hollow and objectless. It is as though he were looking at some distant point behind the viewer, evading eye contact, and for the

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figure 3.12. Page 117 (top, left to right: figures 71–71a; bottom, left to right: figures 72–72a), from Eugen Fischer and Gerhard Kittel, Das antike Weltjudentum. Tatsachen, Texte, Bilder (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1943).

observer he is therefore an object. The common denominator for the two pictures, emphasized by the page layout, is the nose. And although the angle of the anthropological photograph is almost frontal, the nose appears so prominently not only because of its length but because the photograph is taken from slightly to the right, and almost the entire left part of the face is darkened. This is a subtle, hardly perceptible, example of how the photographic treatment shapes the representation of an object and the perception of the photograph. If Mondzain shows in

her study that Christ is always seen frontally, and the Jew, who in this tradition is denied the face of God, only shown in profile, this photograph of the Jew from Lodz, although apparently frontal, is really the profile of the Jew.33 The reason for including the two bottom photographs on this page, which seem less obviously Jewish, is the nose shown in figure 72, which Fischer classifies racially as Near-Asian, as well as the one in figure 72a, where the man shown is identified as Somali. Inverting and completing the photograph

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figure 3.13. Pages 98–99 from Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kunst und Rasse (Munich: Lehmann, 1928).

above it (71a), figure 72a shows the left side of the man identified as Somali as it reflects the strong light falling on him from above left. Of the four faces shown on this page, the closest to Fischer and Kittel in space and time, namely the Jew from Lodz shown in figure 71a, is depicted as the ugliest and most threatening. Using the layout to frame, interpret, and illuminate various specific components of photographs was a strategy that had already been employed earlier, by Hans Günther, in his 1922 book on the racial components of the German people. There, cropped portraits were placed alongside photographs, giving the portraits the function of photographs. We also saw elements of a similar layout strategy, as I have noted, in Perret’s pairing of photographs of living people’s

heads with skulls (see Fig. 3.7). The specific strategy used in Fischer and Kittel’s 1943 book, of placing reproductions of portraits alongside anthropological photographs to point to shared structures, had been employed in journals such as Der Querschnitt, but it is even more likely that in this instance it was drawn from Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s inf luential 1928 book Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race).34 Schultze-Naumburg was a prominent Nazi architect, publicist, and politician who was a generation older than Fischer. In Kunst und Rasse, Schultze-Naumburg developed a unique layout method, embedded in a particular racial ontology, for medical photographs and photographic reproductions of art or sculpture (Figure 3.13). On facing pages 98 and 99 of his book, for instance, Schultze-Na-

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umburg places details from modern paintings (page 98) across from photographs of individuals suffering from various congenital and incurable diseases (page 99). The layout is based on, and is meant to suggest and reinforce, his theory that the artworks share the same source and have the same status as the individuals suffering from these diseases.35

Excursus: The Asymmetry Between Linguistic and Visual Images A comparison of Fischer and Kittel’s photographic manipulations with their linguistic ones reveals a fundamental asymmetry in the susceptibility of each sort of manipulation to deconstruction. It is relatively easy to show Fischer and Kittel’s manipulation of the talmudic quotation. Deconstructing the photographic manipulations requires a greater effort, is harder to grasp, and leaves a residue. Fischer and Kittel’s partial quotation inverts the context, meaning, and function of the quoted source. The reference under the citation reads: “Talm.” The abbreviation found in the book’s endnotes, on pages 233–36, reads “b. Ab.z. 10b,” referring readers to the Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 10b. 36 The story of Qetia b. Shalom told there is in fact, on several interconnected levels, the exact opposite of what Fischer and Kittel imply in their partial quotation. In the general context of a discussion of noble Gentiles in the Roman Empire who have been Judaized, the text playfully employs the name of the protagonist, Qetia b. Shalom (literally meaning “chop” or “Sever, son of shalom”), to convey the indispensable role played by Israel in the Roman Empire and in the world. The episode starts with the question

quoted earlier, as posed by Caesar (using the same Hebrew root for “removal of the dead flesh,” yikta’enah, as is found in the protagonist’s name, Qetia). Qetia, a non-Jewish nobleman, instantly understands the subtext of Caesar’s question and responds in a way that materializes his own name. Although he is not Jewish, Qetia uses a talmudic form of argumentation with Caesar: By way of midrashic exegesis of a biblical quotation from Zechariah 2:10, Qetia argues that Jews are as indispensable to the world as are the four winds. The destruction of the Jews would mean the destruction of the world. Following such destruction, the empire would be a “cut-off empire” (“malkhuta qeti’ah”). Fischer and Kittel’s partial quotation is easily recognized as an intentional distortion of the text’s original meaning and context. Hermann Strack and Paul Billerbeck, from whom Fischer and Kittel take the translation, translated the entire passage, including elucidations within the translated passage.37 The story establishes a symmetry between the removal or chopping off of the foot or dead piece of flesh (or, in the German translation, cancerous tumor) and the act of circumcision or removal of the foreskin. At the end of Qetia’s audience with Caesar, Caesar congratulates him on his good argument but sentences him to death. As Qetia is being removed, a woman exclaims, “Woe to the ship that sails without [paying] the tax!” Qetia understands this immediately and cuts (“qeta’ah”) his own foreskin, announcing that he has duly paid his tax. Scholars disagree about whether or not this act made him a Jew, but in our context what is important is that R. Akiva’s response to Qetia’s act confirms Qetia’s self-identification as one of the people of Israel. Qetia both saves Israel and earns himself an honorable martyrdom and place in the world to come.38 In comparison, the manipulation in-

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volved in photographs shows greater resistance to deconstruction. We are aware that Fischer’s assistants did not choose the individuals they photographed randomly but instead selected those who fit their image of Jews, and we are also aware that, from the photographs taken, Fischer similarly chose photographs for the album that fit his image of Jews; nevertheless something of the image, as well as of the manipulation, sticks

figure 3.14. Page 201 from Eugen Fischer and Gerhard Kittel, Das antike Weltjudentum. Tatsachen, Texte, Bilder (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1943).

and subsists in the sense that it cannot be fully withdrawn. It is not merely that once seen the image cannot be unseen (this is of course true for the quotation as well), but that the photograph forms a different relationship with the real. Consequently, the only way to deconstruct a photograph would be by countering it with another photograph showing the same subject—in this case the man from Lodz—differently; but in this in-

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figure 3.15a. Page 197 from Eugen Fischer and Gerhard Kittel, Das antike Weltjudentum. Tatsachen, Texte, Bilder (Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt: Hamburg, 1943).

stance, as in many other cases, this is impossible. Recall the third disposition discussed in the Introduction, with regard to a photograph’s ability to indicate that it is a direct representation of the real, which is what this photograph suggests. Because an image of the Jew preceded the photograph, however, the real (individual) mediates the image

(of the Jew) and the photograph (of the individual as Jew), and this mediation cannot be withdrawn. This is a circular dynamic in which photography partakes in reality and, by representing a piece of the real, reaffirms the preexisting image and social imaginary. Because photography is so close to the real, it can be difficult to clearly describe the way the social imaginary is entwined

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into the photograph, and it is made even harder by the fact that social imaginaries are themselves historical entities. When I discussed this photograph of the Lodz Jew at a conference at Emory University in 2015, a scholar in the audience responded that she saw a “noble seed” in the photograph.

In the Introduction, I discussed the historical perception of photographs and the ways the expectations and intentions built into their production and use offer keys to that perception. Where we may see a noble seed, the German audience of 1943, based on the expectations and intentions of Fischer and

figure 3.15b. Details from the Reims cathedral, from Moshe Barasch, “The Face of Evil: On the Afterlife of the Classical Theatre of the Mask,” Imago Hominis: Studies in the Language of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 102. © NYU Press. The classic account of the association between the Jews and the devil, by Joshua Trachtenberg, came out a year after Fischer and Kittel’s book. Moshe Barasch studied the devil’s laughter in art and its relationship to the classical theater mask and demons. Barasch, born in Czernowitz in 1920, a partisan fighter and Holocaust survivor, is considered the founder of art history in Israel. His opening statement, “Everyone who has been brought up in the Western tradition is familiar with the motif of the devil’s laughter,” makes it hard for one to avoid wondering about the absence of the antisemitic/Jewish aspect from his account. Focusing on examples from the Reims cathedral, Barasch explores their expression of evil of a “low” type (102), of their engendering a sense of danger, anxiety. Fischer and Kittel could have used these examples, and I wonder why they chose to use the Roman masks as a resource rather than medieval Christian ones. In 1953, in between the publication dates of Fischer and Kittel’s album and Barasch’s article, the Austrian art historian Dagobert Frey published what is still today the most comprehensive essay available on the “evil gaze” throughout art history. I do not know whether Frey knew Fischer and Kittel’s album or reproductions, but his discussion of the Al Fayum portraits belongs to our current context of discussion. Frey notes how the portraits look at the observer but that their gaze goes beyond, as if into a void or emptiness of the dead in their new state (276). Roughly a decade earlier, Frey had taken part in extensive looting of artworks in occupied Poland; in 1942 he wrote a guide to “Lublin without Jews.” Fischer, Kittel, Frey, and Barasch all possessed an intimate understanding of the relationship between images and evil. See Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1943); Moshe Barasch, “The Face of Evil: On the Afterlife of the Classical Theatre of the Mask,” Imago Hominis: Studies in the Language of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 100–110; Dagobert Frey, “Dämonie des Blickes,” Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur in Mainz, Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, Jg. 1953, no. 6, (Wiesbaden, 1953), 243–98. For the marginal sculptures in the Reims cathedral, see Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, Marginal Sculpture in Medieval France: Towards the Deciphering of an Enigmatic Pictorial Language (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995).

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Kittel, perceived subhumanity, threat, and pollution. When I once again discussed the photograph, this time at the University of Chicago in 2017, a scholar of photography and visual studies claimed that it was only the text surrounding the photograph, not the photograph itself, that conveyed Fischer and Kittel’s message. But based on the approach I have developed in this book, his position has to be rejected: Because photography partakes in reality, entwined with the people who take the photographs and the people who appear in them, and because virtually every subject can be photographed differently, the context of its generation is expressed in the photograph itself. The claim of that scholar, however, testifies to the degree to which photography resists deconstruction as compared with linguistic expressions.

Although Fischer and Kittel appropriated Schultze-Naumburg’s layout method, they used relatively few anthropological photographs of Jews. For Fischer and Kittel, these few photographs formed scientific evidence for their discussion of the Jew; for us, the photographs are the remnant of an archive. Even though most of the photographs were destroyed just before the end of the war, these few photographs are sufficient for us to recreate the whole “archive,” the whole mise-en-scène of which they were a part. These few photographs were sufficient to suggest the shared and permanent structure of Jewry over time. Further proof that Fischer and Kittel’s aim, in the end, was to erect an image of Judentum is provided by the concluding section of the book. In this section, made up of 225 reproductions of figurines and masks from several ancient collections, photographs of Roman masks are shown as though they were early carica-

tures of Jews (Figures 3.14–3.15a). And if the talmudic quotation suggested the deep corruption of the Jews by drawing on an image from a textual tradition, these photographic reproductions suggested the Jews’ inherent evil essence by evoking an image that draws on the visual tradition of the laughing devil (Figure 3.15b). The identification of the Jews with the devil dates back at least to the medieval period; the devil’s discordant laughter epitomizes the total indifference to human suffering that, according to Moshe Barasch, “sends a chill down the spine.”39 It is evident from Fischer’s comments about the original context of these images that he is aware that they do not actually represent Jews. But the way they are reproduced here implies that they capture the grotesque and alien nature of Jews, and that the ancients were already plainly aware of that nature. Here the grotesque photographic treatment (the first disposition of photography discussed in the Introduction) can be correlated with the excessive linguistic treatment of the subject. The reproduction of the masks belongs to the sphere of the comic, given that Fischer and Kittel, we can be confident, knew their Aristotle. In the Poetics, Aristotle speaks of the imitation of the ridiculous—“a species of the ugly”—in the context of comedy, the mask “that excites laughter, is something ugly and distorted without causing pain.”40 The close-up photographs possess an almost three-dimensional, lifelike quality. Fischer and Kittel provide no historical or cultural contexts for these collections. For one of the collections, now located in Cologne, however, I was able to find out that it was discovered in an excavation in Trier and dates to the Roman period. There is no indication that the collection had anything to do with Jews.41 While it is true that in “documentary” terms the use of these photographic reproductions is false or

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“fake,” they are effective. In this sense, these reproductions illustrate the photography scholar Margaret Olin’s notion of photography as a “performative index” (that is to say, the idea that photographs performatively create relations between objects).42 And, in this case, the photographs connect an image (of the Jews) with an image (of the devil). A comparison between the photographs made by the museum where the pieces are currently housed and the photographs of the same pieces in Fischer’s book demonstrates the ability of Fischer’s photographer to blow a certain social imaginary into these tiny clay pieces.43 The museum’s website shows nothing but page after page of small, flat, lifeless archeological remains, illustrating once again that photographs that are representational and documentary can nonetheless simultaneously partake in the constitution of social imaginaries.

CONCLUSION: PHOTOGRAPHIC REMNANTS We have seen three major kinds of photographic practices in Fischer’s career— photography used for racial/medical observation, for scientific propaganda, and for the establishment of a mental image—all of them embedded in an ideology of racial inequality. I have recreated the context in which the photographs were generated as well as the intentions, the expectations, and the ideological assumptions within which they were embedded, which was necessary for regaining some access to how they would have been perceived by contemporaries. In Vilém Flusser’s architecture of communication, Fischer’s case fits quite well with the third, scientific method, where the sender distributes information that is enriched and

changed during its circulation.44 From our current moment in time, we can determine that the ideology of racial inequality gradually declined in the decades that followed Nazi Germany’s defeat (which is not to say that it evaporated completely), although it is very difficult to say exactly when; that decline probably took different forms and occurred at different times among medical doctors and other sectors of society that had been exposed to the photographs. From the methodological perspective developed in the Introduction, one of the hardest questions to address is: Within this gradual process, how did the perception of the photographs change? This is hard to address because, as with any process of social and ideological change of this kind, it takes place silently until, at some point, from outside of the previous ideological presumptions, the photographs are perceived differently: The cues they had held for earlier viewers are no longer perceived, the monstrosity of the Jew from Lodz is no longer sensed, and other things that were not visible before can be seen, such as the terrified expression of the young African girl. Things are even more complex than that, however. If, as I argued in the Introduction, photographic documentation moves forward in history on the same plane with and as part of the changing discussion of those who document and that which is being documented, the photographs still continue to inject into discussions that have moved away from racial inequality something left over from the original context of their generation and use. If we insist on the reciprocity between photography and social reality—that is, if, as we saw, a mental image preceded the production of the actual photograph of the Jew from Lodz or the girl from Rehoboth, and shaped the photograph—then something of both the mental image and the

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photograph will shape the ensuing changed discussion, including with regard to any social encounter with the thing shown in the photograph when it is met in reality. Neither the mental image nor the photograph will disappear completely into obscurity. With these processes in mind, I will end this chapter by addressing, first, the vestiges present in the second half of the twentieth century of the practices studied in this chapter, and, second, a shift in discussions of other cultures based on similar assumptions with regard to photography’s ability to speak to the imagination. Fischer and Kittel appropriated from art history the layout strategy of pairing art objects with humans. In doing so, they also merged the study of Jews with that of degeneration, mental illness, and pathology. We could suggest the specifically propagandistic and antisemitic features of this photographic tradition. But it is arguably more interesting not to isolate Fischer’s photographic practices but rather to look at them within broader struggles over vision and their interface with less tainted histories. What remains of Fischer’s photographic practices, and under what conditions? Fischer introduced photography into the study of human inheritance as a tool for the medical and racial observation of inherited traits. In 2012 I gave a lecture at the Genetic Clinic of the Ha’emek Medical Center in Afula, Israel, and on that occasion the clinic’s director invited me into her office for a conversation. The subject of the talk was not photography, but in the course of that short conversation it came up. The director lifted a camera from her desk to point out its presence to me. Some genetic disorders are instantly visible to the genetic expert, she said; patients are regularly photographed and the images communicated to colleagues for consultation and diagnosis. Im-

ages are also instantly compared with vast online medical archives.45 This use of photography is so prevalent, patently obvious, and fundamental to the practice of medicine that it eclipses its historical source. (The condition of this practice should also not be overlooked: the removal of “race” from the discussion.) Aside from this basic feature, however, it is harder to assess what else remains of the photographic practices used in Das antike Weltjudentum. The layout strategy Fischer and Kittel appropriated from Schultze-Naumburg’s Kunst und Rasse, namely coupling photographic reproductions of paintings and portraits with anthropological photographs, implied that both could be reduced to medical and racial categories. Similar layout strategies, based on similar assumptions, continued into the second half of the twentieth century. For example, Genetics and Malformation in Art, a catalog comprised of photographic reproductions of paintings, statues, miniatures, and anthropological photographs (recaptioned as “artistic photographs of malformed people”), was handed out to participants at the seventh International Congress of Human Genetics, held in West Berlin in 1986. I came across the catalog in 2013 in the home of an Israeli geneticist who told me that she still uses it in her teaching.46 Six photographs, shown on two facing pages, depict individuals with various genetic deformities, along with their diagnoses (Figure 3.16). “Race” has once again been removed from the discussion. While this may be my subjective impression, this layout form seems to carry vestiges of its historical source. An essential feature of the photography in Das antike Weltjudentum is that it is not presented in the service of anthropological representation but is related, as I have claimed, to the image: the image of Jews,

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figure 3.16. Pages 70–71 from Jürgen Kunze and Irmgard Nippert, eds., Genetics and Malformation in Art (Berlin: Grosse, 1986).

and the image of the extinction and cessation of the Jews.47 We have seen several separate facets of connection with regard to this image: The talmudic passage, Steinschneider (who envisioned the total integration of the Jews into Germany), and Fischer belong to different universes, yet they are not unrelated. (And Lichtenecker’s attempt to create an archive of races that were dying out in Africa can be seen as a separate island within the history of Fischer’s career.) Photography plays a complex role in this history. Already in 1927 the German Jewish essayist Siegfried Kracauer noted the inherent relationship between the photograph and death. He meant something different from what the great German Jewish scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem contended when he connected documentation and museumization with death. And both

Kracauer and Scholem meant something different from what Fischer did. Fischer’s anthropological photographs from the Lodz ghetto are part of the actual annihilation of the Jews; the album explicitly states its context of genocide. And yet, at least to me, Yudovin’s photographs, taken almost three decades earlier, evoke the Holocaust more strongly. How can this be explained? Kracauer and Scholem offer some guidance here, as the perception of An-sky’s and Yudovin’s folkloristic mode of documentation was transformed following the Holocaust. The reason Fischer’s photographs do not evoke the same response is found in the photographs themselves: Embedded in a paradigm of racial inequality, identifying with the ongoing eradication of the Jews, the photographs are devoid of compassion, and this shapes their later perception

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as well. Apart from using one racial photograph from India in a later publication, Fischer did not resort to photography after the collapse of Nazi Germany. But his ideology stayed the same, including his belief in the disappearance of inferior populations throughout history. When, in his semi-autobiographical 1959 book, Encounters with the Dead, Fischer half-jokingly states that “one can then also encounter an entire dead nation [Volk],” he is not talking about the recently exterminated Jews but instead referring to an anatomist who uses the archeological remains of peoples extinguished long ago.48 But photography can also fire the imagination about extinct cultures in an altogether different way, for altogether different purposes. It is difficult to think of someone more distant from Fischer, in his biography or in his political and intellectual commitments, than the French Resistance fighter

and later government minister André Malraux. Malraux published a three-volume book in 1954 (though it was already announced in 1947, just four years after the publication of Fischer and Kittel’s book) comprised almost entirely of photographic reproductions of statues, ancient reliefs, and artworks organized according to major geopolitical regions and historical periods. Resonating, in a certain way, with the contemporary photographic exhibition of the “Family of Man” that toured the world for eight years starting in 1955, an exhibition that was magnificent in its scope and anything but a celebration of hate, Malraux’s book uses photographs to create what he terms a musée imaginaire (imaginary museum).49 “Imaginary” describes the virtual space of the book, which replaces the actual museum building and makes it possible for artworks to be brought together that could otherwise never have been shown in the

figure 3.17. Pages 146–47 from André Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire (1954; repr. Paris: Gallimard, 1965).

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same place at the same time. But it also links photography and the imagination. Malraux advances photography as the only medium that allows the extraction of art objects from their original context, placing them next to each other and allowing us to “see” history in them (Figure 3.17). Photography provides us with a mental image of some of the great artistic achievements of geographically and historically distant cultures. Enlarged close-up details from ancient reliefs, in deep shades of gray and black, blow life into these objects, which, in spirit, are quite close to those found in the Archives of the Planet (see Chapter 1). Mal-

raux frees photography from its associations with the specific historical uses to which Fischer put it, while still using photographs to establish an image of the magnificence of distant and past cultures. The next chapter, on the Swiss-born American Jewish photographer Robert Frank, explores another way photography could be used to undercut the ideology of racial inequality, this time by advancing an individualistic notion of vision and using photography to drive human heterogeneity and vision much further than Fischer’s racial inequality could ever have tolerated.

Chapter 4

PHOTOGRAPHY for Its OWN SAKE Robert Frank and The Americans

T

he line that connects what is arguably the most important photographic album of the second half of the twentieth century, Robert Frank’s 1959 The Americans, with the fierce struggles over photography and vision studied in the preceding chapters, runs through the most influential photographic exhibition of the postwar era, Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man.1 Whereas Albert Kahn’s early twentieth-century project was founded on photography’s potential to advance peace among peoples through sensual, intellectual, and political visual education about diversity and equality, Eugen Fischer’s use of photography, on the contrary, employed photography to advance notions of inequality among peoples. But for Steichen, the first curator of photography at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the most influential curator of photography in America at the time, it was Kahn’s vision that ultimately triumphed. Appearing during the same period as UNESCO’s statement on “race,” The Family of Man championed Kahn’s humanistic outlook while also shifting the

alliance of photography from science to art. Humanity was one and photography a universal language.2 Tens of millions of visitors attended Steichen’s show as it toured the globe, often leaving a deep and lasting impression. In a clear response to the horrors of fascism and Nazism, and in the face of the emerging cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union in the era of the threat of atomic annihilation, The Family of Man exhibition opened on January 24, 1955, in New York City. The exhibit comprised thousands of carefully selected and organized photographs from all continents and captured all stages of the life cycle, from birth to death. There is wide agreement today that The Family of Man exhibition was a central trigger for Robert Frank, and that his album The Americans, which first appeared in a French edition in 1958, followed by an American edition in 1959, was a response to the exhibition. Steichen insisted on fundamental human dignity; Frank, who was born in 1924 to a middle-class Swiss Jewish family and came of age during World War

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II and the Holocaust, clearly saw things differently.3 Frank’s revolt against Steichen was aimed at both the humanistic creed of Steichen’s exhibition and Steichen’s conception of photography, both of which of course bore on vision. If Kahn’s and Steichen’s visions (and in a grotesque way Fischer’s as well) were utopian, Frank’s was dystopian; the reality that The Americans studied was American society.4 The album, comprised of eighty-three photographs—selected from close to seventy thousand shots that Frank took during a two-year tour of America on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956 and 1957—pushed photography in new directions and redefined the boundaries of art and documentary photography. The importance of The Americans is evidenced not only by the history of its reception—which within one decade shifted from anger and rejection to celebration of the album as a landmark in the history of photography—or by the number of photographers whose development was shaped by it, but also by the amount of discussion and scholarship the album generated on the wide range of subjects on which it touched and that it modified.5 With Frank’s album we move to a new configuration of photography and ideology of vision. My argument offers a subtle recontextualization of the relationship between Frank’s biography and the album; I will address his biography in a moment, but only after I touch on the changing grounds that condition that relationship. The peculiar class of objects that comprises the central part of the discussion on “photographic objects” is inseparable from the photographic conventions that the album broke, which I will briefly address. But as it is not possible to separate the things Frank studied from the ways in which he studied them, I approach the discussion of this peculiar class of objects in gradual and

cautious steps, arguing that Frank expanded, diversified, and solidified this class of objects.

ROBERT FRANK’S THE AMERICANS The Changing Ground of Photography, Critique, and Power Frank’s influence on photography took place on grounds that were themselves changing.6 Within the large and sophisticated body of scholarship on Frank, only one study, by Jonathan Day, has suggested connecting The Americans with The Family of Man through the Holocaust. In the context of this current book study, such a suggestion makes sense, but Day’s suggestion brings to the surface a blind spot in the scholarship on Frank, which is critical in our context: Day notes the almost total absence of the Holocaust from Steichen’s exhibition; moreover, the one photograph in the exhibition that touches on the Holocaust shows Jews leaving a ghetto, weak but upright and noble. Foreclosing the possibility of, for instance, including images of piled-up, emaciated carcasses in Dachau, Steichen’s exhibition shows the world as it should be rather than as it is—the world as it is being closer to what Frank’s album tries to show. This is a perceptive comment, but the move that follows it contains an omission that is implicitly shared by the large body of scholarship on Frank. The omission is this: Day brings in the Holocaust to explain the difference in vision between Frank and Steichen, to explain Frank’s rejection of Steichen’s idealization of humanity and Steichen’s inability to face human reality as it really is. But Day fails to

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acknowledge that Frank does this through a critique of American society.7 Frank himself contributed to this ideological blind spot when he noted in a lecture in Montreal in 1983 that: “I felt it [America] was a powerful country, but a very hypocritical country. I felt it was brutal, the people mostly. And there was a lot of violence that I had not known in Europe.”8 But how is it that Frank, having grown up as a Jew in Switzerland during the Nazi period in Europe, can describe violence and brutality as particularly American attributes? And if he wants to cast his gaze on humankind as it really is, on the violence and barbarity that is close to the surface of civilized society, why go all the way to America when there is such an abundance much closer to home? This blind spot is hard to pin down precisely because Frank’s album is definitely a critique of humanity at large, despite the fact that in practice it is only a study of American society.9 To unpack this ideological moment requires an appreciation of three interrelated points that condition and serve as necessary background for the following account. First, if Frank had explored German rather than American society, his album would have been a much narrower study of one single society, because in the second half of the twentieth century America was the sole society for which the photographic study would be both a study of that particular society and a study of humanity at large. Second, if Frank had critiqued, say, Nigerian society, that would also have had a different meaning than his critique of American society, because brave, true critique confronts power. Third, in this period, photography had developed into an explicit instrument of critique according to this definition, and aside from Frank, none of the cases studied in this volume qualifies as critique in this particular sense.

Without acknowledging these key points we could not fully account for the success of Frank’s album, and they are necessary for the recontextualization of the relationship between the album and Frank’s background. Frank’s The Americans enables me to elucidate crucial ways in which the album reshaped threads discussed in the preceding chapters and to demonstrate the intertwinement of Jewish history and the history of photography, the expansion and diversification of “photographic objects,” and the principal arguments of this volume—namely, that photography established a style of reasoning, that photography is entwined into subjects and contexts, and that it changes how we think, judge, and imagine. Frank teaches us that seeing is an individually learned and learnable process, related to thought, in which photography plays a constitutive and increasingly independent role.10 But above all Frank’s album is a celebration of photography and life, forming relations between the serious and the playful and opening photography up to move into multiple directions in the second half of the twentieth century.11

The “Small Difference” Generation Frank’s statement about the violence he saw in the United States that he had not known in Europe is somewhat astonishing, given his biographical background. Robert Frank was born in 1924 in Zurich to a German father and Swiss mother, both Jewish, and he grew up in Switzerland during the rise and expansion of its neighboring Nazi Germany. From neutral Zurich he witnessed the horrors of World War II unfolding close by, on the other side of Switzerland’s bor-

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ders. Around 1940, when the German army swept across large parts of Europe, including Belgium and the Netherlands, bordering on Switzerland, there was an imminent possibility that Switzerland, too, despite its neutrality, would be invaded. Frank’s family, like many other families of similar background—aware of the wild anti-Jewish persecution, terror, and violence that followed the arrival of the German forces, terrified, and without any better idea of what to do—temporarily fled Zurich for a rural mountainous area. A German cousin managed to enter Switzerland and lived with the Franks, but her parents, who were declined entrance, along with many other relatives of the Franks, were killed in the camps.12 In interviews Frank has reflected on this period in his life and the significance of experiencing his parents’ fear. Scholarship has acknowledged the lifelong imprint it left on him: how these experiences toughened him and prepared him for life, how they sharpened his sensitivity to certain kinds of injustices.13 This aspect of his biography has been addressed by Sarah Greenough, and it is largely accepted that some of the social sensitivities found in The Americans can be linked to his biography. My question, or set of interrelated questions, is different and relates to the entwinements of photography with possibilities of identity after World War II. The more deeply I researched, the more I sensed this required a subtle recontextualization, for which it is necessary to take a look at Jewish history in Switzerland and Europe as well as in the United States during and after World War II. The recontextualization of Frank’s background necessitates simultaneously holding two disparate registers of history in view: namely, Frank’s development as an individual and the much broader historical context within which that development took

place. It is a matter of historical contingency that, while throughout Europe individuals of similar background were being dispossessed, persecuted, and killed, Frank was instead gaining meticulous photographic training as an apprentice to some of Switzerland’s most prominent photographers. While Switzerland was not invaded, the fate of the Jews outside of Switzerland was of course not absent from the public eye, and the actions of the Swiss government were the subject of public debate even during the war. There is no way to know the extent to which Frank personally was conscious of the particulars of the discussion, but the point is rather that this discussion, including its distinctly Swiss terms and shape, enveloped and shaped the possibilities of his identity both during the war and in the period that followed. Even during the war there was public criticism of the Swiss government’s restrictive immigration policy toward Jewish refugees. In 1942, at a Landesgemeinde in Zurich (a Landesgemeinde being a citizens’ assembly, one of the oldest tools of direct democracy in Switzerland, and actually one of the first subjects to which Frank turned his camera as a photographer, in his 1949 Landesgemeinde Hundwill), a local priest named Walter Lüthi protested that “it would be coldhearted to consider ten thousand refugees as unbearable while food is being shared with a hundred thousand dogs.”14 Lüthi’s civic courage and intentions are unmistakable, but given the long history of Christians likening Jews to dogs, even this powerful call to action, in which Jews are being considered as a humanitarian cause, at best, rather than as an integrated part of society, cannot escape a degree of ambiguity.15 It would be an error to reduce Frank’s personal history to the debate over the fate of Jews during or after the war, but it is crucial

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to at least recognize the presence of that debate in the background. Critical discussion of Switzerland’s conduct toward the persecuted Jews who had flocked its borders during the Nazi period began almost instantly after the war ended. One of the focal points for the criticism was Heinrich Rothmund, until 1954 the chief of the Department of Federal Justice and Police (EJPD), the department responsible for the immigration police. Rothmund had been the representative for Switzerland at the 1938 Evian conference, the futile meeting of world powers organized to discuss the fate of the unwanted German Jewish refugees; during World War II Rothmund had been responsible for implementing Switzerland’s refugee policy. Apart from the notice taken of his warning against the “danger of Verjudung” (an antisemitic term that is hard to translate but means literally “Jewification”), criticism of Rothmund centered on a 1942 visit he had made to the German Federal Office for External Affairs in Berlin, which included the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. Following that visit Rothmund wrote a report to the Swiss Federal Council (Bundesrat) that included detailed descriptions of the organization, composition, and overall situation of the camp; from a postwar standpoint, this could be described as having been either extremely naïve or deliberately ignorant of the reality there.16 Another subject of critical public discussion was Eduard von Steiger, the chair of the EJPD, who in 1942 had been responsible for closing the Swiss borders to refugees. In response to criticism, von Steiger stated that he had not known about the crimes committed by the Nazis, but the image he used to justify his decision, of Switzerland as a “small and already overcrowded rescue boat,” smacks of antisemitism: Even at that point, when the lethal consequences of the decision were

evident, he was still speaking as though the constraints he and the other non-Jewish citizens of Switzerland faced were comparable to those of the Jews to whom he had refused entry, who had been systematically persecuted, and the large majority of whom went to their deaths following his decision.17 My question relates, then, to the necessary ambivalence about the place of Jews in European societies that permeated the postwar discussion, underlying and framing the meaning of any individual decision. In conjunction with this broader context, there are also some somewhat ironic twists and turns in Frank’s own personal history: Frank’s father, Hermann, had been a German citizen until November 25, 1941, when Hitler’s decree denying citizenship to German Jews went into effect and left him (and his sons) stateless. Although he had lived in Switzerland for many years, Hermann had declined to learn Swiss German (a fact that embarrassed his son), claiming that it was an “inhuman” language (strangely echoing accusations that Yiddish was an “aberration” of German). Robert and his brother, Manfred, received Swiss citizenship only days before the end of the war, and then only based on a formal statement that they were required to sign, attesting that they were “fully assimilated” and had “absolutely nothing Jewish about them anymore.” Because their father had not mastered Swiss German, however, he was denied citizenship on the basis that he was not fully assimilated.18 Judaism and the German language intermingle strangely in the Swiss discourse of assimilation here, creating a certain degree of ambiguity. In interviews many years later, Frank was asked why he had left Switzerland for New York City; his answer, reprinted many times over, emphasized his desire to escape the narrowness (Enge) of Switzerland and

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the fact that there was only one real possible destination for this escape, and that was New York.19 Within the broader coordinates of the historical and sociological European Jewish experience, this account is partial. It was in 1947, two years after the end of World War II, that Frank made his way from Switzerland to New York; in the next few years he spent time in the United States and in Europe (along with tours in South America), finally settling in the United States in the early 1950s. Frank left Switzerland in his early twenties, shortly before Helmar Lerski made his way back there from Palestine. Lerski, who was over eighty at the time, considered settling in the newly established communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), but ended up staying in Zurich, where he died in 1956. For Robert Frank, the motivations, deliberations, and expectations that went into his decision to leave Switzerland reflected the experiences and decisions of other individuals of similar age and background. Individuals of this background and generation, who grew up under the threat of Nazi tyranny, cherished their freedom perhaps more than any generation before or after, identifying not only with their particular nations but with the cause of the war itself. (Frank had wanted to join the Resistance.) Nonetheless, after the war was over, they faced an identity crisis of sorts. I know this from my own family background in Central Europe and Britain as well as from the stories of many people of more or less the same generation and broadly similar backgrounds. These are people who, like Frank, came of age during World War II, and while they were unquestionably British, Dutch, or Swiss (and embarrassed by their parents’ foreign accents), they could not evade the question of their place within their societies and nations. And it was precisely at this

point, when it was no longer a question of life and death, that the “small difference” surfaced as a question: Can I and will I ever be considered completely and fully English, Dutch, or Swiss? My slippage here from “British” (which Jews could be) to “English” (a category from which non-Anglican Christians and nonwhites were, at that time certainly, excluded) is an indication of the answer. For many people in situations broadly similar to his, of course, the situation was not grounds for reflection and even less for a change of place. Many others, however, found themselves facing only three or four alternatives. One was to hide or abandon their Jewish identity, an option that was chosen by many, particularly in Central and Eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary. Another was to remain in their societies as Jews, aware that they would never be accepted as “properly” English, Dutch, or Swiss, however negligible the differential residue might be. A third possibility was to move to the new Jewish society that was being created in Palestine and participate in its creation, the creation of a society that promised (whether or not it would eventually deliver on the promise) a more unrestricted sense of belonging than European nations could. Or, finally, they could move to some other place entirely, most often the United States, “the land of unlimited opportunities” and “the land of the free,” which, because of its distinct history and political culture, offered a form of new beginning, if not a solution to the identity question that was necessarily posed in Europe.20 During his military service in the Swiss Army, immediately after World War II, Frank did encounter antisemitism—just one example of the ambiguity in the Jews’ situation after 1945. In various social situations, in fact, subjects may not always be able

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to tell whether or not a particular incident or encounter is antisemitic, and facing this as a question is itself a marker of ambiguity. With regard to Frank’s decision to leave Europe and his development as a photographer, the difficulty lies in situating these experiences within a broader economy of considerations while recognizing the multi-determinate nature of social life: that is, that people do things for various reasons, of which they are sometimes only partially aware. Indeed, decisions often involve more than one set of considerations, and individuals explain and justify them differently at different moments in time, depending on the outcome and circumstances. Lee Friedlander is said to have made the claim that the best street photographers have all been Jewish. Even if this statement were true, the problem with it is that it puts too much weight on the Jewish background of the photographers. The converse of this contention is denying that Frank’s being Jewish has any relevance to his photography because he did not focus on particularly Jewish subjects. Both claims suffer from the same weakness, namely the inability to treat the Jewish background as a component within a larger, more complex economy of considerations. In keeping with my insistence on the multideterminate nature of life, I want to explore how Frank’s decisions were connected to the symbolic spaces that framed them and in which they found their meanings. Frank never intended to have a “Jewish” career. But he was also always quite open about his Jewish background—in Hebrew we would say he was “a warm Jew”—and never felt it necessary to hide it. In a wonderful speech act, Frank said in an interview in German in 2000: “Ich will nicht vergessen, daß ich Jude bin and why should I?”21 (“I do not want to forget that I am a Jew [and then switching to English] and

why should I?”). Frank was thus not compelled to take what Jeffrey Alexander calls “the bargain of assimilation,” which would have framed his space in Switzerland. 22 But in the account quoted earlier, where he reported his wish to escape the narrowness of Switzerland and cites New York as the only possible destination, he narrowed the parameters to class and career, entirely omitting the Jewish aspect. And how were considerations of career and identity related for him? We have no indication whatever that Palestine ever did cross his mind as a destination; nor do we have any indication that his decisions were motivated by anything other than his wish to advance in the field of photography.23 Within the context of his generation, nevertheless, we can, as historians, point out that it is noteworthy that this is the destination he did not consider (i.e., to fail to consider Palestine is different from, for instance, failing to consider Denmark or Chile). My intention here is not so much to emphasize the Jewish component as to recontextualize it within the changing grounds of photography, critique, and power discussed earlier. Frank’s The Americans is significant for the history of photography in the second half of the twentieth century, and its significance is related to the nonnative, non–American-born stranger’s perspective on 1950s American society. (Frank’s non-American, European, Swiss, and Jewish backgrounds are referred to interchangeably in the literature about him.) Working outside of the vernacular of American thought, Frank’s photographs were unfamiliar, crossed boundaries, and were only vaguely recognized by Americans as reflecting their society. The history of the album’s reception, moving from fierce rejection to admiration, is related to a transformative moment in American culture and society, which went

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from an inability to recognize itself in the images in the 1950s to being able to see itself that way in the decade that followed. The Americans is in this respect an expression of American power, of America’s ability and willingness to elicit, endure, and celebrate criticism in the second half of the twentieth century.24 And as Luc Sante observes, “The Americans contains coruscating criticism of the United States,” but “it is just as much elegiac and even celebratory in its appreciation of the country.”25 The personal has consequences for the public, and Frank exemplifies a postassimilation historical moment in which a Jewish photographer could critically explore photography in an American-cum-general context without abandoning his identity as a Jew or, on the other hand, without paying attention to anything particularly Jewish.

Breaking Conventions With Robert Frank, after World War II, we have moved to a more fractured, fragmented, charged, and raw vision of society, humankind, and photography. Individualization and individuality play major roles in this respect (and, as the photography scholar Blake Stimson notes, the photographic vision against which Frank turned was to a great extent a collective one).26 Individuality and individualization here are important concepts in several ways: first, referring variously to the individuality of the object before the lens and of the photographic image, the individual vision of the photographer, and the individual vision of each viewer; then, because they make it possible for us to note the reverse of individuality—people hardly distinguishable, humanity as a mass devoid of individuality; and finally, referring to differences among people rather than their

similarities, to their separation and isolation from one another instead of their fraternity and unity.27 The concept of individuality is critical for understanding the decisions Frank took as a photographer. Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological study Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, published in 1965, described photography from this other end of the field.28 Studying the class of professional photographers in France, Bourdieu showed how the will of photographers to individuate led to common conventions with regard to what equipment photographers aspired to possess or what equipment they employed, what objects they chose to photograph, and even how they photographed those objects. There was little room for individuality in this field, and photographers were all doing more or less the same things. We could find precedents even for Frank’s photographs, which goes to the essence of photography, because a precedent could be found for every photograph.29 At least in part the field as a whole was practically defined by the impossibility of standing out from the rest, an impossibility that was built into the very attempt. This structural condition is necessary for understanding Frank’s motivations; it explains some of the strategies he used in The Americans as well as, to some extent, the irony that his photography was then also appropriated, repeated, and conventionalized.30 Unlike Kahn (and Steichen), who assumed the universality of vision and worked toward its standardization, Frank individuated seeing. The Americans is a methodical and powerful photographic inquiry into and demonstration of the individuality of vision. For one thing, compared with the work of Kahn’s photographers, Frank’s exploration of the typical is intuitive rather than conscious. One of the characteristics of Frank’s genius in this respect was his ability

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to unlearn the rigorous Swiss technique he had been taught for how to do photography and to see advantages in photographic faults and defects for newly defined photographic ends.31 The scholarship on Frank, in a variety of contexts, shows that The Americans broke a long series of conventions. To begin with, it marks a break with Frank’s own earlier work. The album also broke the conventions of photojournalism established by such periodicals as Life and Harper’s Magazine, the standards for documentary photography and for which Frank also worked. He broke the conventions of The Family of Man exhibition, in which he had participated, as well as those of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “the right moment” photography and Walker Evans’s photography; he broke the conventions of what qualified, according to his Swiss masters, as a good photograph in terms of distance from objects, sharpness, lighting, focus, angles, framing, composition, the cutting-off of objects, the selection of objects and kinds of expressions, printing, and the assumptions about what qualified as an art photograph.32 But what does it mean in this context to break conventions? What does it mean to break so many kinds of conventions at once? To break conventions means to engage with them, and to engage with them requires being acquainted with them. To break them in a meaningful way means to engage with them creatively, exploring them in a manner that reveals something about them. But Frank’s breaking of conventions is also closely related to the status of reality and its realistic depiction, which can be understood through Roman Jakobson’s seminal 1921 essay “On Realism in Art.”33 Jakobson walks his readers through several changing definitions of realism: He starts by saying that realistic works are those “works which we feel accurately depict life

by displaying verisimilitude” (20), but then problematizes this definition by breaking it down to verisimilitude first, as the intention of the author; second, as perceived by the person judging it; and third, as the “sum total features characteristic of one specific artistic current” (20), which is akin to an artistic tradition. But he then contends that “the methods of projecting three-dimensional space onto a flat surface are established by convention” and thus that “it is necessary to learn the conventional language of painting to ‘see’ a picture” (21; italics added). The artist-innovator, like Frank, “must impose a new form upon our perceptions, if we are to detect in a given thing those traits which went unnoticed the day before” (21), and by doing this he may violate the rules canonized by his predecessors. This “deformation” of reality will be viewed as “a more accurate rendition of reality” by some and as “the deformation of the artistic code” by others (21). As the same breaking of conventions that produces a more accurate rendition of reality is also an act within an artistic tradition, it becomes conventionalized itself. What Jakobson allows us to understand with regard to Frank is not only the tight relationship between breaking conventions and achieving a (controversial) more realistic rendition of reality, but also the role of (photographic) deficiencies and deformations in this regard. Our expectations of Frank’s “deficiencies” are not the same as our expectations of Yudovin’s, because based on Frank’s training, we know that they are intentional, which is essential for understanding The Americans. Even before The Americans, Frank wanted his photographs to be “like a line of a poem that one has to read again in order to grasp the meaning.”34 But the “quantum leap,” as one commentator called it, that was taken by Frank in The Americans

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has to do with turning photography into an instrument of subjective and individual expression35 and with Frank’s decision to leave the weekly journals he was working for to pursue a path guided by his desire to do photography for its own sake.36 Frank’s exploration was both playful and serious; both open, following the exploration wherever it led, and closed, in the sense that the album had definite borders.37 As Frank said in interviews, he stopped photographing because he sensed that he would repeat himself.38 (In actuality, Frank did not stop photographing, but neither the films that he made nor his later still photography are dealt with in this chapter.) Frank’s exploration was closely tied to the study of the relationship between photography and the visible, in more ways than one. Prior to his trip through America, he identified “symbols,” as he called them, that he wanted to pursue, “things seen everywhere but not looked at or examined,” as Sarah Greenough refers to them: “things so ubiquitous in the American landscape that they were no longer observed, yet Frank not only saw them but recognized their impact on the ways people interact.”39 Jane Livingstone observed that Frank captured “things found around the edges, things half invisible to most of us most of the time,” and W. J. T. Mitchell notes the way “Frank forces us to see what we systematically overlook.”40 One of Frank’s early favorite quotations, from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, that “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye,”41 is of course a metaphor about different kinds of visuals, and Frank’s perspective is profoundly visual. Frank observed explicitly that “it is important to see what is invisible to others”; he also noted that “I wanted the view anybody can see”;42 and in direct opposition to Lerski’s ideology, Frank also main-

tained that “something must be left for the onlooker. He must have something to see. It is not all said for him.”43 While documentary photographers communicated commitment to the real,44 Moholy-Nagy developed a photographic technique to produce photographs independent of a real object, and Lerski strove to free the photograph from its correlate in reality, Frank never forfeited the relation with the real. Frank provides a succinct expression of his conception of photography, which should be read slowly and literally: “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside. Trying to say something that’s true. But maybe nothing is really true. Except what’s out there. And what’s out there is always changing.” Photography here means looking at the real world, the outside, but it is looking at the outside world to express something that is not outside but in, or of, the photographer, in order to say something that is true. But it does this with a sense of doubt about the truth of reality, recognizing that the outside is in a constant state of flux or change.45 Elsewhere Frank acknowledges the “thin line,” in his words, where “matter ends and mind begins,” the two meeting in “a good photograph.”46 In insisting on photography as a subjective instrument of the photographer and, at the same time, on its commitment to the real, Frank did two things that until then had been conceived as contradictory, thereby bringing to the surface a blind spot in the ideology of photography and vision that preceded him; Frank showed that documentation of the real and subjective expression were not mutually exclusive, as “a single image can belong to more than one category.”47 In the chapter on Lerski, I contended that, as his Jewish types project was never published, we cannot know which of those photographs he viewed as successful and

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would have chosen for publication; here, Frank selected eighty-three photographs for the album out of a total number that is the same as Kahn’s entire archive. These, then, are the ones Frank chose as being most successful for his purposes. Our difficulty here lies rather in the fact that, according to existing conventions, some were flawed, as well as by the fact that the photographs were not intended to stand separately but as part of a larger whole, the album.48 Yet the album can be experienced and addressed only through the individual photographs, and doing this is already an act of parceling out the whole. The difficulty of addressing individual photographs after they have been serialized is related to the suggestion made by scholars that the energy and flow created by the ordering of the photographs reaches the threshold of the moving image from within the photochemical still image. Serialization is central to Frank’s exploration of the still photograph, the experience of the separate images, and accentuates vision as fragmented, unstable, subjective, and individualistic. The sophistication of The Americans and the fact that Frank conveys knowledge directly through the photographs in a way that engenders intuition in the viewer only further complicates the discussion of “photographic objects.”49 But once all these facts are granted, subtle kinds of “photographic objects” can start to be approached.

Excursus: Lee Miller in Dachau As noted earlier, a key impetus for Frank’s The Americans project was Frank’s rejection of Steichen’s The Family of Man. Given that, as we have noted, the one Holocaust-related photograph in Steichen’s exhibition showed victims being deported from the ghetto but still noble and upright, how would Robert

Frank have photographed them? And how would he have photographed in the liberated camps of Buchenwald or Dachau? Photography is, by definition, about framing, but framing in two different and only partially related senses. The first is what the photographer decides to photograph: Would Frank have photographed corpses in a liberated camp? And the second is how the framing is used as a device for the expression of the photograph: How would Frank have photographed the corpses? With Lee Miller’s photographs from liberated Dachau, we can begin to approach this speculative question. This is because, in terms of photography, Frank and Miller both began in journalism and then crossed over into something else. Miller, like Frank (and Lerski, as we saw), was negotiating the relationship between the documentary nature of the photograph, on the one hand, and the photograph as a form of the photographer’s expression—the photographer exploiting the “out there” for the creation of an image—on the other. Miller’s images are recognized as iconic Holocaust photographs; how, then, can we talk about the aesthetic qualities of a photograph, when this is what they show? In a brilliant article, Sharon Sliwinski contextualizes and analyzes Miller’s photographs from the liberated concentration camps. Sliwinski shows how these early photographs from the camps preceded the understanding of what they showed by about two decades, long before the word “Holocaust” came into use, and she points to several additional historical twists and ironies involved in this history.50 The photographs were testimony visualis, communication without understanding: According to Sliwinski, the “public bore witness in 1945, but they did not know what they saw” (390). “BELIEVE IT” was the headline of Miller’s article on the Nazi camps, which ap-

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peared in the special “Victory” issue of Vogue in June 1945. The command to “believe” here touches, first, on the unbelievable horrors Miller and her colleagues found and to which her photographs testified. The horrors were in fact so unbelievable that their first response had been to think that they were a propaganda stunt of the Allies. But “believe it” also touches on the specific doubt that photography produces, alongside its claim to be evidence of what it shows: a doubt built into the medium. Miller’s “photographs both testify to events at the heart of civilization’s discontents and stubbornly remain at the limits of human understanding” (392). The discussion of Miller, a non-Jewish American woman who photographed in Europe, can be productive for the specifics of photography as a visual language in the

context of Frank, a European Jewish man who photographed in America. Even in her photographs of Dachau’s death train on May 3, 1945, there is a rigorous, specifically photographic negotiation taking place; her use of framing, certainly in retrospect, leads to Frank’s photography (Figure 4.1). While this may be entirely my subjective impression, in this photograph I sense a powerful combination of horror and softness, achieved with the use of framing. Given the history of gender in photography, I am inclined to think this combination is not entirely unrelated, although maybe not reducible, to Miller’s being a woman. The gender dimension is complex, however, because it intersects with the gender expectations (or their breaching) of Miller’s time; norms with regard to the social roles of photographers (e.g., her accompanying the advanc-

figure 4.1. Lee Miller, Dachau, American soldiers view the bodies in one of the open railcars of the Dachau death train, 1945. © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Ruth Sherman.

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ing American forces); and the photographic language and expression found in the photographs. As a photographer Miller had experience in fashion photography as well an intimate understanding of being on the other side of the lens. She had been a model, had worked with Man Ray in Paris (her photography features strains of surrealist art), and had worked as a photojournalist teamed with David Scherman. All three influences (fashion, surrealism, and photojournalism) can be sensed in her photograph from Dachau. The connection between Frank’s practices and Miller’s photographs can be approached in the second sense of framing noted earlier, as a photographic device. Consider Miller’s treatment of the feet in this photograph from the death train. Miller uses framing to emphasize the dead man’s feet by excluding from the frame the feet of the two soldiers. By excluding, she includes; by omitting, she presents. Recall, again, that Miller came from fashion photography, where, to emphasize the dress worn by a model, a photographer would often crop the photograph below the knees of the model. Here, in cropping the photograph below the knees of the two soldiers, the photographer not only contrasts the soldiers with the dead man, whose feet, hanging outside of the train car in heavy boots, are at the center of the frame, but also turns the soldiers into extras, models in military uniform. Miller also uses the specific ability of photography to show facial expressions that are opaque, ambiguous; expressions that cannot be described in language without interpretation (which I discuss with regard to Frank later in this chapter). Miller’s treatment of the heads creates another contrast between the soldiers and the two dead men whose heads we see in the

train car. The horizontality of the two dead men’s heads (the man whose feet emerge from the car and the man whose head is closer to the photographer) contrasts with the verticality of the soldiers’ heads, expressing two concepts of body, dead and alive. Consider, also, the use of frames within the photograph: the dark of death in the train car, framed by the straight angles of the opened carriage into which the soldiers are looking, and the light-colored frame, in which the soldiers are standing, both of these included in the frame of the photograph as a whole. These are two soldiers, two young men, but their treatment does not emphasize the normally expected masculine military qualities of courage, toughness, and determination or strength. Rather, their posture is soft, emotive, almost submissive. The photograph is almost lyrical, emphasizing flow, and the facial expressions of the soldiers are soft, maybe bewildered. And in terms of the dispositions I spoke about in the Introduction, the photograph insists not only on conveying the real but also on negotiating the grotesqueness of this distorted death—a train of carriages, a transport of thousands of dead inmates— along with the opposite end of this same disposition: the two quite ordinary soldiers, with their ordinary facial expressions. The photograph touches on the encounter with death, and one question we might ask is whether the fact that the photographer is a woman allows her to show that encounter less in terms of heroism or utter helplessness than as a dialogue, a dialogue with death. We can provide no definitive answer here, but what we can say is that, even at this gruesome moment to which she is testifying, Miller does not surrender photographic expression. In fact, there is a certain ten-

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sion, if not outright contrast, between the high degree of control the photographer shows in making this photograph and our knowledge about the existential crisis from which she later suffered, following her exposure to the camps. Much more could be said about this photograph. And this is precisely what I want to say about it, that it elicits thoughts and feelings. When Flusser speaks about photography as forming a new imagination and visual language, his point is that, while the thoughts and feelings elicited by the photograph can be expressed in linear form, in natural language, the photograph does this instantly, and differently: In a photograph, you can put a frame within a frame, you can contrast a dead body with a living one through the angle of the head or by excluding feet from the frame. The visual language of photography is no less a language than natural language, but fundamentally different in how it operates. Roland Barthes’s approach emphasizes that the photograph shows something that was there; Flusser’s, that the photograph is real. Because of how overwhelming the context and content of Miller’s photograph of the death train in Dachau are, it is difficult to think of a more apparently inappropriate place to contrast Barthes and Flusser. In retrospect, however, after Frank’s album of a decade and a half later, we can acknowledge that Miller moves us closer to seeing that Barthes and Flusser do not stand in necessary contradiction. This is particularly important for understanding the historically evolving nature of the matching process between photograph and image, because, as Sliwinski shows, Miller’s photographs established an image of what was at the time still nameless, still only the indistinct expression of the Nazi war horrors.

PHOTOGRAPHIC OBJECTS The class of “photographic objects” is closer to Frank’s photography and intentions than it is to the cases studied earlier, 51 relying as it does on a deliberate play with the dispositions of photography. With Frank what comes to the fore is a range of objects, ordinary and mundane, that belong to the everyday, more ephemeral than Fischer’s and Kahn’s ideologically more solid objects. Frank’s objects are harder to see; they have a less stable, independent anchor in reality into which they hook, and their status outside and independent of their photographic representation is more ambiguous, as they more strongly depend on photography. In Flusser’s, Friedrich Kittler’s, and Gilbert Simondon’s terms, The Americans demonstrates how photographs that document reality are also components of reality, as photography plays a role in the constitution of reality and, consequently, problematizes the assumption of independent existence. Thus photographs partake in and affect reality. And as they are disseminated and discussed, they are taken on by and gradually incorporated into the fabric of life and experience. The subject of “photographic objects” is inextricably tied to considerations of genre. A street photographer examining a street photograph differs from an intelligence officer examining an intelligence photograph. Photographs differ in the motivations and expectations that bring them about, the kinds and degrees of invitation they extend to viewers to examine them, and the kinds of discussion they generate. Contrasting Paul Outerbridge’s carefully staged studio photograph “Egg in Spotlight” with Lee Friedlander’s street photograph “Albuquerque, New Mexico,” the historian of photography

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Douglas Nickel brilliantly demonstrates that, in different kinds or genres of art photography, photographers hold different kinds of control and, consequently, elicit different ways of looking at the photograph.52 Frank is a prime example of street photography, the genre of photography that arguably more than any other encourages viewers to study the photograph, search for details, consider the relationships within the frame, consider the aspects of social reality they depict, and consider every minute element of the photograph as intentional on the part of the photographer and as meaningful. Frank’s photographs invite us to view and discuss them in terms they themselves help to suggest and shape. More than the cases discussed earlier, The Americans begets discussion of “photographic objects.” “Photographic objects” are a somewhat ambiguous and elusive class of objects, the nature of which evades unequivocal, frontal discussion. They require an oblique approach that does not lose sight of their inherent ambiguity, doubt, and instability, and this shapes my strategy as well. I open my discussion with a quality of some of the photographs in the album that is only indirectly related to “photographic objects” and pertains to the strange mixture, in those photographs, of being simultaneously boring and enigmatic, a quality that is inseparable from the exploration of nonentities and nothingness. If the relationship between “photographic objects” and the exploration of nothingness and nonentities is not immediately clear, it will become clearer following the second, partially overlapping section, which addresses a particular range of facial expressions that evade easy classification or description. I then move to objects that can be called “ex nihilo,” which are established or invented by the photographer. And, finally, I end by trying to show how these

considerations play out in individual photographs.

The Exploration of Nothing After the publication of The Americans, Frank achieved something of the status of a celebrity. Why was he offered this status, and why did he, at least to some extent, accept the offer? This celebrity status is connected with a certain kind of charisma that both Frank and The Americans possess, with an ability to enchant viewers, which is important for my discussion. A couple of years ago, I met with a prominent Israeli photographer who, like many photographers of his generation, had admired, intensively studied, and taught The Americans to generations of photography students. Years after this intense involvement with Frank’s work, for personal reasons (I will not enter into those reasons here, nor mention the photographer’s name), he was disappointed by Frank, and the album, too, lost its enchanting quality for him. “Name me one photographer who didn’t photograph in public toilets,” he said to me. Knowing the book inside out, he said: “Open the book randomly and look at the photograph you fall on.” There was a grin of resentment in his suggestion, based on his confidence in the outcome of this small experiment. I followed his instructions and happened to open the album to the photograph “Picnic Ground—Glendale, California.” This photograph shows a rather ordinary picnic ground, trashcans, and a man sitting at a picnic table facing the photographer. The most dramatic thing that could be said to be taking place in this rather bland photograph is a child running on the left-hand side of the frame. “If you open the book randomly,” he continued, “there is a fair chance that you’ll fall on a photograph

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that is mediocre and boring, containing nothing strong, polished, critical, formal, unique, unprecedented, or interesting.”53 What he believed he had demonstrated to me was that many of the photographs in the album were rather weak and did not live up to the veneration with which the album was treated. From my current perspective, however, the point is to try to incorporate the changing position of that photographer and critic into what is going on in the album and to acknowledge that this is not accidental but in fact essential to Frank’s exploration. Unlike the photographs produced for Kahn’s archive—scientific documents carried out to meet the already existing scientific grid developed by Brunhes—Frank’s album does not reveal why he chose these photographs out of the seventy thousand he had taken. When asked this question in interviews, he answered that he personally liked them. This answer emphasizes the role of subjectivity and individuality in his judgment, which is important in itself, but the question of why exactly he liked them remains unexplained. I wrote earlier about Frank’s breaking of conventions, and at this point I would like to distinguish between that and the parts of reality to which he turns his attention in the photographs, although the two are closely interwoven. To say that some of the photographs are boring, if we go back to the dispositions discussed in the Introduction, is to talk about the result of the combination of what he photographed and how he photographed what he photographed. Why did Frank take a photograph such as “Picnic Ground—Glendale, California,” and why did he include such a photograph—one that does not show anything special or of particular interest nor offer any special aesthetic or other treatment of its subject—in the album? I am reminded of a scene in the Coen

brothers’ A Serious Man (2009), which takes place in 1960s suburban America, where the protagonist, the physics professor Larry Gopnik, who is undergoing severe health and marital problems, rather unwillingly goes to consult the junior rabbi at the synagogue at his estranged wife’s request. Rabbi Scott isn’t as learned or as psychologically gifted as the senior rabbi, but sensing Gopnik’s distress, he invites him to look out the study’s window and observe the synagogue’s parking lot. The camera tilts, and the viewers and Gopnik see only a rather banal, half-empty parking lot. But the rabbi apparently sees, and wants Gopnik to see as well, even in the most ordinary parking lot the presence of some wonder. In the film the wonder the junior rabbi wants Gopnik to see is the presence of the Almighty (“Hashem”) even in the most ordinary facet of existence. The Coen brothers’ ironic treatment of this moment at best leaves open whether the viewers can experience the wonder of existence that Rabbi Scott wants Gopnik to experience. Frank’s “Picnic Ground—Glendale, California” can be compared to this parking lot. Frank’s mediocre photographs, in terms of the subject and the photographic treatment, are in a strange way one of the strongest and most original things about the album. Frank knew, from his education in Switzerland, how a “good” photograph of a picnic ground “should” look, and here breaks those conventions. Frank weaves into the album photographs of banal moments, his treatment even accentuating their banality, but within the general flow of the album— the serialization—they manage to evoke drama and enigma with regard to photography, reality, and the relation between the two (evoking the way Frank characterized the photographs of Bill Brandt as “reality become mystery”). 54 And from the late 1960s onward, the album has indeed been

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s­ urrounded by an aura, but the risk built into this strategy brings home how much relies on the observer, who may (or may not) be enchanted. The exploration of boring moments, moments in which nothing happens, nothing out of the ordinary at least—an exploration that reshaped photography—is not unrelated to the existentialist philosophy of Sartre or Camus, whose novels Frank read; it is also connected to Heidegger’s more solemn “the nothing nothings.”55 “Detroit” shows an old couple seated in their car, most likely waiting for the traffic light to change (Figure 4.2). They are photographed from slightly above, from a semi-profile angle. Frank is studying a moment of nothingness, a moment of non-happening: the car is not moving, the couple is not engaged in conversation, or thought, or observation, or attentive listening. Nothing is going on. There is no special expression on their faces, and what the photograph explores is a moment when these two individuals simply “are.”56 It suggests that much of life is comprised of moments of this kind. So this documents a moment in reality, but at the same time it focuses on and expresses a segment of everyday life and experience. It also says something about the ability of photography to explore and express this aspect of life. A landscape photograph by Ansel Adams would be an extreme example of the kind of photograph that elicits a response of “wow!” This is the Romantic sublime. In a different way, Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of the “right moment,” too, elicit a response of “wow,” although not because of the wonder and beauty of nature but because of the combination of humanism and the photographer’s skill. In The Americans Frank shows no interest in the kind of sublime nature that Ansel Adams records; indeed there are neither natural nor manmade wonders

in the book. But with Cartier-Bresson there is a dialogue, and if Cartier-Bresson’s “right moment” photographs are about bringing together a happening in reality within a perfectly framed photographic composition, Frank is simultaneously renegotiating both—indeed Frank’s photographs have been called “the not-perfect-moment photographs.”57 The existentialist purposelessness that Frank explored is shaped by the medium of exploration. Photography makes it possible to observe the particular kind of facial expression that evades description and to capture, document, store, reproduce, and communicate—a social process of stabilizing visual objects, which also includes their reception by audiences. In terms of ideology, Frank brings to the surface the self-evidence of everyday reality, as comprised of the moments of nothingness and the nonentities that define much of human existence. Frank used such photographs carefully, so as not to cross the fine and invisible line between the study of the boring and the banal and actually falling into it. After Frank it would have been backward-looking (or ignorant) to do photography the way it had been done before him; the appearance and reception of the album mark a clear line between art photography and photojournalism. If we move from the single photographs to the album as a whole, we can observe a kind of dialectic involving the boredom invoked by some individual photographs and their subterranean infusion of energy through serialization. While we would normally think of boredom and energy as contradictory, here the two—as in the Gestalt thought experiments of the rabbit and the duck, where the gist is that it is not possible to see the rabbit and the duck simultaneously—flicker back and forth, coming into and out of view simultaneously.

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figure 4.2. Robert Frank, “Detroit,” 1955. From Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, The Americans (New York: Grove Press, 1959). © Andrea Frank Foundation.

This flickering quality is closely related to Frank’s use of serialization, recognized as one of the most complex features of the album. Although Frank was a still photographer, he had already abandoned his belief in the single photograph when he worked on The Americans.58 My strongest impression upon seeing Frank’s archival materials in the National Gallery in Washington, DC, in 2018 was that, in terms of their photographic language, the only photographs there that resembled the ones in The Americans—with their lighting, low angles, and staged scenes—were the stills Frank took in Switzerland for cinema. In the Introduction I raised the issue of how one sees a photograph differently when it is serialized compared to when it stands alone and contended that serialization is related to attempts to use photography to transform vision, touching

on the question of how, from the state of serialization, we can move back to considering a single image before the serialization; I noted that the answer to that question can be effective in bringing to light what transformation is sought in different contexts. In this respect the ideas that drove Kahn’s, Fischer’s, and Lerski’s projects were easier to unpack than those behind Frank’s album. Frank’s individual photographs are intentionally more heterogeneous, and the effect of the album depends more immediately on the interaction of the photographs with each other than on their performance separately; in a certain basic sense, the serialization follows a different logic. The numerical aspect of the selection process emphasizes editorial decisions, so that the album is essentially an experiment in reduction. It may seem absurd to contend this, but it is only partially

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so: Frank’s achievement is based on elimination; the album as a whole works against the individual photographs and is intended to fashion how the individual photographs are seen.59

Facial Expressions The photograph “Detroit” weaves together the exploration of nothingness with that of a peculiar range of facial expressions. How could these facial expressions be described? Nothing in particular characterizes the expressions on the couple’s faces—not interest, anger, happiness or unhappiness, pain or satisfaction, attentiveness or distraction or tension. They are seated next to each other, but this particular moment shows no interaction between them. What emoticon could express their facial expressions? If emoticons reduce complexity and ambivalence, the photographs do the opposite. Frank’s photograph of this couple at this moment does indeed seem to go in the opposite direction from simplification. This could be called the complication of seeing (second disposition), and the photograph questions the relationship between the photograph and the real (third disposition) because it is unclear to what extent it expresses something about the couple or something about Frank at that moment; significantly, the question arises from the photograph itself. Again, the number of such photographs in the album is sufficient to conclude that their inclusion is not accidental. In photographs such as “Factory—Detroit,” “Chattanooga, Tennessee,” “Picnic Ground, North Carolina,” or “Courthouse Square, Elizabethville, North Carolina,” Frank accentuates ambiguity. Other photographs (not pictured here) study this same range of facial expressions. Consider “Charleston, South Carolina”:

Both the nanny and the baby are wearing spotless white clothes, and a subtle sense of alienation is engendered by the lack of eye contact, by the tightly sealed lips of both the white baby and the black nanny, by the way she is holding the baby (with a certain distance between them), but above all by the opaqueness of their expressions. A similar opaqueness marks the expression of the waitress in the following photograph, “Ranch Market—Hollywood,” and the one after that, “Butte, Montana,” which shows a heavy woman in the front seat and a young girl behind her, again from slightly above and to the right of the car. All of these explore “nonphotographic” moments: that is, the kinds of moments that before the appearance of this album would have been seen as what happened just before or just after the actual “photographic moment.” The idea that the album expanded vision is corroborated by the fact that, after its appearance, this kind of photograph became a genre—in other words, the album stabilized and solidified a way of seeing. One could object and say that many photographs showing such facial expressions had been made before Frank. Indeed, we could even go back to some of the photographs studied earlier in this book and claim something similar about that photograph. So where does the difference lie? I would stress two interrelated considerations. The first, based on the sociological assumptions discussed in the Introduction, is that it is not possible to separate photographs from their perception by audiences, which means that the originality of the treatment also involves its perception and appreciation by audiences. We have no evidence that earlier audiences saw in Yudovin’s photograph what several generations of curators, photographers, and historians have perceived in Frank’s “Detroit.” The discussion of photographs, which

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is inseparable from the photographs, generates new forms of seeing, which can then be projected onto earlier photographs, too. Second, while this perspective stresses the photographer’s reliance on the audience, the Introduction also stressed the notion of exploration by the photographer, which is a way to return the weight of agency to the photographer. The range of facial expressions studied in “Detroit” is part of Frank’s broader exploration, in the same way Lerski explored the connection between identity and visibility. The photographer’s questions, intentions, and interests, or, more accurately, his or her ability to convey them to audiences, shape that discussion. Even if we can find something visually similar to “Detroit” in photographs found in private family albums made before Frank, for instance, they are not the same. Frank’s album enabled discussion, agreement, disagreement, and debate, closely tied to the comprehensiveness, breadth, and power of the exploration found in the album as a whole, of which the photograph as a visual document in the narrower sense is only one component. This peculiar range of facial expressions cannot be expressed in straightforward, unambiguous language, and it depends on photography for its stabilization.60 The exploration of this particular range of objects is entwined with Frank’s subjective comportment. This can be seen through a comparison with Tulsa, an album by the younger Larry Clark.61 Clark was born in Tulsa, so Tulsa was a return to his birthplace (though most of the photographs were taken indoors, so there are no obvious markers of the place). These are mostly intimate and distressing photographs of youngsters depicted stoned or at the moment of shooting up. But Clark is inside the situation. This is expressed in the book’s opening statement, where Clark writes that he was born in Tulsa

in 1943, that he started taking drugs when he was young, and that “once the needle goes in it never comes out.”62 How did Clark get into the interiors in which the photographs were taken? How did people allow him to photograph them in this condition? Unlike Frank, who photographed in open or public spaces, without requesting the consent of the people he photographed, Clark could not have taken his photographs without some kind of consent. In one of the photographs (less disturbing than another photograph that is an intimate portrait of a woman in advanced pregnancy sitting on a kitchen chair at the moment of injection), a young man is lying on an untidy but clean bed, half-covered by a rumpled sheet, plunging a needle into the arm held out to him by a bare-breasted young woman who is kneeling over him on the bed (Figure 4.3). Her face is outside the frame, and both seem at ease; Clark, who must be standing above the bed, closes the triangle, looking into the situation of which he is himself a part. Frank, in comparison—even when he is very close to his subjects, sometimes even almost touching them—remains external to the situation.63 For instance, in “En Route from New York to Washington, Club Car,” Frank is standing very close behind the backs of two seated men, who are conversing with a third man who faces Frank (Figure 4.4). We can deduce the relative importance of the presence of the photographer in a given photographed situation from the comportment of the photograph’s subjects, because the photographer elicits a response from the photographed persons; furthermore, the photographer can influence those responses very much or very little, and in different directions and ways, and this, too, is a component of the reality being photographed. The feeling that Frank is external to the situation is generated by the way the

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three men form a closed triangle, which Frank is observing from the outside. It is accentuated by the fact that most of the frame is filled by the intimidating backs of the two men behind whom he is standing. Because they are leaning forward, toward their conversation partner, their bodies are leaning away from Frank’s camera. The sense of either being inside the situation or observing it from the outside derives, then, not from the actual distance but from the subjective comportment of the photographer and the subjects.64 The particular range of facial expressions I have analyzed depends on the eye more than do certain other visual objects, which more easily lend themselves to description and communication. The kind of objects I next discuss I call “objects ex nihilo,” because they are, to an even greater degree, creations of the photographer. This particular class relies on incongruities between the real and its photographic rendition (third disposition) that are manifested or only subtly suggested by the photograph. For the establishment and solidification of “photographic objects,” those incongruities that are only subtly suggested are more important, because in these cases the manipulation can more easily go unnoticed (indicating the changing historical ground of the matching process between two-dimensional images and the four-dimensional world from which they are abstracted). The photographs by Frank that I want to discuss belong to this end of the spectrum.

“Objects Ex Nihilo” In a certain sense “objects ex nihilo” present to the viewer something that did not exist in reality. “St. Petersburg, Florida” (not reproduced here) exemplifies one sense of

what I mean: The center of the photograph shows two benches back-to-back; on one bench, there are two elderly men and one elderly woman, who is smoking; on the other bench, an elderly man and woman are sitting, facing the other direction. What is the relationship between the people sitting backto-back, adjacent but separate? The vertical line created by the backs of the benches, comprising the compositional axis of the photograph, both separates and connects the people on either side of the line. In terms of the genre of the “perfect moment” photograph, Frank should have cut the photograph at the top of that line, or just above the subjects’ heads, to emphasize the bringing together of a perfect photographic moment and a perfect composition. But instead he breaks this convention and undermines the perfect composition by adding the horizontal line created by the road and the passing car above. He accentuates the separation of the subjects and the untidiness of the photograph, letting us see that their gazes are all turned in different directions, and that four of the subjects are each wearing a different kind of hat, highlighting even the comparison between the two sides of the frame. There is no eye contact or communication among the people on the two benches, and what brings them together for us is the photograph, by deliberate intention. A photographer before Frank would probably have focused on the people sitting on just one of the benches and on one of the sides of the frame (extending their point of view and showing what they could see). Unlike for any of the other cases studied in this book, here the contact sheets are available, from which we can reconstrue essential aspects of Frank’s practice and reasoning; in this case, Frank took six photographs of the bench situation.65 By comparing the photographs, we can learn how

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figure 4.3. Larry Clark, Tulsa (New York: Grove Press, 1971). Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

figure 4.4. Robert Frank, “En Route from New York to Washington, Club Car,” 1956. From Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, The Americans (New York: Grove Press, 1959). © Andrea Frank Foundation.

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quickly he operates, how swiftly he moves around the scene of the photograph, cutting the situation so differently each time that, if the photographs had not been on the same strip, it would have been difficult to recognize it as the same scene. In one photograph he cuts it horizontally, then vertically, and then with a split second’s difference, tilts the camera to have the same frame not horizontally but vertically. From the six photographs of the same bench scene, Frank selected for the album the one that, based on the different orientations of the faces and gazes, most accentuates the separation and alienation of the people being photographed, the sense that the focus of the photograph is outside the frame, and the sense that it is only for the observers of the photograph that these individuals exist together. The real and the fictitious stand in complex relationship with each other in this photograph. It is not fictitious in the sense of being unreal, a figure of fantasy, or externally appended to the image; it is fictitious in the sense that the way the photographer draws certain signs from reality, or frames elements of the real in a certain way, creates an image that is independent of the experience of the people shown in the photograph. This is a space created by the photographer. Where Flusser wrote that adding a moustache to a photograph, for instance, was essentially external to the program of the camera, 66 Frank was working within the camera’s program but using what was “out there” to create a fictitious image (a modality that Flusser did not explicitly consider). Frank expresses this same thing in his “photographer jokes”; for instance, in the way he uses the lips of the waitress and of Santa Claus in “Ranch Market—Hollywood” to form an analogy between the two figures, their artificial, stuck, opaque expressions problematizing the distinction between the

real and the artificial. This entire operation would be different if a painter had painted the same situation, because the photograph draws signs from reality and communicates that it is using the reality of the people in the photograph (third disposition). “Photographer jokes” are in fact themselves a form of photographic object. Because of the particular way Frank decided to frame reality and the ability of photography to stabilize and communicate such qualities, they could be conveyed to viewers. Frank’s treatment was also adopted by photographers who developed and diversified, for instance, the use of the car window to frame the image (Lee Friedlander) or the use of the frame to bring things together so that it looks as though a certain kind of interaction was happening (Gary Winograd) when it is in fact only the photographer’s sensitivity or playfulness. If in the “St. Petersburg” example the photograph claimed that it both showed the real and created a reality ex nihilo at one and the same time, “Metropolitan Life Insurance Building—New York City,” which shows a newspaper stand with its stacked newspapers leading into the skyscraper’s windows behind it, demonstrates the capacity of photography to merge two things that in reality are completely different—in terms of scale, size, distance, and material—into one continuous, two-dimensional photographic surface (a technique later adopted especially by Martin Parr). While there is no question that the newsstand and the skyscraper are both real, the photograph nonetheless declares the image to be fictitious. From the contact sheet and from the cropping, which removed the building on the left side of the photograph (which would have added depth), one can reconstruct how Frank used reality to explore the flatness of photography.67 From the series of images on the contact sheet it is possible to see that Frank

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had something particular in mind before he began photographing and that, when he saw the result on the contact sheet, he marked the frame that most closely met the image he had in his mind in the first place. (This is a different configuration from that in Ansel Adams’s famous “Zone System,” in which the desired image exists prior to the taking of the photograph.) Frank’s photograph exemplifies Heidegger’s “age of the world as picture,” only with humor, because how could a newsstand merge into a skyscraper? “Political Rally—Chicago” shows a man in a white suit playing a tuba in front of a wall. His head is obscured (and “replaced”) by the bell of the sousaphone, which looks as if it is growing out of his body, and atop that is a metal pole, from which hang two flags. Everyone knows that reality is three-dimensional and photographs two-dimensional, and this photograph experiments with establishing the flattest image possible: The frame is cut by the wall’s horizontal lines, the vertical line of the pole, the lines of the flags, the folds in the flags, the arm and elbow of the musician, and likewise the arm and elbow of a woman standing in the bottom right corner of the frame, and the round shape of the bell of the sousaphone. We know the man has a head, of course, which must be behind the horn, so the photograph does not intend to fool viewers into thinking otherwise; what it does, rather, is to attempt to remove three-dimensionality from the image and to establish the most depthless image possible. “Los Angeles”—a semidark, abstract view from above that looks down to the street, pavement, building, and roof opposite, with a long, thin, brightly lit arrow on the side of the building and a lone man walking on the sidewalk below—also deliberately flattens vision and reduces it to two-dimensionality. Everything in the photograph is moving to the right: The man

walking in the direction of the arrow also looks like a two-dimensional graphic sign of a man walking; even the thin black line that seals the top of the frame directs the eye to the arrow and the man. In a conversation in 1980, Frank touched on the photographer’s ability to bring together the world and the photographer’s own vision, saying, “The genius of the artist is to look at the world he shares with us.” The artist introduces the audience to a world they both share, but he then adds in a rather enigmatic fashion: “The illusion of the photograph is one with realities of our daily world.”68 In an inversion of the standard perception of the relationship between photography and reality, Frank states that “a photograph is fiction and as it is moving it becomes reality.”69

Two Photographs Through three cross-sections (of nothingness, facial expressions, and objects of composition), I have shown how Frank establishes and stabilizes “photographic objects.” I begin this section by using the first photograph in Frank’s album to show how similar considerations are used in a broader context. Because “Parade—Hoboken, New Jersey” is the first photograph in the album, Frank is saying: “This is what I’m going to do in the album.” 70 As in “Political Rally— Chicago,” discussed earlier, Frank creates an extraordinarily flat image. Its effects, including those related to “photographic objects,” have very much to do with this flatness, and the central thing the flatness is there to do is to establish blockages, alienation, and separation. The first thing the eyes see, the center of the photograph, is a brick wall that blocks

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the view of the observer. The eyes then go to the sides. At the sides, two people are looking out of two separate windows. According to the title, but only the title, this is a parade. Can the people in the window see the parade, or is the large American flag blocking their view? The photograph suggests that (at least for the person on the right) all they can see is the flag; that their view, too, is blocked. On second observation, however, the thought arises that this does not make sense. Who would stand in the window, with a parade passing in the street, if the view was entirely blocked and none of the parade on the street was visible? We have to wonder, then, if it is possible that their view looks blocked only because of the photographic composition; that is, that the flag is farther from the window than the photograph suggests (third disposition). Frank’s very first photograph, then, opens with the third kind of “photographic object,” creating an image that is incongruent with the experience of the people it depicts. Yet the “photographic object” is not an end in itself but serves, rather, in this instance, to establish blockage and alienation. Frank often points to something outside the frame that is incompletely suggested and not shown within the frame.71 Problematizing both what is within the frame and the relationship between the photograph and reality, Frank regularly confounds the borders of what is shown. He often does this in a way that confuses rather than clarifies the broader context. This is only the first move in a methodical attempt to create alienation and separation, in non-Marxist terms. Consider the use of the gaze and eye contact in the photograph: There is no eye contact, no reciprocity; in Blake Stimson’s words, it is “without sympathy or explanation, without the decency or respect of a warning,” thus creating “the paucity of generosity” that

is “reciprocal between subject and object, and that is the point.” 72 The photographer is looking at these people in the window. They are, separately, looking at something but without reciprocity. Then there is our gaze as observers of the photograph; again, without reciprocity. There is no mutuality between any of these, and the gaze is not collected. According to Leslie Baier, “The viewer is made ill at ease by his awareness that the people photographed are witnesses to events beyond the camera’s field of vision.”73 If the gaze, communication, and recognition are founded on reciprocity, starting the book with this photograph demonstrates a multilevel alienation.74 Because the photograph abolishes depth, our gaze hits a brick wall. Now observe the people in the windows: Their faces are cut off or distorted, and one of them in fact is completely obscured; the other, half in the dark, is blurred. These are not people the photographer knows: He is photographing them from a subjectively external point of view; he is not within their situation. They are behind two separate windows, they are separated from each other, they are separated from whatever is happening on the street, and they are separated from the photographer. Frank is not interested in their individuality (the photograph even doubts whether they have one). According to John Szarkowski’s famous Mirrors and Windows, this photograph is a window avant la lettre, as if the photographer were saying to us, “I’m going to be the window to America.”75 I’m going to look at the Americans in a certain way. Frank studies the space that divides people from one another, “the point of separation, the point that allowed them not to have to deal with each other.”76 Separation is also accentuated formally here by the numerous frames within the frame, which contribute to the alienating experience: There is

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the frame of the photograph, the frame of the windows, and the frame of the bricks. Within the left window frame there is another frame, created by the white curtain, that makes the window even smaller. And within this smaller window there is another, black curtain, which again makes it even smaller—all of these shrinkages further reducing the size of the figure in the window. Within the windows, especially on the left side, there are additional frames created by the white lines of the window insulation, and the bricks themselves also comprise small frames, almost like the disintegration of a digital image into pixels. The figure in the left window, a woman filling about half of the small part of the window that is uncovered, is partly veiled by the curtain. The figure in the right window appears to be wearing a woman’s coat, and this is perhaps the only clue to the gender of the figure, whose head is completely obscured by the flag. The main instrument Frank employs in this photograph to guide the eye of the observer is the use of white (based on the role of the color white in perception): The first thing we see is the flag; then, because the eye is attracted to whites, the second thing we see is the white of the chin, the white of the hand, and the white blouse—with its faint polka dot or diamond pattern—of the woman in the left window; the third thing we see, finally, is the person in the other window, whose hand seems whitened (or bleached), drawing attention and guiding the eye of the observer. What we see of the woman on the left is not her face, which even on closer inspection is barely visible, but her arm, accentuated by the black vest that separates that arm from the rest of her body. Note that of all the cases investigated in this book, Frank’s is the only one in which gender (for women as well as for homosexual men) is the

object of critique. The photograph undermines the discreteness of gender classes by its use of ambiguity and liminality, corroborating my argument about Frank’s transformation of the role of photographic critique. Above the left window there is a white background, which, at least in the 1968 (Steidl) edition, is not separable from the white background of the page. Consequently, already in this very first photograph of the album, Frank breaks one of the elementary conventions of photography: One should not leave white open but rather close it off, to differentiate the white in the frame from the white of the paper on which it is printed. This is not the only convention he breaks; the more closely we look at the face of the woman in the left window, the more it becomes clear that her face is blurred, that in fact there is no face. Indeed the more closely one looks, the more frightening this blurred image appears. One does not have to be a scholar of Levinas to understand that this is no humanist photo.77 Several threads discussed throughout the chapter can be observed here (including the breaking of conventions and the subjective external position), but what is most important for the discussion of “photographic objects” is that these characteristics almost elude our notice because of their subtlety and because they are not the declared end of the photograph. I end with another photograph that also employs these forms of photographic manipulation. “Drugstore—Detroit,” unlike most of the other interior photographs, is relatively light (Figure 4.5). A Life photographer would have photographed this scene using the line of the table as the border of the photo, cutting out the cake stand that obstructs the view in the front of the frame. This item creates what the conventions of “good” photography would call unnecessary noise. As with Harold Pinter’s plays—which

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figure 4.5. Robert Frank, “Drugstore, Detroit,” 1955. From Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac, The Americans (New York: Grove Press, 1959). © Andrea Frank Foundation.

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seem to record absurd exchanges but are based on close listening and are linguistically much closer to human communication as it is in reality than is the usual cleansed language of the theater—this photograph is closer to what reality is like: When you raise your eyes and look around, reality is full of noise. Observe the fingers in the front of the frame, part of a hand: again “noise”; the photograph’s horizontally cut composition (as well as the sequence within which it is placed) accentuates the expression of noise to emphasize separation and alienation. The young man closest to us, the straw not quite in his mouth, has been caught by the photograph just before or just after taking a sip from his glass. The partial hand at the very front of the picture and the advertisements hanging above leave the observer no opening or way out. The connection made between gender and “race” is hard to ignore: The black women are on one side and the white men on the other. Frank’s use of the camera here could be compared to the act of idealization in its scientific sense. If idealization is the act of purifying an object from the inessential noise that obscures our perception of it in a given context and for a particular purpose (medical drawings in textbooks, for instance, idealize the organ to make it easier for the medical student to identify the organ in a patient’s body), here the thing purified appears to be “noise” itself. Not only does Frank not exclude noise from the photograph, he turns noise and disturbances into the organizing principle of the photograph, the (idealizing) work of the photographer, the disposition of photography, an aspect of human vision, and an essential part of reality. In this respect Frank brings us full circle with regard to photography as a means of documenting and representing reality, a means of expressing reality that also reveals a hidden part of it, and, conse-

quently, by bringing that to the attention of observers, a means of subtly modifying reality and our perception of it in actuality.

CONCLUSION: INDIVIDUALITY AND PHOTOGRAPHIC OBJECTS Robert Frank’s The Americans is recognized as one of the most influential photographic albums of the second half of the twentieth century. I have contended that, for the broader context of photography and Jewish history, Frank’s album was able to attain the importance and influence that it did only because of America’s growing centrality—the fact that, in the second half of the twentieth century, American society was the only society that could simultaneously allow the study of a particular society and the study of humankind at large—and because of the changing role of critique in this period and the development of photography as an instrument of critique. Scholars have noted that the only population in the album to whom Frank shows sympathy may be Black Americans. We notice that, in Frank, sympathy is expressed without softening the visual markers of difference. Frank exemplifies a postassimilationist mode of Jewish identity, a possibility that had not been available to him in his native Switzerland, elaborating on a subject that had nothing particularly Jewish about it while at the same time not limiting, hiding, or abandoning the fact of his being a Jew. He thus demonstrates the claim I made in the Introduction, that photography and Jewish history are so thoroughly entwined that one can no longer separate them. Numerous threads addressed throughout the previous chapters were shown to have been reshaped or redefined by Frank’s

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album. I have tried to show how the album establishes and stabilizes objects that belong to the distinct class of “photographic objects” and how this is integrated into the broader goals of the album with regard to the expansion and complication of vision. Two people can look at the same sequence of photographs, or even the same single photograph, and see different things. Seeing is an individual activity. This applies potentially to anyone, but in our context, one of the most important things that Frank did was to liberate photographers to develop their distinct form of vision. The same Israeli photographer I quoted earlier in the chapter said that what Frank did for photographers was to “make photographers think, and think not only about his photographs but about their own photography.” When photographers think about photography, they think about vision, and when they think about vision, they do this through the distinct dispositions of photography, affecting nonphotographers as well. In certain respects this sequence expresses an essential feature of the decision that set the course for Frank’s album. When Frank left commercial photography to work on the album, he sought to pursue photography for its own sake. But what

does “for its own sake” mean in this context? Frank may not have expected to generate a substantial income from the album, but he certainly sought recognition, so “for its own sake” does not mean “for the drawer.” “For its own sake” means that the photography was not intended to be subordinated to a commercial, journalistic, scientific, political, or ideological end. And because it was not his explicit intention, his photography was very effective in subverting the kinds of order that Kahn and Fischer, in their use of photography, wished to impose on the chaos of existence. Tautological as this sounds, Frank wanted to do the photography that he wanted to do. Embarking on this course, Frank thought as a photographer: His training, intelligence, intuition, and originality arose from within the medium of photography.78 Working from within the dispositions of photography, Frank’s photographs showed subtle, quotidian, ambiguous, and polysemic aspects of reality. This is a range of objects that could be suggested to interested viewers, not to prove the existence of such objects but to make the viewers think about how photography does what it does, in a process in which photography is ultimately not a means but itself the end.

Chapter 5

PHOTOGRAPHY and RUPTURE S. An-sky, Solomon Yudovin, and the Documentation of Russian Jewry

B

etween 1912 and 1914, S. An-sky initiated and organized a series of expeditions to study and document the life of Russian Jews across the Pale of Settlement, the first undertaking to incorporate photography for such a purpose. Setting out to survey Jewish life on a national scale, and within the broader ideology of cultural renewal and productivization, An-sky’s expedition became one of the most important scientific studies of the Jewish world conducted during the first half of the twentieth century, and the photographs taken by Solomon Yudovin have increasingly come to be recognized as lying at the core of the expedition’s legacy. To demonstrate Flusser’s contention that photography changed history, that it changes the things it comes into contact with, this chapter addresses the following questions: How did photography come to be included in the expeditions’ techniques in the first place? What were its intended purposes? And how did photography interact with the ideological concerns that undergirded the expedition, such as the documen-

tation of the “vanishing world” of the Pale of Settlement and its renewal? Attempting to answer these questions, I reconstruct the context of the expedition and carry out comparisons with the photography of “race” and “type” in other contexts and between photography and other media involved in this case. Simultaneously, however, I follow a thread that pertains to a subtler and more complex feature of photography and history in this case. Because this feature involves complex temporal structures and bears on the question of the directionality of twentieth-century Jewish history, and because it involves a reflective and even personal mode of inquiry, I am choosing to end the volume with this case, although in plain chronological terms it could have begun it. As a medium that, per Flusser, abstracts or freezes the four dimensions of the world into a two-dimensional image, photography has a special disposition to recording “before” and “after,” to the sense of documenting a “vanishing world,” and to noting historical rupture.

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But a “vanishing world” is an idea, an image, and for viewers to comprehend this image in a photograph, some kind of minimal cue is required for the “match” to occur. And the thread that I want to follow here is this: I seek to show that the idea of a “return” to the people, or masses—Yudovin’s idea of studying a “vanishing world” to which he both did and did not belong, and with which he both did and did not identify—is expressed in a dialectic of distance that is found in some of his photographs. Had the Holocaust not occurred, however, the significance and meaning of that dialectic would have remained very different from what it came to be. The Holocaust, as an extreme mark of rupture, transformed the meaning and significance of this dialectic of distance, of the thematic of the “vanishing world,” of the “before” and “after,” and of the historical rupture found in some of Yudovin’s photographs.1 This is the circular dialectic by which photography and history shape each other in this case. This kind of argument can be suggested and intimated, but it involves apositivist registers of argumentation. In the absence of a theory of subjectivity with regard to photography, but given its necessary role in any attempt to connect Flusser’s philosophy with history, subjectivity plays a particularly complex role in this chapter. To notice this thread I rely on several kinds of subjectivity and sensitivity. My subjectivity and my trained intuition as a historian—for instance, in the interpretation of “cues” with regard to visibility or productivity—are therefore instruments whose purpose is to (genetically and systematically) historicize Flusser’s contentions about photography in the context of the case. Although in this volume I am trying to put forward the notion that subjectivity is technologically, socially, and historically shaped, I readily admit that it will neverthe-

less occasionally appear as exactly what it is: The subjective nature of some of my analyses is an essential feature of the intellectual experiment that forms this volume.2 To many North American (and especially Jewish) readers, the thread I have just described will be most strongly associated with Roman Vishniac’s famous album, A Vanished World. For many American Jews, Vishniac’s photographs powerfully expressed an emotional bond with their former homeland after that world had been destroyed. 3 I am not sure why this is so— maybe because he was naturalized as American—but Vishniac has been received more widely in the United States than in Israel or Europe. Although he, too, photographed before the Holocaust, his photographs were perceived as being directly related to the Holocaust (i.e., the “matching” of his photographs with the Holocaust has been established). A Vanished World first appeared in 1969, and in this album Vishniac managed to convey both that Jewish life in Eastern Europe had been an entire “world” and, at the same time, that that world had completely vanished. The explicit connection between the photographs and the Holocaust was made in Vishniac’s dedication, in the preface by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and in Vishniac’s directive to the readers to remember, to connect each and every photograph with history. Vishniac is the only photographer to whom the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, dedicates a separate section. He does not enjoy a similar centrality in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; indeed I have not found him even mentioned there at all.4 This difference between the United States on the one hand and Israel and Europe on the other is important, because it brings home the fact that the perception of his photographs is historically and culturally mediated.

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Vishniac photographed much more extensively than Yudovin, and his photographs show far greater photographic sophistication than Yudovin’s. This sophistication is important with regard to recent scholarship on Vishniac, by Maya Benton and others, which questions the accuracy of some of Vishniac’s accounts of the context of the photographs and the descriptions of the photographs themselves. These analyses reveal elements of construction if not downright staging in some of the photographs; they note that Vishniac was generously paid by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC) as part of a campaign to raise funds, and that this sponsorship may have shaped his mission, the selection of things he photographed, the way he handled them, his editorial decisions with regard to the selection of photographs for publication, and the prominence of impoverished, disadvantaged, and helpless Jews in the Eastern European shtetls in his photographs.5 Vishniac was an incredible photographer, both in terms of his technical skills and in his consistent and quite remarkable photographic language. But because of the Holocaust, it is practically impossible to appreciate Vishniac’s sophistication in the same way we do view the photographs of Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank. Rather than appreciating the framing or the composition of the photographs, we pay attention to their content, and it is therefore much harder to see the photographer and his work. In the comparative context of this current book, it is particularly important to note that the negotiation of Jewish productivity, central to both Vishniac and Yudovin, is distinctly non-Zionist—as evidenced in Vishniac’s photos of observant farmers and Yudovin’s of observant blacksmiths. And as with Yudovin’s work, although for different reasons, Vishniac’s album, too, was highly

partial: showing observant, Orthodox Jews rather than secular Jews, “traditional” rather than “modern” Jews, the poor rather than the rich, mostly men rather than women, and workers or small shopkeepers rather than bourgeois businessmen, landowners, professors, or intellectuals. The image Vishniac’s album preserves of the Jewish world of Eastern Europe that was later destroyed is (as in Yudovin’s photographs, as we will see) that of a far poorer, more “traditional,” and more observant world than it actually was. Vishniac and Yudovin explored different terrains: Vishniac photographed mainly in Poland, Yudovin in Russia; Vishniac mainly in cities, Yudovin mostly in shtetls on the periphery of the Russian Empire. The logical similarities among Vishniac, Yudovin, and An-sky are nonetheless helpful. First, they point to the fact that this intellectual structure transcends this or that particular photographer. Second, it is useful to note that this structure is not found in every body of photographs of Eastern European Jews, or in all of their photographs; it has to do with the relationships among certain qualities of (some of their respective) photographs and with the knowledge of historical events that audiences bring with them to the experience of the photographs. Why do particular photographs, rather than others, elicit certain responses? The answer, I suggest in this chapter and volume, must go through both history and photography, through audiences’ mutual socialization, through the gradual (and mostly unconscious) social stabilization and solidification of their (subjective) experience. In this process audiences learn to identify, recognize, and match an object (in the four-dimensional world) with a photograph (a two-dimensional abstraction)—and vice versa. In comparison with Vishniac’s, Yudovin’s photographs are raw, scattered, and immediate.

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The structure of this chapter is as follows: First, I reconstruct the historical context of An-Sky’s scientific expedition, paying particular attention to how photography was added to the expedition’s techniques, making it the first scientific expedition of Russian Jewry to employ photography. Second, I turn to a closer analysis of the scientific genres of Yudovin’s photographs. Paying particular attention to photographs of humans, I show that the genres were drawn from the study of “race,” but that the photographs simultaneously show a warm treatment of their subjects in comparison with other, then-contemporary similar contexts. Third, I then try to underpin it with regard to a particular dialectic of distance and, through the analysis of one photograph, identify how it speaks to a particular post-Holocaust register of culture. Finally, fourth, I conclude with an attempt to calibrate the specificity of photography in this context.

THE IDEA OF THE EXPEDITION AND THE INTRODUCTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY Born Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport in 1863, S. An-sky left home at the age of seventeen to spread Enlightenment ideas among the Jewish shtetls across the Pale of Settlement. Then, broadening his horizons and taking up the cause of the Russian masses, he changed his name and became a miner in the Donetsk Basin. After moving to St. Petersburg, he became a member of the Russian populist elite. Following other radicals, he then immigrated to Paris where, as secretary to philosopher, sociologist, and recognized leader of Russian populism Petr Lavrov, he devoted himself to the revolu-

tionary movement. When he reestablished himself in Russia after the political amnesty of 1905, he developed a great interest in Jewish politics and folklore. The issues of “return” and “before” and “after” that pervade this chapter in photographic terms thus arise in many ways and modes from An-sky’s own biography and the context of the case. In the broadest sense, An-sky’s motives for making photography an integral part of his ethnographic project were scientific. His understanding of “science,” however, was very capacious: He held it to be closely entwined with art and politics. In this sense, An-sky hoped that documenting Jewish “olden times”’ (Everiskaya starina) could serve as an aid for future generations of artists. The photographs thus functioned as both scientific and artistic artifacts, with no clear-cut or precise boundary existing between these two dimensions. He expected the materials he collected not only to constitute an archive of Jewish folklore but also to provide the basis for a revived national culture.6 This idea was originally prompted by An-sky’s conviction that Jewish culture in the Pale of Settlement—home to the largest Jewish population in the world at the time, and an area beyond which Jews had no rights of residence and within which they lacked full citizen rights—was being eroded by modernization and thus on the verge of vanishing. The aim of documenting both a “vanishing world” and its “renewal” appear today as contradictory, and the fact that they were not perceived as such then indicates to us that they signified something different then from what they do today, and that they are elements of the ideological matrix of the case. An-sky believed modern Jewish culture to be secular, and when he thought about “renewal” he actually had in mind

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that materials gained in traditional areas could contribute to the cultural renewal of the Jewish intelligentsia in urban, secular centers. An-sky clearly distinguished himself and his secular, urban Russian Jewish colleagues from this Jewish sector, regarding it as a subject for study. Yet it was also clear to him that they were of the same people. This view lies at the heart of the folkloristic approach represented by and reflected in Yudovin’s photographs, embodying a “return” informed by a dialectic of distance with regard to traditional forms of custom and practice.7 As he later observed in his memoirs, the expedition allowed An-sky to “go to the people” by returning to his own, following the path laid out for him by his non-Jewish Russian mentor, Petr Lavrov. This path was steeped in the rich tradition of the Russian Empire itself.8 To appreciate the way photography entered into and in retrospect reshaped the study of Russian Jewry, it is important to remember that An-sky’s was not the first study of Russian Jewry. In the wake of a series of pogroms that shook Jewish society, the wealthy Varsovian Jewish businessman Jan Bloch established a research bureau in 1884, sending people out to gather information regarding the financial and social status of the Jews in the Russian Empire. The results were published in five volumes in 1891 as A Comparison of the Physical Subsistence and Moral Condition of the Population in the Jewish Pale of Settlement and Elsewhere.9 An-sky himself apparently made use of the work of two of Bloch’s researchers—the prominent Jewish writer Isaac Leib Peretz and the economist Andrej Pavlovich Subbotin.10 Although not Jewish, the latter had a particular interest in the “Jewish question,” traveling extensively across the Pale of Settlement to document the intricate details of Jewish social and material culture via close, dense

descriptions. Funded by Bloch, Subbotin published his findings in a two-volume work entitled In the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1888 and 1890.11 As An-sky grew older, his interest slightly shifted from the liberation of Russian peasantry toward the Jewish world.12 Increasingly dubious of the possibility of being loyal to both Russia and Judaism, he came to the conclusion that he had to make a choice between the two.13 This last statement should be qualified, however, because in the multinational imperial Russian context, at least until 1914, An-sky and most of his associates saw a relatively clear distinction between “Russia” and the “Russian people,” and no necessary contradiction between maintaining an active Jewish consciousness and belonging to Russia.14 In the wake of the abortive 1905 revolution, he thus threw himself into the collection of Jewish folklore. Penning a programmatic article on the subject, he cofounded an organization dedicated to the study of Jewish ethnography.15 Even though for An-sky and the members of his circle assimilation was not viewed as a personal question, they were troubled by the structural processes taking place around them—would these processes affect their real or metaphorical children? Would they be followed by another generation of Jewish Russian activists who would safeguard a balanced Jewish Russian life?16 In Jeffrey Alexander’s sociological terms, both An-sky’s “general” Russian phase and his “return” to his Jewish roots reflect the challenge posed by assimilation—namely, the imperative of choosing between the two realms. His “return” thus underlies the folkloristic approach that Yudovin’s photographs embody and reflect. Simon Dubnow, the preeminent Russian Jewish historian of the time, had called for a historical and ethnographic study of

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Russian Jewry in 1891. An-sky’s conviction that folklore was the way to personal and communal redemption was also directly influenced by his Russian mentors, Gleb Uspensky and Petr Lavrov.17 But An-sky’s conviction was not special in the context of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia, where the ideas of commitment to the people, re/turning to the people, and shaping the people circulated widely. In line with the broad humanist horizons of his mentors, An-sky thus insisted that Jewish folklore was the product of continuous and ongoing interaction with the surrounding Christian environment.18 An-sky managed to draw together some of the most distinguished Russian Jewish scholars of the time for a three-day discussion of the expeditions’ goals, methods, and techniques. Dubnow and An-sky found themselves in intense disagreements around 1905, but at the time of the expedition’s discussions they cooperated fairly well, and Dubnow made himself available. One of the other prominent members was the physician, anthropologist, and folklorist Samuel Weissenberg.19 Weissenberg was well known in Europe for publishing articles on Jewish and Karaite anthropology and folklore in German scholarly journals, and the numerous racial photographs of Jews, in particular Eastern European Jews, that he took were reprinted in books and articles by various German and German Jewish authors.20 Weissenberg’s promotion of the use of photography had great import for the expedition. While An-sky sought to incorporate ethnographic, folkloristic, photographic, physical-anthropological, and sound-recording techniques, his friend Lev Shternberg was responsible for introducing the idea of a specifically physical-anthropological form of photography.21 Some weeks prior to the date of the expedition’s departure, Weissenberg suggested that the original program

be revised, arguing that, extensive exploration of the physical characteristics of the Jewish race having already been undertaken, they should focus on ethnology, examining daily life and behavior.22 This argument reflected the shift Weissenberg had taken in his own research, favoring folklore and ethnography over physical anthropology. These broader and looser goals shaped the photographs Yudovin took. While the expedition brought together science, photography, and race, neither An-sky nor Yudovin was committed to racial ideas in the same way some of their Central European colleagues were, such as the prominent Austrian-born Berlin professor of anthropology, archaeology, and ethnography Felix von Luschan, or the German Jewish founder of modern Jewish sociology and demography Arthur Ruppin.23 Nor were they particularly opposed to the concept of “race” or ideas with regard to “racial purity” as their German Jewish contemporary counterpart in the United States, Franz Boas, the founder of cultural anthropology, was. In their eyes their documentation project was a scientific endeavor of a more general type, for which photography served as a powerful technique. They thus employed it to enhance the scientific nature of the project rather than out of an interest in racial photography or photography per se.

SCIENTIFIC GENRES AND EXPRESSIVE QUALITIES Solomon Yudovin’s photographs reflect several aspects of the scientific photography of his day. Various interrelated methods were developed between the 1880s and the turn of the nineteenth century and applied to physical anthropology, ethnology, ethnography, and folklore. It was only in the 1920s and 1930s, however, that these became clearly

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differentiated and associated with specific disciplines, such as cultural anthropology and physical anthropology, and even with political stances. At this point “racial types,” or anthropometric photography, became associated with the physical anthropology of Rudolf Virchow, Felix von Luschan, and Rudolf Martin—while social or cultural documentation was regarded as belonging to Bronislaw Malinowski’s social anthropology or Franz Boas’s cultural anthropology.24 The scientific goals that photographic methods were designed to achieve during the 1880s and 1890s help us understand the place of photography in An-sky’s expedition. One form, racial-type photography, was intended to represent and encapsulate the typical essence of a group via a well-selected individual specimen (Felix von Luschan). This form is easily recognizable by its standard frontal and profile angles. Another—anthropometric photography—was conceived of as a form of measurement that, when carried out under controlled conditions, could be transformed into statistical data (Francis Galton, Rudolf Martin). A third variety studied human subjects within their cultural, social, and economic environments. When An-sky’s expedition set out, the disciplinary boundaries had already been created, but the three genres and the relations among the genres were still fluid. Even more important, tone and expressive quality could vary within each of them. The same genre—racial type, for example—could either reduce the subject to a lower form of life (see Chapter 3) or elevate it by treating it empathetically. Solomon Yudovin—who was An-sky’s nephew, his sister’s son—may well have been invited to serve as the expedition photographer because the services of a twentyyear-old with little professional experience

would be inexpensive. Compared with Ansky, Yudovin almost belonged to the shtetl world himself. And given An-sky’s fame and stature, Yudovin would clearly have accepted his authority in full. Later acclaimed as an eminent Jewish artist in the Soviet Union, Yudovin had learned to use a camera while working in photographic studios in Vitebsk.25 His later work in the 1930s and 1940s was directly linked, both thematically and technically, to the experience he gained during the expedition. His photographic technique never attained the level of a Helmar Lerski (Chapter 2) or Robert Frank (Chapter 4), however.26 Throughout his life, he focused on small-town Jewish life and portraits of individual Jews situated in a landscape reminiscent of the area around Vitebsk.27 He did not adopt a socialist realist style until the late 1930s. Even today there are lacunae in what we know about the accidents that befell the expeditions’ materials over the course of twentieth-century Russian history. But some examples will convey a sense of how Yudovin’s photographs were dispersed. An-sky’s intention had been to print photographs as their intended uses arose, as “print on demand,” so to speak.28 Of the three volumes that were prepared in 1914 for Radlov, a prominent member of the Academy of Science, only one has survived (and in that one Yudovin appended the locations to the prints glued into the album, including several apparent errors). Meanwhile, a brief display of some of the photographs opened on April 19, 1914, at the Jewish almshouse in St. Petersburg, in rooms allotted to the Museum of the Jewish Historical and Ethnographical Society (EIEO). In 1917 the exhibition closed, and the most valuable items were moved to the Ethnographic Department of the city’s Russian Museum. The Jewish Museum in Petrograd reopened in

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June 1923, with Yudovin as its chief curator, when the EIEO renewed its activities, but in 1929 the Soviet authorities accused it of “propagandizing a chauvinist-religious ideology,” and it was again closed. Many of the collections were then transferred to the Mendele Moykher-Sforim Museum of Jewish Culture in Odessa, which operated from 1927 to 1941. However, the Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum also continued to hold artifacts that An-sky had given it for safekeeping in 1917. In 1930 additional An-sky collection items from the closed-down museum were added. Together they became the basis of the Jewish Ashkenazic collections of the Leningrad State Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR (GME). This latter museum acquired other items from the An-sky collection in 1938, and to this was added part of the collection of the Odessa Jewish Museum. Then, in 1939, Yudovin also handed over to it other material that he had preserved. The GME’s Jewish collections suffered greatly from the bombing of Leningrad in 1941; after World War II, the Jewish section was not restored. The most valued selections of documents, manuscripts, recordings, and texts were acquired by the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture, and they have been kept at the Vernadskii National Library of Ukraine since the 1990s. Other materials remain in archives, libraries, and museums in Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, and Moscow. A large part of the photographic collection remained in the hands of Yudovin, in St. Petersburg, and was passed on to his son after his death. Tsyila Mendjeritsky, a refusnik who was finally allowed to immigrate to Israel in 1988, later purchased parts of the collection from the son. The number of photographs taken during the course of the expedition is disputed, with estimates ranging between 640 and two

thousand.29 (A comparison of these numbers with the seventy thousand photographs found in Kahn’s archive [Chapter 1] and the same figure out of which Robert Frank compiled an album of 83 photographs clearly reveals the trajectory of numbers in the history of photography.) Partially overlapping sets of photographs exist in archives in Russia, Israel, and the United States—no single archive of the expedition’s photographs having been established, for reasons that are themselves disputed. According to the art historian Carol Zemel, An-sky had originally intended to create such an archive in Odessa. Benjamin Lukin writes that An-sky intended to create Jewish museums of three types: an ethnographic museum in every city of the Russian Empire, an art museum in every region of the empire, and a museum of national relics in the historic homeland of the Jews. But, as we compare An-sky with Kahn (see Chapter 1), we can see that the fact that no central archive was planned or executed also reflects the personality of Ansky, who was more of a writer than an initiator of institutions. He also suggests that the Jewish situation in czarist Russia made Ansky apprehensive about placing all the material in one place, which would have made it vulnerable to confiscation. According to Flusser’s architecture of communication, discussed in the Introduction, An-sky’s photography followed no clear single method of communication. The surviving photographs are thus scattered across several archives and held by various individuals. Inevitably, this means that many of them remain unknown.30 There is confusion within the archive itself, too; shortly before the publication of this book, in fact, I had to replace one photograph and omit another because Benjamin Lukin brought to my attention that, although they had somehow found their way into Yudovin’s collection, they were not

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Yudovin’s. I draw here particularly on two Israeli archives, focusing especially on photographs of people. Three folders of photographs exist in the archive of the Israel Museum. According to the curator Ruth Apter-Gabriel, the museum purchased them from Tsyila Mendjeritsky. The photographs number fewer than two thousand in total; some of them are originals, with the name of the place and subject noted in Yudovin’s handwriting on the back. Others are photocopies or reproductions of other sorts. The photographs are accompanied by captions and short descrip-

figure 5.1. Solomon Yudovin, Profile of man. Courtesy of Benjamin Lukin.

tions, on separate pages. Although it is not clear whether the latter are original or are later additions, some—like the category of “professions”—appear to have been written at the time. Yudovin himself cropped some. Photograph no. 6240, for example, shows an older man standing in a field with a smiling boy at the edge of the frame. In the cropped version, the child has disappeared. A larger number of photographs is stored in the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People at Giv’at Ram, Jerusalem (and if this name sounds somewhat majestic, note that the archive is actually a trail-

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figure 5.2. Solomon Yudovin, Frontal view of man. Courtesy of Benjamin Lukin.

er-sized building at the back of the Hebrew University campus). Their existence demonstrates that the photographs discussed in this chapter are only a small group out of a much larger number. Many are of poor quality, both technically and aesthetically. (I have discussed “flaws” in Robert Frank’s album in Chapter 4; here flaws are simply flaws.) I want to show that Yudovin’s photographs belong to certain genres but that, within those various genres, they have in common the warm treatment of the people featured in them. Yudovin took numerous

photographs of individuals. Figures 5.1 and 5.2 depict a man in a white shirt and dark suit, seated in a tidy interior. In Figure 5.2 the frontal angle is from slightly above the subject, who is thus looking up toward the photographer. The man is sitting upright, and his eyes gleam—not only because he is smiling, but also because light falls on his face from the left and above, creating an impression of light particularly on the right side of his face. In Figure 5.1, the profile angle is almost full. (The full profile was introduced because it was believed to cancel out the expressive features of the frontal angle,

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figure 5.3. Solomon Yudovin, Young woman. Courtesy of Benjamin Lukin.

thus allowing the scientist to focus on the purely physiognomic.) Whereas the stereotype of the Jewish nose is that it is hooked, this photograph emphasizes a straight, non-Jewish nose and high cheekbones. Figures 5.3–5.6 show two young women at ease in front of the photographer. They are treated gently, and I sense the glimmer of a smile more in their eyes than on their lips. In the profile view of the second woman (Figure 5.5), the light falling onto her from the left imbues her with a kind of radiance. The soft, almost erotic photographic treatment of Figure 5.6, in which the light falls softly

on the young woman’s smooth, light skin, accentuates the sense that while these are racial-type photographs in terms of scientific genre, they are also affectionate photographic portraits. The subjects are in their natural habitat and appear to me to be comfortable and at ease in the photographer’s presence and under his gaze. Some of the racial-type photographs introduce cultural and political expressions. Two photographs of a Jewish blacksmith from Slavuta, for example, merge racial discourse, revolutionary Russian iconography, and Jewish productivity (Figure 5.7). While

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the angles define them as the scientific depiction of a Jewish type, the photographs highlight cultural, religious, and social markers rather than removing them from the frame as “noise.” The blacksmith wears a white worker’s shirt under a vest and a laborer’s hat, and his shoulders are at ease in the frontal angle. (Surprisingly, however, Yudovin’s framing of the photograph excluded the blacksmith’s hands, the symbol of the profession and of productivity.) This is the Jewish type as revolutionary—a healthy, productive, masculine Jewish member of society. The photograph accentuates his

powerful, virtually straight nose and tidy haircut. The frontal photograph, which underscores his cheekbones and the natural beard that covers most of his face, complemented by his barely visible but nonetheless powerful direct gaze into the camera, conveys the man’s robust nature and internal energy. One can bring to the surface elements of the ideology in which the expedition was embedded.31 Rather than reflecting the whole range of Jewish economic life, the photographs focus primarily on factory workers and artisans. Many are of black-

figure 5.4. Solomon Yudovin, Young woman. Courtesy of Benjamin Lukin.

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smiths—the representative of the worker par excellence in the early twentieth century and thus the symbol of revolution. Such expressions of productivity countered antisemitic theories, which An-sky believed to be “based on slander about the economic danger posed by Jews”; he asserted that it was therefore necessary to “arm ourselves with the materials given directly by folk art, which brightly depict the face of the Jewish people.”32 The elements of a socialist discourse were intended for internal Jewish purposes. The elements of response to anti-antisemitism were intended for external

figure 5.5. Solomon Yudovin, Young woman. © Association “Petersburg Judaica,” European University, St. Petersburg.

purposes. The relationship between the two forms a fairly complex structure. Indeed, as we will see, An-sky had in his possession powerful folkloristic tools (which did not include photography) with which to counter antisemitic allegations, and which he made use of in non-Jewish arenas of publication. But despite this relatively clear line of separation between the internal and external, one can discern elements of both in Yudovin’s photographs, which corroborates the claim made in the Introduction that photography is immersed in social ideologies in the broadest sense of the term.33 Yudovin’s type

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photographs of Jewish blacksmiths therefore merged socialist propaganda with an anti-antisemitic discourse.34 The question of ideology, therefore, of An-sky and Yudovin’s generation and of ours, also brings gender into play. In the summer of 2019, I returned again to the archive, with the intention of examining more closely questions pertaining to gender. 35 Gabriella Safran has touched on issues of gender in this context (although not specifically with regard to photography), showing the importance of gender in the socialization that formed some of the basis for the record-

ing of folk stories or folk songs, including male social contexts that involved the joint drinking of vodka. We have no evidence of any direct instruction by An-sky about photographing differently based on gender, and gender is not represented as an explicit class in the archive. I share Benjamin Lukin’s impression that the number of men and women in the portraits is roughly the same. In the photographs Yudovin took in open or public spaces, I could find no differences between his treatment of men and women. I also tried to count men and women in group

figure 5.6. Solomon Yudovin, Young woman. © Association “Petersburg Judaica,” European University, St. Petersburg.

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figure 5.7. Solomon Yudovin, Jewish blacksmith. Courtesy of Benjamin Lukin.

photographs, but this effort soon proved futile because the state of the archive was far too chaotic for any sustained quantitative analysis. There are too many empirical unknowns. We do not know the exact number of photographs Yudovin took. We cannot know how many were lost in the twists and turns that befell the collection and how many survived. Between the respective archives and within them there are duplications and overlaps. Hence, there is no clear way to distinguish or stabilize standards for a quantitative analysis of gender in the group photographs. Nor is it possible to distinguish between the particularities of the social world being depicted and those of the photographic study of that world. If Yudovin’s

photographs do not show women doing domestic work, for example, it is not possible to determine whether this stems from the ideological matrix of the case—that domestic work did not qualify as productive at the time and was therefore “self-evidently” (for the given community, for An-sky/Yudovin, or both) not worthy of being photographed in the context of the expedition—or whether it was just because Yudovin photographed very little inside homes. Where I did find a difference was in the “type” portraits, where women tended to be treated as gentle and beautiful and men as tough and resilient (reflected in the selection of photographs in this chapter). Here again, however, it is not possible to determine whether Yudovin was only reflecting

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figure 5.8a. Solomon Yudovin, “An orphan sleeping in the synagogue.” © Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People.

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figure 5.8b. Roman Vishniac, photograph, 1937. Gift of Mara Vishniac Kohn, the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, University of California. Note parallels between Yudovin’s and Vishniac’s photographs of Jewish social spaces.

a widely shared social ideology or accentuating that difference in his photography. In any case, however, what we see even here is not an aestheticized language of gender difference, of the kind discussed in Chapter 3, where a specific gender aesthetics is an integrative element of the ideology of racial inequality. At the same time, and to a great extent

in opposition to the above observation with regard to Yudovin’s portraits, I find that his photographic treatment of women and men is both consistent and the same: They are photographed against the exact same background (Figures 5.1 and 5.5 were taken in the same physical location, though because of the fading the tapestry is harder to discern in Figure 5.1), with the same lighting,

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figure 5.9 Felix von Luschan, Type photographs, 1903–1914. From the Collection of the Natural History Museum, Vienna. © Naturhistorisches Museum, Wien.

from a similar distance and angle, and with a similar use of framing. Indeed, this kind of “type” photograph constitutes only a minority of Yudovin’s works. One of my favorite photographs is found in a file entitled “Types, refugees, institutions for refugees, and children.” When

I first saw it, it was not clear to me what I was looking at. When I looked closer, I realized that it showed a teenager or young man asleep at a table, his head resting on his hands, his face entirely obscured by the bill of his white hat (Figure 5.8a). The caption reads “An orphan sleeping in the syn-

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agogue.” Yudovin provides no information about the subject, not even a visible face. This photograph documents a Jewish social space by way of a single individual. We have little way of knowing whether Yudovin was instructed to photograph subjects from frontal and profile angles, but those angles characterize the photographs as scientific, although Yudovin’s photographs lack the scientific control required for a valid anthropometric photograph. In Central Europe the issue of selection was becoming significant in pragmatic terms, too. During the second decade of the twentieth century, in particular in the context of the anthropological studies of prisoners of war during the Great War, methods based on forms of “trained vision” were becoming increasingly widespread.36 In An-sky’s case there is no indication that he thought much about selection or that there were any clear standards guiding his selection. Neither An-sky nor Yudovin had any anthropological, medical, or morphological background, of course. To emphasize the softness and warmth of Yudovin’s photographs, I will compare them with those of Felix von Luschan (Figure 5.9). Von Luschan played a central role in establishing “type” photographs that, while free of strict control, shared certain patterns— the removal of the subject from the environment, a neutral gray background, strong lighting (eliminating much of the photographic detail that characterized studio portraits), close-ups that tended to distort and enlarge the nose, a low angle representing subjects in an unflattering manner, and the selection of individuals on the basis of physical and cultural resemblances. Yudovin treated his subjects much more warmly. The lighting falls softly on their faces, bringing out far more features than can be seen in von Luschan’s photographs. Unlike von Luschan, who extracted the

photographed subject from its environment, Yudovin frames his portraits against soft backgrounds, the faces of his subjects glowing with an internal radiance. Yudovin photographed his subjects from slightly above, a more flattering angle than von Luschan adopted. The greater distance from the camera caused far less distortion. Yudovin’s photographs also tended to cluster physical and social or cultural features, thus offering a sense of an open and diverse class. In terms of warmth within the genre, Yudovin’s photographs exhibit some affinities with those of the prominent African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois that were displayed in the Paris 1900 exhibition (Figure 5.10). As Shawn Michelle Smith has shown, the three albums that comprise Du Bois’s Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. are filled with soft, warm-toned portrait images of African Americans, many of whom are photographed from the frontal and profile angles associated with the science of race. Emphasizing the subjects’ individuality and humanity, these photographs subverted stereotypes of African American difference and inferiority.37 The elements of soft pictorialist photography employed in both sets of photographs further distanced them from the anthropological “mugshot” style that—implicitly yet powerfully—distinguished “us” from “them,” “self ” from “other.” In this way they helped to undermine the depiction of the African American or the Eastern European Jew as other. But in terms of the particulars of photography, it is also possible to contrast Yudovin’s photographs with Du Bois’s: Du Bois’s photograph of a beautiful young African American man in a sharp suit shows that he could have been anyone (note that the visual racial cues—hair, teeth—associated with African Americans are absent), while Yudovin’s subjects are photographed in such

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figures 5.10. Two photographs of a young African American man, frontal and profile angles. From W. E. B. DuBois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A. (1900), vol. 1, no. 2 (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LOT 11930).

a way that they could only be Jews. Indeed, the African American is photographed in a neutral studio; the Jews are photographed in their own environment. The one says: He can be anything (Du Bois); the other says: He can be respectable (Yudovin). Du Bois is showing that African Americans can be photographed like white Americans; Yudovin is trying to photograph these Jews in their element. Both are saying that African Americans and Jews, respectively, are regular people, even though their respective photographic strategy is different. Both messages, however, belong strictly to the era of assimilation. Both Du Bois’s and Yudovin’s deeply humanist photographs are, of course, a form of ideological apologetics. Forms of action and representation are themselves forged in and

shaped by their social environments and conventions. If we follow Louis Dumont’s method (see the Introduction) and seek the antithesis of Yudovin’s photographs, we might identify that antithesis as scientific photographs that frame Jewish specificity in terms of inferiority and parasitism. In Yudovin’s type photographs, the contours of the subjects’ faces blend with the background, their profiles merging softly with the environment. Rather than mug shots of criminals or the racially inferior, they are “photo-impressionist” pictorialist portraits.38 Thus, even within the same genre, racial photographs could vary greatly in terms of their expressive quality. A look at disputes over photography in Russia can also shed light on some aspects of Yudovin’s photographs. 39 As Alexander

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left. figure 5.11. Solomon Yudovin, Profile of old woman, 1912–1914. © Association “Petersburg Judaica,” European University, St. Petersburg. right. figure 5.12. Solomon Yudovin, Old woman, 1912–1914. © Association “Petersburg Judaica,” European University, St. Petersburg.

Ivanov has noted, when the expedition set out, Yudovin was already familiar with the critique of ethnographic photograph albums (including those of Jews), which argued that carefully staged individuals in festive ethnic costumes looked like an “idealized imitation of reality in the spirit of ethnic romanticism.”40 Ivanov draws attention in particular to the inf luence that Samuil Dudin exerted on Yudovin. A well-known Russian photographer and ethnographer, Dudin sought to turn Yudovin against this photographic tradition. The controversy centered around whether photography’s primary goal should be to document (heralding the photographic essay) or to serve as an art form.41 In terms of photographic practice, the “pictorialists” or “photo-impressionists” were more inter-

ested in the mutual relationships between their subject and their environment and in the application of methods of fine art photography. They thus avoided the direct gaze into the lens and eliminated anything not strictly necessary for the scene, believing that these weakened the aesthetic composition. When the expedition set out, Yudovin was far more of a pictorialist than a documentarist. In accordance with the aesthetics of this approach, his photographs of elderly people are often stylized portraits of seemingly wise, expressive men and women (Figures 5.11–5.12).42 To achieve the effects associated with pictorialism, such as the soft lines of demarcation thought to resemble high-quality oil paintings, photographers often smeared their camera lenses with oil. Unlike the case for the photographs of

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the ethnographic generation that preceded Yudovin, the clothing in which these old people were attired “was not dragged out of grandmothers’ chests, standing still under the scrutinizing look of the camera. Neither are there primitive ‘scenes of Jewish life,’ the favorite subject of postcards at the time.”43 Within the context of Russian photographic representation of Jewish themes, Yudovin renounced exoticization in favor of normalizing Jewish visibility, going against the grain of Mikhail Graim’s photographs, Jewish illustrated postcards, and ethnographic albums. In terms of the dispositions of photography discussed in the Introduction, Yudovin focused on the normal rather than the grotesque (first disposition), simplifying vision rather than challenging the observer (second disposition), and implying a direct and simple relationship between the photograph and the reality it represented (third disposition). However, the meaning of these photographs is transformed after the Holocaust. When photographing material items, interestingly, Yudovin employed a different method. Here his use of metric paper and controlled scale recall anthropometric discourse and its ideas of metric measurement. The first exhibition of the expedition’s findings, in 1914, classified traditional ritual objects such as hadasim or Havdalah cups according to their religious or social purpose rather than their artistic style. This demonstrated the inner substance and aesthetic variation of objects belonging to a specific class. Founded on the scientific classification promoted by Linnaeus and others, this practice made its way into photography as early as the 1844–45 inventory pictures “Articles of China” in Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature.44 I have noted how the internal and external ideological contexts merge in Yudovin’s

photographs. In the context of this case, then, photography of Jews involved countering anti-Jewish images and stereotypes, particularly those pertaining to Jews as parasites. It did so from two apparently dichotomous poles. To undermine the economic stereotype of Jews feeding off others, the photographs depicted them as productive members of society. At the same time, the photographs did not refrain from showing their “Jewish” features. (We have encountered something similar in Lerski’s kibbutzim photographs in Chapter 2.) Yudovin’s photographs form a complex negotiation of the question of Jewish productivity and visibility involving socialism, Narodnik and Russian populist ideas, and the Jewish Enlightenment.45 The photographs range from depicting very Jewish-looking subjects to those with no visual cues of Jewishness in the frame. I find the photograph of Jewish children in a parquet factory striking in this respect, because, unlike with the photographs of Jewish schools, it features no cues that the child factory workers are Jewish (Figure 5.13). After the Holocaust photographs of this kind would not elicit the same response as those in which the children look very Jewish. To move closer to the evolving historical grounds that shaped this process, let us now look at the photographs some audiences will more intuitively recognize (or “match”) as images of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jews.

“RETURN” TO A “VANISHING WORLD”: THE DIALECTIC OF DISTANCE Setting out to gather the materials of a “vanishing world,” the An-sky expedition focused on what it intuitively believed to be the core of that world. In retrospect, this

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figure 5.13. Solomon Yudovin, Children in a parquet factory, 1912–1914. Courtesy of Benjamin Lukin.

process was highly selective and partial in its representation of social reality, and the meaning of this selectivity completely changes after the destruction of this world. I want to undertake a performative analysis of this subtle thread, both during An-sky’s life and after the Holocaust. When Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett identifies Jewish “folklore” as the “large domain of cultural trash” produced by attempts to reform Jewish life, she is talking about distance. Heritage, she argues, is “created through the transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the defunct.”46 In contrast to the reformers Kirshenblatt-Gimblett adduces, An-sky and Yudovin were perhaps more sympathetic to the subjects of their study, even as they treated them objectively and

from the outside. Their decision to travel to locations distant from major urban centers further contributed to the folklorist “gap.” This is the source of the dialectic of distance: They were Russian Jews studying Russian Jews. They were members of the class of their study, of the same people. But they were also not. They were urban, nonobservant Russian Jews who were “returning” to a class to which they did not belong in the first place. In Georg Simmel’s dialectic of distance, according to which closeness invokes distance, they were both inside and outside, close and distant, and this is the source of the ambivalence.47 An example of this dialectic is found in the fact that An-sky and Yudovin attempted to speak Yiddish with local Jews but received responses in Russian, revealing much about their mutual expectations and

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assumptions.48 This dialectic of distance intersected with the thematic of studying a “vanishing world,” thereby transforming— following later events—the meaning of the dialectic of distance. Exhibiting little interest in modern aspects of the Jewish town or in educated and progressive Jewish life, the expedition ignored the material objects that could be found in the homes of assimilated and wealthy Jews. Its selective lens focused on life in small towns—a world populated primarily by observant Jews.49 This differs from earlier statistical studies whose goal had been to record all aspects of Jewish existence in a specific location. This preference for the traditional occurred, however, precisely when “the Russian avant-garde had already passed beyond their obsession with the primitive. As they explored the exciting systems of French cubism and Italian futurism, collage, reliefs, and the first syntax of abstract painting, these artists must have found the actuality of the Dymkova toy or a Torah scroll much less enticing than in 1908–9.”50 These being the years in which Marc Chagall was applying modernism to “primitive” or “folk” motifs and Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was being performed in Paris (1913), An-sky’s expedition was perhaps half a step behind the Russian avant-garde. His interest in the “traditional” verging on the “primitive” not only reflected this movement but was also influenced by Martin Buber’s neo-Hasidism. An-sky was particularly interested in mystical legends and folk beliefs. Assumptions that “authentic” Jews lived traditional and Hasidic, rather than learned, lives; were simple rather than educated; poor rather than rich; and existed “out there” in Eastern Europe, crossed political beliefs and geographical boundaries. Kahn’s photographers, too, photographed away from home. But they

did not identify in the same way with the people and landscapes they photographed. In this subjective regard, An-sky and Yudovin resembled the German artist Hermann Struck, an Orthodox Jew and early Zionist who almost at the same time was engaged in drawing Eastern European Jews as part of the exploration of “types.”51 An-sky’s political beliefs changed significantly; particularly important from our performative perspective is the outbreak of World War I. Shaken by the hostilities, and receiving fragmentary news and rumors of atrocities committed against Jews by the Russians, Germans, and Austrians alike, he suspended the ethnographic expedition for all intents and purposes and began devoting his efforts to relief work.52 In his eyes, the Russian army was not only motivated by a bestial form of antisemitism but also engaged in a “systematic deadening of the most elementary human feelings—a process I witnessed day after day.”53 His account of his experiences during this period is still chilling today. Making use of the same folklorist tools that had lain at the heart of the expedition, An-sky documented the unprecedented forms of barbarism being inflicted on Jews during the war years. In what amounts to a report on the collapse of civilized life, he described Cossacks tossing two-year-old children into the air for others to catch on their swords, massacres, women being raped in front of their parents, old people being slashed and left to bleed to death on the streets: humiliations, lynchings, powerlessness, and despair.54 Maybe most important for historicizing Flusser’s contentions, we can conclude from An-sky’s abandonment of photography as the war broke out that photography’s significance in situations of conflict and violence had not yet been recognized. (The political and technological facets of history are here coupled: The camera An-

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sky had at his disposal was not light enough to travel with and to document the violence he was recording in real time; closely related to this is the fact that, because he was carrying a camera, Yudovin was arrested, along with Avrom Rekhtman, who was part of the expedition, on suspicion of espionage.) An-sky recognized that the Jews were politically and militarily defenseless. Neither did they possess any coherent political organization that could help them deal with the allegiances and cooperation they were being required to demonstrate to all the sides involved—the widespread belief that they formed a fifth column being only heightened by the war.55 He thus began to espouse more explicitly Zionist views, moving away from his initial denunciation of the movement (in 1901) as a typically bourgeois ideology. Ansky was led to the pragmatic conclusion that only Zionism was capable of providing the organized Jewish political representation the circumstances so desperately necessitated. We are fortunate to have a unique source of evidence about how the photographs were used that points to the discrepancy between what they showed and—as a critique of Flusser’s conservative practice—the way An-sky used them to fire the imagination of the audiences to whom they were shown. After meeting Vladimir Jabotinsky—a young Zionist activist who later became a rightwing political leader—An-sky became intrigued with the idea of a Jewish legion and began embarking on a fundraising campaign in support of this cause. To this end he showed slides from Yudovin’s expedition photographs, later describing the powerful effect these had on his audiences.56 As Safran observes, the idea that the traditional Eastern European Jew (which is what the photographs actually showed) could be molded into a new, masculine Jewish soldier (which they did not show) who knew nothing of the

ghetto exerted great appeal.57 This example helps us to broaden the performative perspective offered by Flusser: The photographs fired the imagination of An-sky’s audience to envision something diametrically opposed to what they actually showed. Let us now look at how the dialectic of distance in some of Yudovin’s photographs was transformed by history. I want to suggest that the transformed sensibility belongs to a particular cultural register. “Students in a Talmud Torah, Dubno” shows rows of toddlers, older children, teenagers, and young men, with a bearded adult standing on the left side of the frame (Figure 5.14a). Figure 5.14a matches with the image of Eastern European Jews in our cultural imagination. It could be placed in a series with other photographs from the expedition that do not insinuate later violence; for instance, the photograph that looks like a picnic in the French countryside (Figure 5.14c). But it is also possible to place it on a continuum with other photographs by Yudovin (e.g., Figure 5.14b), as well as photographs of Eastern E ­ uropean Jews reproduced in antisemitic literature and photographs showing the murder of Eastern European Jews during the Holocaust (Figures 5.14d–5.14e). This serialization elicits elements in the photograph that speak to the post-Holocaust imagination. In my eyes, the key to the experience of Figure 5.14a is its frontal angle: we face the subjects’ faces directly. The very young age of the children in the front row, who are not much more than toddlers, along with the children’s muddied shoes and modest or shabby clothing, subtly accentuates their vulnerability. Yudovin placed himself relatively close to the group, with the subjects all facing forward. The older children in the second row appear to be smiling openly and looking at the photographer. The youngest

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figure 5.14a. Solomon Yudovin, “Students in a Talmud Torah, Dubno,” 1912–1914. © Association “Petersburg Judaica,” European University, St. Petersburg.

figure 5.14b. Solomon Yudovin, Group photograph, 1912–1914. © Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People.

children in the first row are shy, but not anxious. Rather than looking at Yudovin, they are gazing at a point outside the frame. Even the youngest children’s faces seem relaxed. The left hand of the girl on the left side of the frame lies gently on the head of the child standing next to her. Right in the middle of the frame, a teenager’s hands rest softly on the shoulders of the child standing in the

row in front of him. Where they are visible, the hands of the small children in the front row are also loosely held. The girl on the left who is touching the child does not look happy. (In fact, on close observation, it is not at all the case that all the children appear happy.) But although crowded together to fit into the frame, the children all seem comfortable and at ease in front of the camera.

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figure 5.14c. Solomon Yudovin, Group photograph, 1912–1914. © Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People.

figure 5.14d. Photograph of East European Jews (Ostjuden), from an antisemitic publication (Hans F. K. Günther, Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes [Munich: Lehmanns, 1930], 183).

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figure 5.14e. Humiliation and killing of Eastern European Jews, 1941 (Rabbi Ber [Dov] Erlich [Sloshny]). © Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem, 2746/13.

From the ease they display it is possible to sense the folkloristic mode of the photographic activity, that they are being photographed by a person who belongs to their class, even if not entirely, as he is not really from there or of them. In my understanding this has to do with the difference between the folkloristic and anthropological modes of exploration. This can be clearly seen if we contrast the expressions in this photograph with the outright anxiety of the children on display in Fischer’s photographs in Africa (see Chapter 3), where Fischer was studying members of a class he conceived as distinct from his own. In this group photograph, history—the knowledge of what took place—comes into play in the viewer’s experience of the photograph. I ask myself: Which of the individuals survived? Based on much later knowledge, we see this photograph in terms of “before” and “after.” The children’s relative sereni-

ty (“before”) elicits in our imagination the tragedy that came later. Photography can fold time. The intimacy in the photograph, which belongs to one context and situation, is transformed by the audience’s knowledge of later events. What we see in the image is something different from what it actually shows, and that gap is a different gap from the one that manifested during An-sky’s lectures. Apart from the caption, which tells us this is a Talmud Torah—traditional Jewish primary school—the photograph also offers various kinds of clues that the children are Jewish: a Jewish-looking child on the lefthand side of the frame in the front, and the bearded teacher at the back. Our perception of it is thus shaped by the fact that it is a collective portrait from a frontal angle that shows happy faces that conform to the image of Eastern European Jews. The documentation of a “vanishing world,” the dialectic of

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distance, and the folkloristic mode are critical here for how their meaning transformed after the Holocaust. We know from the title that the photograph was taken in Dubno, but most of us have no firsthand experience of the place. Yudovin did not record the names of the subjects, and to most of us, too, they are anonymous. The great majority of Eastern European Jews, including those in the regions that An-sky’s expedition visited, were murdered. Far more than their Western Europe brethren, they have remained anonymous, with far fewer names or photographs surviving and large discrepancies between what was officially documented and the actual numbers killed. Because Jews in this region were killed on the spot rather than deported to extermination camps, their names do not even appear on transport lists. The sense that the photograph elicits the Holocaust is thus cultural. It is a very different story when the experience is direct. In his A Memento: Poetry, Photography, Memory—a study of photography in the poetry of the Holocaust survivors Dan Pagis, Tuvia Rubner, and Avot Yeshurun—the Israeli literary scholar Shahar Bram examines how these writers grapple with photographs of their hometowns, showing how they find them to be haunting documents that they at times expend great energy to avoid. Provoking memories, the photographs are traps that bring back the past, forcing the survivors to “face” the dead even if there are no people in the photograph or whether the photograph was taken years before the war or years after. 58 The perception of Yudovin’s photographs, in contrast, belongs to a certain cultural register that formed after the Holocaust. The matching, to return to Flusser, between something from the world and its abstraction in a photograph is the result of an educational historical process.

The Talmud Torah photograph speaks to a cultural memory on a deep, opaque, associative level. This register is not exclusive to photography. The closest correspondence I have found to the register it invokes is Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes. Written and staged four decades after the Holocaust, the play features two characters, Devlin and Rebecca. Both are in their forties, and the time is the present. Thus they could not have been adults during the Holocaust. The geographical location is also very different—Dorset in England. While no direct links exist between the strangely disturbing, absurd dialogues in which the two protagonists engage and the Holocaust, Rebecca’s monologues nevertheless evoke images that speak to the same primitive, associative level as Yudovin’s photograph: Oh yes, there’s something I’ve forgotten to tell you. It was funny. I looked out of the garden window, out of the window in the garden, in the middle of summer, in that house in Dorset, do you remember? Oh no, you weren’t there. I don’t think anyone else was there. No. I was all by myself. I was alone. I was looking out of the window and I saw a whole crowd of people walking through the woods, on their way to the sea, in the direction of the sea. They seemed to be very cold, they were wearing coats, although it was such a beautiful day. A beautiful, warm, Dorset day. They were carrying bags. There were . . . guides . . . ushering them, guiding them along. They walked through the woods and I could see them in the distance walking across the cliff and down to the sea. Then I lost sight of them. I was really quite curious so I went upstairs to the highest window in the house and I looked way over the top of the treetops and I could see down to the beach. The guides . . . were

178  Chapter 5 ushering all these people across the beach. It was such a lovely day. It was so still and the sun was shining. And I saw all these people walk into the sea. The tide covered them slowly. Their bags bobbed about in the waves.59

Although Rebecca’s vision no more relates to the Holocaust than does Yudovin’s photograph, it raises that specter in a very similar fashion because it touches on the same cultural-associative post-Holocaust register. In this strange, impossible scene of a large mass of people walking into the sea, their suitcases bobbing on the surface being the only remnant of and witness to their existence, Pinter evokes (and does not evoke) an image of the Holocaust at a deep, opaque, associative level. Like Yudovin in his photograph, Pinter both reproduces and establishes an image that is already constructed within the cultural imagination. In both cases, however, the association or “matching” remains, strictly speaking, subjective; it will not be identified by everyone or always, it cannot be “proven” positively, and it is empirically “impossible.”

THE SPECIFICITY OF PHOTOGRAPHY Because this case involves other media as well, it enables us to approach the question of the specificity of photography in this context. I conclude this chapter with an exploration of this thread through a comparison, first, with a contemporary photographic album and, then, with other media involved in the context of the case, the question being whether they respond differently to historical rupture. In Survivors in Ukraine, the renowned American Jewish photographer Stephen

Shore returns, seventy years after the Holocaust, to the land where his family originated, photographing in the same locations that An-sky traversed in his expedition a century earlier.60 Shore explores photography’s ability to express loss and destruction by way of documenting the “is” that endured. The survivors, who are treated with affection and dignity, are now all old. In a more fundamental way, however, the album conveys a world without a future horizon. Various layers of time and history are built into the images, even the modern day in the frames often intimating the past. One of the subtle ways Shore evokes death is through memory objects—such as the framed photographs on display in the interiors of the survivors’ homes. Overlapping individual and collective death, the framed photographs and named survivors are at the same time both persons and samples, individuals and types of a class—of which the album is a portrait. Jane Kramer, who authored the accompanying text, captures a similar quality in noting that “their stories are the same; they begin and end with the Germans. It is as if those three years of dislocation and fear, frozen in time and memory, remain the defining moments of their lives.”61 Shore’s photographs touch on rupture from its other side, from the side of “after.” Shore is famous for his formal compositions, and the album is meticulous and reserved, framed by its title and explicit subject. Photography expresses rupture in numerous ways. The four photographs on pages 116–17 of Shore’s book (Figure 5.15) contain no living person, but only traces of life—hanging winter coats and apples picked from the garden lying on a shabby colorful plastic tablecloth. The bottom photograph on page 117 embodies in almost spectral fashion Shore’s exploration of the past in the present and of absence in the “is.”

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figure 5.15. From pages 116–117 of Stephen Shore and Jane Kramer, Survivors in Ukraine (New York: Phaidon Press, 2015). © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York. Original artwork in color.

Its counterpart on page 116, of old blackand-white photographs hanging against fading wallpaper, a clock covering their corners, and a note pinned to the wall, establishes a relationship with the photograph above it. It does so by way of composition, our eyes linking the two and placing the warmly remembered man and woman in the garden and modest house of the photograph above. They are also connected by color, with the green creating a tension between the past indicated by the man and the woman in the photographs and the lush garden. One of the signs that Shore’s album is a portrait of a world without a national future

horizon lies in the fact that it lacks most of the characteristics pertaining to Jewish visibility, of the kind that An-sky and Yudovin’s expedition negotiated. As we saw, Yudovin’s photographs tacitly negotiated questions relating to Jewish visibility and productivity. But for ideological reasons the photographs simplified and narrowed them, reinforcing the image of Eastern European Jews as traditional and observant. The deeper question is whether this process was pre-shaped by the very medium of photography. In the 1920s and 1930s, Yudovin produced various graphic interpretations of his expedition photographs that shed a new

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figure 5.16a. Solomon Yudovin, Photograph of a shoemaker, 1912–1914. © Association “Petersburg Judaica,” European University, St. Petersburg.

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figure 5.16b. Roman Vishniac, Photograph of a shoemaker, Warsaw, 1937. From Roman Vishniac, A Vanished World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983). Gift of Mara Vishniac Kohn, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, University of California, 2018.15.1.

light on his photographic practice. His 1928 woodcut of a shoemaker, for example, intensifies the stereotyping or iconization of Jewish life as dark, gloomy, and somewhat mythic in comparison with an earlier photograph from the expedition (Figures 5.16a and 5.17 and 5.16b with Vishniac’s rendition of the shoemaker). The man depicted in the

woodcut is older, his back much more bent. The modern beard is replaced with a longer one, less groomed and more closely resembling the Hasidic style. The worker’s hat is replaced by a traditional Jewish cap, the sharp white shirt (did he dress specifically for the photograph?) now worn and shabby. The mustachioed, smoking client in modern

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figure 5.17. Solomon Yudovin, Woodcut remaking of the photo of the shoemaker from the series “The Past.” From I. Ioffe and E. Gollerbach’s album: S. B. Yudovin, Graviury Nna Derive (Leningrad, 1928). © Center “Petersburg Judaica,” European University, St. Petersburg.

attire and the bench on which he sits, along with the arm of another person sitting on the shoemaker’s left, have been excised. The shoemaker is now alone in the frame, rendering the image one less of professional and social interaction than of existential solitude. This mood is accentuated by the fact that the light floor of the workshop in the photograph is now dark, and the shoemaker is sitting on a barrel rather than a stool. The light coming in through the window in the woodcut has an artificial quality; the addition of the window, the hanging lantern, the picture on the wall, and the more crowded room all contribute to the sense of a mythical, unreal space. Yudovin used the shift

in medium to move away from the social documentary character of the photograph to a more stereotypical and melancholic, idealized depiction of a “Jew.”62 What is the reason for this shift? Was this a result of the violence and the changes since the photographs were taken? Were they in some way the response to a (Soviet) demand to emphasize the difference between “then” and “now,” “tradition” and “progress,” as opposed to An-sky’s period, which strove for some kind of wholeness? Let me end with a comparison to An-sky’s most lasting and famous legacy: One of the most analyzed and interpreted plays of the twentieth-century, The Dybbuk, brings

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to the fore complex questions of language and translation; social, national, and religious identity; and other major issues in the history of theater. My primary interest here, however, lies in the structural similarity that can be ascertained between the photographs and the play. An-sky not only based the play, completed in 1918, on his store of folklorist material, but also regarded it, in a sense, as an extension of the expedition.63 The characters are observant Jews, living in a traditional Jewish environment saturated with spirits and kabbalistic beliefs. The plot revolves around a form of mystical possession brought about by a broken oath. The play is populated by pious Jews, rich Jews, and batlanim (idle peddlers); Jewish productivity does not play the same role here as it does in the photographs. Although it shares a folkloristic mode with the photographs, the play is less apologetic. The Russian, Yiddish, German, Hebrew, and English versions of the play diverge in various ways, but in all of them the Jewish world remains premodern, traditional, and mystical, verging on the primitive throughout. Were it taken to represent or document Jewish reality in the Pale of Settlement, it would give only a very partial, perhaps even distorted, picture of Jewish life around 1918, yet because it is a play, we do not expect reality from it. But the fact that we do not is the point. When he first heard the play read in Yiddish in Kiev, the Russian Jewish Hebrew poet Haim Nachman Bialik consigned it to the “cultural trash” heap, referring to An-sky as a garbage collector who “collects scraps of folklore and pieces them together.” In kabbalistic terms, he compared these to nail clippings that must be collected and burned to ensure redemption and life in the world to come.64 Just as important as Bialik’s literary evaluation of the play, however, was his response to An-sky’s approach to creat-

ing a modern, secular, Jewish national culture. In contrast to Bialik, An-sky believed the folk religious register to lie at the heart of such an endeavor. The inversion, in the play, of the representation of Jewish visibility embodied in the photographic project becomes clearer when one turns from the play as a text (including its element of documentation) to the play as a performance. Although he was no longer alive when the play was first produced, An-sky had given his blessing to its staging. The history of its numerous subsequent productions, whether in Yiddish, Hebrew, or German, is entirely modern.65 The Habima Theater staging in Hebrew became the single most important theatrical production in the history of twentieth-century Hebrew culture. Habima sought the assistance of the renowned non-Jewish Russian director and theoretician Konstantin Stanislavski, the founder of modern theatrical realism, for this production. It was directed by Stanislavski’s protégé, the legendary non-Jewish Armenian director Yevgeny Vakhtangov, and the production became a landmark in twentieth-century theater history precisely because this was the specific moment in which Vakhtangov decided to break away from realism. Giving the play an expressionistic and revolutionary interpretation, he made the peddlers into grotesque figures who set off the bride’s individuality, their dance around her at the end of the play taking on an ecstatic, spiritual dimension. The premiere took place shortly after An-sky’s death; the actors and audience acknowledged the great artistic achievement while mourning his loss.66 These circumstances further highlight the incongruity between the traditional characters in the play and the play’s modern, secular cultural performance. The play (as text) and the production (as performance) possess a complex relation-

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ship. While the photographs and play were intended as forms of documentation and platforms for cultural renewal, both sharing the same folkloristic impulse, the way in which the photographs and the play have endured through history differs. The delicate thread I have explored in this chapter reveals a complex structure of temporality that is closely related to the future-oriented nature of An-sky’s expedition’s work. The orientation to the future of Kahn/Brunhes’s and An-sky/Yudovin’s photographs has withstood history differently. The former are still future-oriented even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, while the orientation of the latter has been reversed. When we look at Yudovin’s photographs, we are now looking at twentieth-century Jewish history from its other end. The post-Holocaust cultural register that filters the perception of the photographs entails several ironies. Historically, the Holocaust obscures the fact that the regions through which An-sky’s expedition traveled were those that suffered the most from the unprecedented level of violence and the sys-

tematic killing spree that broke out in 1918– 19—now called the “small Holocaust”—in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. Around two hundred thousand Jews are estimated to have lost their lives during these atrocities. While forming part of a scientific documentation project, An-sky’s selection of subjects was ideologically filtered. The meaning of the dialectic of distance found in some of Yudovin’s photographs changed after the destruction of this world. Now it spoke to a deep, opaque, associative cultural register of memory about that world. In so doing, it deepened the gulf between “us” and “them,” “present” and “past,” “here” and “there,” because they stand on the opposite shores of historical rupture. By showing this, however, I hope not only to have shown photography’s disposition to capture, express, communicate, and elicit the experience of rupture, and not only to have substantiated Flusser’s claim that photography changed the process by which humans identified the four-dimensional world as two-dimensional abstractions, but to have demonstrated the fundamental historicity of the process as well.

CONCLUSION Photography and Democracy

A

t the outset of Photography and Jewish History, I set two objectives for the book: a theoretical one, to adapt Vilém Flusser’s contention in Towards A Philosophy of Photography—that photography was part of reality and that it changed the world—to the study of history; and a concrete one, to explore five cases drawn from twentieth-century Jewish history using this theoretical perspective. To do this, I developed a methodological framework for applying Flusser’s philosophical arguments to history, and in analyzing the cases I emphasized the question of what photography was doing in each case. In bringing this new emphasis to bear on the analysis of the cases, a reciprocal process of mutual entwinement, entanglement, influence, and change between photography and the things, subjects, and contexts in each particular case was revealed. If “to be this radical, the proposed model must be this broad,” as Flusser claimed in Into the Universe of Technical Images, then this current volume is radical.1 The aim of the two goals, taken jointly, is to introduce new questions into the discussion of photography and Jewish history and to reorient the discussion from a narrow focus on photographs of Jews or Jewish photographers to new vistas on photography’s broad and complex roles in twentieth-century

Jewish history. In the broadest sense what frames this concluding chapter is the question of freedom with regard to photography. If this conclusion had been written twenty or thirty years ago, its overall tone would probably be more expressly Foucauldian, emphasizing the repressive effect of the monitoring, controlling, and policing found in the case histories studied in the preceding chapters. But while that perspective is based on the sociologist’s/historian’s preestablished normative viewpoint, the “pragmatic sociology” approach emphasizes the critiques that actors can formulate from below, relying on their respective moral senses immanent to the context of the case. I have therefore treated photography here as offering opportunities to social actors to creatively question and criticize values, beliefs, ideas, or institutions within the respective contexts of the case in point. While the scholar can then point to and reflect on these, they largely differ from those invoked by the sociologies of domination, which typically come “from outside.” This line of reasoning has brought to light diverse ways in which photography reveals human action, creativity, and the capacity of humans to act in ways that affect and shape their situations, environments, values and ideas, institutions, and social and political realities

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(which should not be confused with justifying them, or viewing them as good, as is plainly evident from the chapter on photography and inequality). From this vantage point, the history of photography from 1900 to 1980 reveals a growing tendency toward democratization, individualization, and privatization (in the sense of the passing of responsibility from the state to individuals). In other words, from the very same case histories one could either draw out the monitoring, policing, and controlling aspects or elaborate on how audiences educated themselves in increasingly complex ways to cope with the increasingly sophisticated demands photography placed on their lives, to a degree that would have been unimaginable even a century ago. For Foucault, Flusser, and Boltanski, the question of freedom pertains to (individual) agency within repressive (supra-individual) regimes or structures. While Foucault and many of his followers emphasize the former, however, within the same dialectic Flusser and Boltanski stress the latter. Both Flusser, using the terminology of “apparatus” and “functionary,” and Boltanski, with his different terminology, show us how the constraints imposed by such apparatuses or social structures create or establish forms of freedom within these constraints, thus reemphasizing human creativity and agency. In this sense, then, rather than emphasize the ways in which photography limits human action, Flusser enables us to see that photography simultaneously frees humans to think and act in new ways. Photography introduced a new “style of reasoning,” a new form of matching two-dimensional images with the four-dimensional world; and it brought about a sea change in the fabric of life, subtly reshaping sensual, cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and political forms of thought and action; but, as we have

repeatedly seen, photography, and therefore also the changes it brought with it, was very close to and entwined with the subjects and objects of its discussion and representation, thereby making these constitutive features harder to notice. Only when we shift our attention to the educational aspects of the history does the larger question about the relationship between photography and ideology become visible: Is there something intrinsically democratic about photography? This conclusion makes a beginning attempt at addressing this question, and although my answer will tend to be positive, my line of argument does not proceed from any progressive utopian assumptions. This book has studied five cases, drawn from dramatically different contexts and spanning the years from roughly 1900 to 1980, in which photography and Jewish history intersected. The exact nature of the relationship between the Jewish and the photographic contexts was in each case indeterminable. All cases involved, directly or indirectly and in complex and multilayered ways, the question of the relationship between photography and the image of Jews, Judaism, or Jewishness. In all cases the investigation focused on an intermediate register between the theory of photography, on the one hand, and a positivistic historical account, on the other. The cases were studied from within their respective contexts, paying special attention to the various ways Jewish history and photography were entwined, and in the process, the questions arising from within the cases combined with the shared register of investigation to reveal a dense network of competing and partially overlapping interconnections with regard to photography and vision. At the same time my accounts both of the separate cases and of all of them taken together were intended

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to advance a larger agenda about the broad, subtle, and constitutive role of photography in history. Every history possesses its own specific particularities as well as generalizable aspects. Many of the threads that run through the cases, such as the relationship between technology and ideology, are most certainly generalizable beyond their immediate historical contexts. We have seen that technology and ideology are indissolubly interwoven, in a progression from relatively simple to increasingly sophisticated relationships between the two. One way this was demonstrated was through the class of “photographic objects,” the kinds of subtle objects that, more than other kind of visual object, rely for our perception of them on photography’s ability to freeze, objectify, and stabilize the four-dimensional “out there” in a two-dimensional image. The emphasis on human agency and the creativity of action pays off here because it brings home the shared moving ground of history, comprised of the producers of photographs placing increasingly sophisticated demands on their end users and the end users in turn accommodating themselves to the changing world. The issue of gender is a good place to distinguish between the argument that photography changes things and the idea that change equals improvement or progress. In a basic sense photography, as an instrument of power (like language), reflects and expresses ideologies, class and social structures, and power relations. Unsurprisingly, therefore, photography has been shown to necessarily replicate rather than challenge the gender ideologies in the respective cases. On a more specific historical register, I have explored how issues of gender are interwoven into the peculiar contexts of each case: In what ways was gender explicitly or implicitly present as a consideration for the

main actors involved? And how was gender related to photography? Thus we found, for instance, that in a politically progressive framework such as Kahn’s network of projects (Chapter 1), which were geared toward bringing about social and political change, gender was present as a not-fully articulated consideration, but not in the context of the photographic archive. In the context of An-sky’s expedition (Chapter 5), gender was not present as an explicit consideration. In the context of racial inequality (Chapter 3), gender was absent from some contexts (the study of racial mixing in Africa) but explicitly present in others (the popularization of Nazi aesthetics for the German public). In this particular context, then, gender helped to distinguish two distinct strains of photography. The only case in which gender was present as an explicit category of critique was the chronologically latest one, Robert Frank’s The Americans (Chapter 4). The creation of the album belongs to the early part of the second half of the twentieth century, and its equally important history of reception leads into the 1970s and beyond. The bigger picture of this trajectory is a picture of the grounds of history changing, but this change begins only in the second half of the twentieth century. While photography may have contributed to this change, this change is certainly not reducible to photography. If we turn to photography’s part in this bigger picture— Flusser’s insistence on both the performative side of photography (that it does things in reality) and its principal visual characteristic (compare photography with genetic studies pertaining to gender differences), as well as the insistence (leaning on Boltanski’s sociological perspective) not to forget how close photography is to reality—we can say that photography played a complex, dubious, and ambiguous role in the process, under-

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mining that which it reestablished and solidifying that which it untied. In this conclusion I am particularly interested in connecting the discussion of change with the question of photography and democracy, which I will do both indirectly and directly. The conclusion consists of two closely interrelated parts: I first address photography and categorization; then I turn to a sustained discussion of Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography based on the cases studied in the preceding chapters. If photography is critical for the history of democracy in the twentieth century, the relationship between photography and democracy for Jewish history is one of the most important features of this book’s analysis. Even allowing for various definitions of democracy and the possible important differences among them, Jewish history in the twentieth century was shaped and deeply affected by the history of democracy, not as a neutral party but as an interested and invested one. Without idealizing the history of democracy, or Jewish history, or the relations between democracy and Jewish history, we can see that it is no accident that all four cases with Jewish protagonists in this book involve democratization or democracy. An-sky (Chapter 5), the initiator and founder of the expedition to document Jewish life, turned to this scientific and artistic project following a long-term commitment to the democratization of political life in czarist Russia and the political representation first of the peasants and then of the Jews. Kahn’s photographic archive (Chapter 1) was only one component of an even broader and more sustained attempt to use his wealth to advance utopian democratic ends with the broadest global scope possible. Lerski’s photographic projects (Chapter 2), in both Germany and Jewish Palestine, were committed to advancing democratic

political values. And Frank’s exploration of America in The Americans (Chapter 4) was inseparable from the exploration of the mysterious strangeness of its unique democratic society. Democratization and democracy are also present in Vilém Flusser’s theorization of photography, to which I will turn later in this conclusion. The only case that was directly opposed to democracy, that of Fischer (Chapter 3), who attempted to advance racial inequality, is part of the history of Nazism, antisemitism, and racism. In other words, Jewish history is unevenly distributed along the democratic versus antidemocratic axis of the history of photography. And while photography played a part in struggles over vision, this book has shown that its history is anything but harmonious. I will return to the explicit connection between photography and democracy in the final part of this conclusion. Yet if liberal democracy is not only a procedure of free elections but a dense, dynamic, and complex network of ideas, values, representations, institutions, and forms of communication, it will also be fruitful to discuss its relationship with photography indirectly, through the intermediate question of the effect of photography on categorization. Major twentieth-century Jewish historical categories, such as assimilation (Chapter 1), nationalism or Zionism (Chapter 2), the Holocaust (Chapters 3, 5), racism and antisemitism (Chapters 3, 5), and postassimilation (Chapter 4), were entwined in the cases we have looked at here. But I wanted to follow the logic of each case, and therefore refused to reduce them to or treat them as tokens of such categories, as this would have obfuscated the fundamentally open-ended nature of photography’s entwinement with them in each case in point (as explained in the Introduction, using Hacking’s notion of style), setting social processes in motion and

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subtly affecting things, subjects, contexts, and their perception and understanding. This strategy enabled an elusive feature of photography to surface: Photography documents things “out there” in the world, while simultaneously altering reality, expressing and affecting the way they are understood and taken on. We can now take a step back and, by collecting some of the threads that run through the cases collected here, make some generalizations concerning categories and concepts.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND CATEGORIZATION If, as I have argued throughout this book, photography does not document reality from some separate perch but is in fact part of the very reality it documents, and if categorization, the activity by which we classify and identify things in reality, is indeed a basic and necessary human activity, then where the two intersect the question arises: How has photography affected how things are identified, classified, and understood? Approaching this question based on the cases studied in this book quickly leads to a differentiation between two kinds of categories: political categories, such as “race,” gender, antisemitism, nationalism, and colonialism; and psychological categories, such as identification, seeing, and imagining. Psychologists and historians have, separately, demonstrated that categories are not innate, inborn, permanent, or ahistorically stable but, rather, acquired through socialization and education, sometimes at a very early age. In addition, while these two kinds of categories do overlap and interact, their time spans are different. The psychological categories contain ahistorical layers, and in comparison with the political ones, they can

persist over a much longer time span (as can be seen, for instance, in our instinctual response to threatening objects or events). In political categories, in contrast, it is sometimes possible to observe dramatic changes over even very short time spans (e.g., the reversal of the value attached to colonialism—at least from the point of view of the colonizers—between 1900 and 1980). These respective kinds of categories stand in complex and dynamic relation to each other, and the effects that photography has on them are not the same. After I discuss political categories briefly, I will turn to psychological categories, looking at them from two distinct perspectives. First I will pull out for discussion one thread of photography’s effect on psychological categories, which is generalizable from the cases, and then, moving into the second part of the conclusion, I will address Flusser’s contention that photography transformed a major psychological category—namely, the imagination. About the crucial political category of the “Jewish type,” the first and arguably most important point to note is that photography centers it as visual and redefines it almost exclusively as a photographic question. In the last chapter of this book, on Yudovin’s photographs in S. An-sky’s scientific expedition to the Ukraine, we observed a folkloristic approach that sought to document a traditional Jewish world in decline in areas distant from the Russian metropolitan centers: In this approach some Jews were represented as very Jewish in their appearance while others were far less identifiably Jewish from the photographs, an effect that was augmented by the absence of material or symbolic cues in the frame. In Chapter 1, focusing on a photographic project with global aspirations and outreach, established by the French Jewish banker Albert Kahn, we saw how photography was intended to document

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human variety throughout the world while at the same time, and at a deeper ideological level, showing fundamental human similarity. In this project Jews were marginal as a direct subject of study, and their treatment was consistent with the project’s overall intentions. Jews were thus shown as members of their respective geographical and cultural environments. Chapter 2, which focused on Lerski’s photographic exploration of Palestine in the 1930s, revealed the social boundaries of photography. Lerski intended to employ his photography to advance a humanist agenda similar to Kahn’s and to undermine racist and antisemitic outlooks. But unlike Kahn’s photographers, Lerski created images that troubled his publisher (who declined to publish them) and were understood by the audience in Palestine as deepening and solidifying the visual expression of the Jewish type rather than deconstructing it. Chapter 3, focusing on photography throughout the career of the German geneticist Eugen Fischer, moved to the other ideological and political end of the spectrum: Here we saw how photography was used to corroborate, stabilize, and deepen a preexisting image of the Jew in the social imagination, coordinating Fischer’s genetic outlook with the world of visual expression. Chapter 4 focused on Robert Frank’s The Americans. Although philosophically closer to post–World War II antihumanism than it was to humanism, Frank’s project bore some similarities to Kahn’s, interweaving photography with art rather than science and recasting and giving a specifically photographic interpretation to anti-essentialist attitudes. The general language of social and artistic criticism developed in Frank’s album, and even more crucially, its exploration of photography’s ability and propensity to establish and stabilize subtle visual objects that depend

on the photographer’s will, were more important for the trajectory of photography with regard to the Jewish type than was the one photograph in the album that featured Jews identifiable as such. At a deeper level than Kahn’s and Lerski’s projects, Frank’s album, using ellipsis and the discrepancy between the visual surface and the deeper layers of the album, smartly undermined photography as an instrument of classification. Frank, belonging to the second half of the twentieth century and the American context, moved beyond the assimilationist paradigm of the four chronologically earlier cases of the book. Looked at together, thus, these cases make it clear that photography contributed to the destabilization, fragmentation, diversification, shallowing, and devaluing of the “Jewish type,” although it did not bring about its disappearance. The incongruity between a possible essence and its visible expression grew, and in practice photography undercut and weakened essentialist notions of a Jewish type or Jewishness. But photography did not operate ex nihilo; it intersected with other kinds of images, representations, and social imaginaries and values that preceded, molded, modified, undid, and redid it in a complex and evolving economy of vision. The category of “Jew” preceded photography; it fed into the production of photographs; and photography, in turn, altered its image in an ongoing, circular historical dynamic. In this process the category changed but was not fully transformed. Photography multiplied individual variations, which in one sense augmented difference and in another, more fundamental way, undercut the imaginary borderlines between groups or classes (e.g., races and sexes). In fact, in a way that is very close to Kahn’s use of photography (Chapter 1) but on a much broader social scale, the democratizing ef-

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fect of photography was the breeding of infinite small differences beneath which, at a deeper level, the perception of human similarity was augmented. In this process, in which the technological dispositions of photography and the ideological tendencies of the twentieth century merged, the nineteenth-century social and mental image of classes as entities monolithically different and ontologically discrete from one another was undermined. But social reality is not exclusively photographic, and the image of the Jew as an old, white, bearded man with an identifiably Jewish nose and eyes is most likely still its prototypical expression in the Western imagination. The picture, however, then becomes even more complex. We saw that, in the case of Fischer, when photography was purposely employed to corroborate and deepen the category of Jew, it could do so successfully. We also saw, in the case of Lerski, that certain strategies for directly undermining the category of Jew yielded unintended results, ambiguous or even contradictory to their purpose. The question, then, is whether photography is merely a neutral medium or whether the process was facilitated or even determined by the tendencies of photography as a technology, including certain asymmetries built into its possible social understanding. Integrating photography into the longer history of vision, we can learn from Aby Warburg’s cautious or even pessimistic view of human history. Asking Warburg’s famous question—“Where is the image going?”—future work will have to continue the study of photography in relation to other forms of image production and assess the relations between deeper and more superficial and between dynamic and constant features of vision.2 One of the things that we have seen throughout this study is that photography

both destabilizes and restabilizes categories. As we shift our attention from political categories to psychological ones, additional complications arise pertaining to controversies over psychological notions of categorization. According to the classical Aristotelian notion, an object belongs to a category or class if it possesses all the characteristics necessary for belonging to that class. (It will be categorized as a bird if it has wings, feathers, a beak, can fly, etc.). But according to Eleanor Rosch’s groundbreaking psychological studies on the categorization of natural objects in the 1970s, people tend to categorize objects by using prototypes of the class (a sparrow as a prototype of the class of birds, for example). Rosch did not explore political categories that touched on sex, gender, or race, but if we change the example from “sparrow” to “Jew,” we see how easily her findings about prototypes could be carried over to political categories as well. If we address the effect of photography on psychological categorization, whether Aristotelian or prototypical, our findings parallel those reached with regard to political categories: Apart from the new but subtle class of photographic objects, categories have been altered, rather than invented from scratch or fundamentally transformed, by photography. In terms of style, using Hacking’s terminology, photography altered the perception of objects in a world in which things and their photographs exist simultaneously and dynamically affect each other. I will soon suggest that the fundamental way photography altered objects is through the imagination, but let me first touch on practical and intermediate registers. Think of Rosch’s class of birds, for example: Photography inadvertently brought birds much closer to our perception than ever before—through objectification and stabilization, through enlargement and detail, and through the

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printing of photographs—broadening that perception, bringing the inherent variety of sparrows closer to us, and increasing our ability to differentiate between sparrows and similar but not identical birds. (Although following the methodological triad developed in the Introduction, we acknowledge that the photographing of sparrows could take any number of additional directions.) Photography did not detract from the reality of the photographed things or events in the world but contributed to our acquaintance with them and, in Hacking’s terms, became an essential feature of their classification and categorization. Rosch’s notion of categorization is based on the view that the world consists of an infinite number of distinct stimuli, but that the cutting up of nonidentical stimuli into classifications is not arbitrary. The world contains intrinsically separate things, and many categories are internally structured into prototypes using clearest cases and best examples. In certain respects, the sociology of critique takes a similar approach. By observing photography in history, we have seen that it was used to document, explore, corroborate, or undermine already existing categories of things or entities in the world, remaining fairly close to them. But Rosch’s work focused on natural classes. And, as we saw especially in Chapter 4, photography has also been used to undermine the ostensible boundaries between kinds of classes, suggesting varying degrees of deliberate fiction or fictitiousness. Emphasizing the ways in which photographs were intended or expected to be perceived by audiences, we saw, meant that the intention of the photographers and the photographs in their respective contexts was seldom misunderstood on a large scale. An art photograph was not understood as documenting a political event (Chapter 2); an antisemitic

photograph in a scientific publication was not understood as an artistic exploration (Chapter 3); a scientific photograph in a philanthropic project was not understood as an instrument of identification (Chapter 1). Audiences usually understood the intended use of photographs, including with regard to their degrees and kinds of reality and fiction, irrespective of whether they agreed with that intention aesthetically, ethically, or politically. But how does the audience know this? It knows it intuitively, as a result of extended education and socialization; it knows this because the generation and use of photographs very rarely comes without a framing social context. This should not surprise us, given that four-year-old children, as I can attest from direct observation, can already easily make sense of and differentiate between Goofy, an anthropomorphized dog that can speak, and Pluto, a dog that can only bark, in Walt Disney cartoons; or, to take another example from Richard Scarry’s classic children’s books: between Sam and Dudley, the cat and pig private detectives, on the one hand, and on the other, for instance, a baby rabbit that is not a rabbit at all but only a doll being used by a wolf supermarket robber, disguised as a mother rabbit. It would therefore be surprising if viewers’ perception of photographs were less sophisticated. Audiences know that a photograph showing a newsstand merging into a tower (Chapter 4) is not expected to be looked at in the same way as a photograph of a massacre or a photograph showing a group of people who, based on historical knowledge, we assume were later killed (Chapter 5). It is the subtle forms of manipulation, the ideological gray areas rather than the direct or crude ones, that this study has focused on, and here significant questions arise about the educational capacity of photography. We have encountered a variety of modes

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of education, ranging from propagandistic ones in Fischer’s Nazi context, through systematic ones in Kahn and “failed” ones in Lerski, to subtle ones in Frank. At least in part, we have to separate these modes from the agendas to which they were attached. Allan Sekula wrote about “instrumental images,” and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, expressed the view that the most effective form of propaganda was one that educated “without revealing the purpose of the education,” because the best propaganda worked invisibly.3 Of course, these are already specific versions of education. In the cases we examined, we saw that Frank’s photographs had a deeper and longer-lasting educational effect than Kahn’s because of their indirect, exploratory mode of expression. The second part of the conclusion, which follows, moves from how photography affected the categorization and classification of what is featured in photographs to how photography affected the psychological faculty of the imagination, which also brings us finally to Vilém Flusser, whose philosophy of photography framed this historical exploration.

FLUSSER AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE IMAGINATION Through five diverse and multilayered historical cases, Photography and Jewish History has sought to adapt Flusser’s philosophical contentions about photography to the study of photography in history. Flusser asked an essentially performative question: What has photography done to history? Philosophically, as I noted in the Introduction, Flusser suggested that the revolutionary character of photography is related to the new form of image that it established.

Photography matched something “out there” in the four-dimensional world to an abstract image on a two-dimensional surface in a way that can be comprehended by a viewer. From a photograph, a viewer can comprehend (the image of) a sparrow, an ambiguous smile, or a “vanishing world.” And if, as Flusser puts it, photography established a new form of imagination, then to historicize photography is to historicize this new form of matching that it established. In the Introduction I discussed four complications in the attempt to adapt Flusser’s philosophy to history. The first is the tension between his performative framework and his discussion, which rested on a traditional, conservative, or restricted sense of what photographs showed. (Yet I suggested that, in expanding his performative perspective, one should not lose sight of its visual basis.) The second is the scientific language of Flusser, which speaks of photography in terms of “codes” and “messages” and the historian who cannot avoid the myriad of expressions of subjectivity at virtually every level, moment, and turn in actuality. With notions drawn from French sociology, the chapters sought to demonstrate the gradual social and historical process of the objectification and solidification of subjectivity. This is a process in which photography plays a constitutive but never completely independent role and which I sought to demonstrate in the chapters through the class of “photographic objects”—objects that depend on the evolving “matching” process about which I spoke earlier. The third consists of the two competing strains in Flusser’s book with regard to the relationship between the photographic image and the world, the “out there,” or the real. One strain of the book suggested that this relationship is a crucial facet of photography. Another suggested that the

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photographer is, ultimately, interested in producing images, and that only the photograph is real. Without being reductive, positivistic, or simplistic about the “out there,” we see that, for the analysis of the kinds of cases studied in this volume, the four-dimensional “out there” is absolutely crucial. Yet at the same time, I acknowledge the latter strain as well, which is easier to do in the cases of Lerski and Frank. Fourth, I took issue with Flusser’s contention that people were still illiterate with regard to photography—a point on which I will elaborate further in this concluding chapter. Of the concepts and terms that enabled Flusser to formulate the revolutionary impact of the invention of photography on history, two are particularly important here: “imagination” and “apparatus.” Photography is an apparatus that transforms phenomena into codified information. Flusser’s idiosyncratic definition of imagination is tightly tied to the matching process I have spoken about, that is, to its capacity to abstract the four-dimensional “out there” and project it onto a two-dimensional surface in a way that is decipherable and meaningful to an observer. Flusser calls the ability to project such abstractions back into space and time “imagination.”4 The transformation of imagination is tightly related to the ontological status of photography. Technical images, produced by a camera or apparatus,5 according to Flusser, are handled naïvely by most viewers, as if the images were windows onto the world.6 If Flusser criticized the conception of technical images as a form of illusion, the pragmatic sociological perspective employed in this current volume led me to suggest a more nuanced and complex analysis of diverse kinds of trust in photography, in diverse social situations and with regard to the changing uses to which it is put. Photography established a

new kind of evidence about the four-dimensional “out there”; unlike a drawing, it provides a particular kind of certainty about the documentary dimension of what it shows, even as viewers are aware of forms of staging and manipulation. But the certainty comes with doubt as to whether this image is only in the imagination of the viewer. The revolution brought about by photography is of the same order as the invention of writing, according to Flusser. With writing, humans abstracted a piece of the world and expressed it in language; photography does this by projecting it onto a surface. Writing created a linear, diachronic understanding of time; the world began to be experienced in causal and historical terms. The technical image is in this sense post-historical, bounded by a magical, cyclical experience of time. Since its invention and vast dissemination, therefore, photography has transformed the imagination. Flusser determines that photography has overtaken writing and that, as a result, writing is now subordinated to images.7 Now, Flusser contends, we see how a war looks, and the text only tells us how to look at the images. This inversion is a structural change in the imagination.8 Flusser then goes one step further and determines that the relationship between photography and reality has been reversed. At first, photography documented things and events in the world. Now, it causes them to happen.9 Flusser writes: “The goal of the political demonstration is not to change the world but to be photographed. The goal of the battle that has been fought this week is to be filmed.”10 These are clear elements of a performative outlook in Flusser’s view: that humans are motivated by photography—for instance, by the contents of a photograph or by thinking about the past in the terms established by photography. Adapting his philosophical ideas to historical cases has

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allowed me to demonstrate them, point out some of their limitations, and enable a nuanced account to emerge. Forms of imagination were not superseded nor entirely transformed, but rather meshed and mixed. Photography elicits relations, events, and more photographs. It participates in events, but it also does so in many ways that Flusser did not consider. He focused almost exclusively on photography’s visual dimension, in a more or less straightforward way, but human intentionality is more complex: It includes not wanting to see or to show as a condition for something to take place—for instance in the way photography’s involvement was shaped, through the avoidance of direct documentation, in the genocidal context studied in Chapter 4.11 These performative facets of photography become visible with the adaptation of Flusser to history. Of the four complications addressed in the Introduction, I confess that now, at the end of my work on this book, I have second thoughts about my criticism of Flusser’s treatment of literacy. Did he mean something more original, subtle, and elusive than the notion I have criticized here? It is possible that he meant that photography established a new kind of visual language, one immanent to it as a medium and as such not equivalent to natural languages, and about which we are all still relatively illiterate because the language itself is young. But if the four complications ensuing from adapting Flusser’s philosophy to the study of history are productive for pushing forward and opening new vistas in the research on photography in history, the most pertinent one pertains to subjectivity (one of the four complications discussed in the Introduction). I noted that, although we possess as yet no theory for the interpretation of subjectivity with regard to photography, we can nonetheless posit that it is shaped by

the medium itself. Delving into the cases, subjects, contexts, photographers, and photographs, we find that subjectivity plays incredibly evasive and difficult, yet also, to the historian, inescapable roles. Analyzing cases in history highlights the difference between abstract and concrete historical accounts and the tensions and possible differences between them with regard to virtually every aspect of photography. Flusser thought in big strokes. Photography marked for him the advent of a new human era, a post-historical one: With the technical image, the human being was transformed. Did Flusser believe that this process led to a post-human phase? Or was the process checked by some internal structural boundaries? It is possible to compare Flusser’s forward-leaning thought with Aby Warburg’s philosophical, antiscientific, and somewhat backward-leaning study of the image. Warburg underscored its essentially subjective, fleeting, inherently irreducible, phantomlike, monstrous, and ambivalent character; whether the image was traditional or technical, in Flusser’s terminology, was beside the point.12 While Flusser’s toying with technological determinism brought him very close to rejecting the idea of philosophical humanism, Aby Warburg, on the other hand, deeply ambivalent as he was about human nature, was nonetheless profoundly committed to philosophical humanism. Torn between technological determinism and humanism, Flusser formulated the question of freedom within determinism.13 Indeed, his biography and his existentialist philosophical credo led him to determine that the purpose of communication itself, at the deepest level, was to “make us forget the meaningless context in which we are completely alone and incommunicado, that is, the world in which we are condemned to

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solitary confinement and death.”14 This current study’s focus on an intermediate register, bridging philosophy and history, leads to a different (though related) question about the relationship between photography and democracy: Does photography have a technological disposition to democratization, or is it instead merely coincidentally correlated with the twentieth century’s process of democratization, which happened to occur at the same time as the rapid democratization of the use of photography? The development of photography beyond the time frame of this study makes the question more urgent and complex. This is because there appears to be a tension, if not an outright contradiction, between, on the one hand, the explosion of digital photography and a world that is more democratic than at any previous point in recorded history, and on the other hand, a growing sense that democracy is being eroded and democratic institutions are on the brink of turning into something else, a process in which photography also seems to be playing a role. In this context it is less and less possible to posit democracy as a constant, possessing a relatively stable meaning, as we ask questions about photography. We are nearing the end of this book, and at this late stage I want to limit this discussion to three short points that are intended to invite and open up future conversation on the subject. Flusser’s observations are helpful, but if we break the question into three parts—relating first to democracy and communication, second to institutions and values, and third to education—the limits of his model become apparent. The history of democracy in the twentieth century is inseparable from the democratization of communication, a process in which photography unquestionably played a critical part. Based on observation of visual media, Flusser distinguished among several

kinds of forms or architectural structures of communication. In the amphitheatrical structure, one sender transmits the same message to many addressees (via TV or newspaper, for example). While I employed Flusser’s classification for the analysis of the cases, at this point I would like to address this question with regard to democracy. Writing a decade before the invention of the internet, Flusser was prophetic and visionary in conceiving that the television could be changed into a form of network: “This would really change humanity into a global village, not only with idle talk in the cosmic marketplace, but with real participation of great numbers in the elaboration of information. This would be true democracy.”15 Flusser was correct with regard to the powerful democratic effects of such a dialogical form of communication. Thinking about it in terms of the forms of communication, he only considered its dialogical form, but democracy cannot be distilled into nor defined entirely in terms of communication form. Focusing on photography as a medium and on forms of communication, Flusser completely left out of his account the ideas, values, and institutions with which photography was historically entwined. Our attention here to such entwinements has allowed us to see that photography advanced democratization not only because of its technological disposition to do so but also because it was enmeshed with democratic ideas, values, and institutions. Democracy itself is a set of changing values, ideas, and institutions, and at this point in our discussion, the most important of these with regard to the history of photography is institutions. As we saw earlier, the persons who employed photography did so with interests they wanted to advance and ideas and values they were committed to or invested in; these, in turn, found expression in the choices of subjects

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and projects and how they were handled; and in this process, ideas and values were institutionalized. Thus photography institutionalized ideas, values, and representations.16 At one end of the spectrum of institutions there are flesh-and-blood individuals. At the other end, institutions like Kahn’s archive “hang together,” in Boltanski’s words, producing social effects that cannot be reduced to the individual human beings who comprise them at a given moment in time. Institutionalization can be looked at from both ends: No institution can speak or act without an individual human being at the end of its speech act or enunciation in one way or another. And all individuals living in society express different degrees of institutionalization in their various daily activities. In all three layers that we have looked at in this book (photography, photographers, and photographs), we have seen examples of both ends of the institutionalization of democratic ideas and values. In Chapter 1, we saw how Kahn established an institution around photography and employed photographers to produce photographs to advance democratic goals and values. In Chapter 3, Fischer’s various publications employing photographs (though not in the service of democracy) also expressed degrees of institutionalization, including the reputation of the university at which he was a professor or the academic press that published his books and articles. Another example is in Chapter 4, where we saw that the funding and even more so the artistic recognition provided by the award from the Guggenheim Foundation led to Frank’s tour of America and the photographic album he produced. These are only a few examples of something that is so prevalent that it tends to go unnoticed. Even in these few examples, we can notice several modes of performative reciprocity

between institutionalization and photography. Photography can be institutionalized, setting into motion a photographic project (Kahn); institutionalized recognition can endow the use of photographs with scientific prestige (Fischer); or institutionalized recognition can set a photographer on an artistic exploration (Frank). In the process, lives are redirected, projects are conceived and come into being, and the social perception of photographs is shaped. In this sense, therefore, the history of photography, democracy, and democratization visited in this book is a history of institutions and institutionalizations. Finally, the question of photography and democracy is tightly related to the human capacity for learning. Humans are constantly engaged in learning (which is closely connected to the notion of exploration, which I have worked with in this study), and when this learning is directed, we call it education. More specifically, when the learning is directed by someone else, we call it education, and when it is directed by the person doing the learning, we call it self-education. When the learning is not directed at all, we may refer to it as socialization. Photography is entwined with all three kinds or facets of learning, and in the twentieth century, all three are entwined with photography. But not only can these three facets of learning not easily or always be distinguished from each other; they can also never be fully differentiated from their contents. And likewise, if anything can be concluded from the present study with any degree of confidence, it is the impossibility of categorically differentiating among photography, the things that are featured in the photographs, and the educational acts and processes with which photography is entwined and invested. The performative approach of this study allows us to see that Flusser’s positions on education are both incomplete and at least

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partially incorrect. He claimed that “we are, in relation to technical images, the same as the illiterate are in relation to texts,”17 and at the same time he staked a more elitist position according to which nonprofessional photographers and their audiences are equivalent, with regard to photographic images, to analphabets. Drawing on Boltanski’s sociology of critique, Hacking’s notion of style, and Dewey’s notion of exploration, however, we have here been able to develop a broader, less elitist, and arguably more democratic analytic framework. This framework is broader because, while Flusser’s comments focus only on the viewer’s ability to decipher photographs, we have seen here that life and photography are entangled in many other ways as well. Flusser emphasized the two-sided image–observer relationship, whereas the triangular model of this study incorporated the photography– world mediation as well. As for my response to Flusser’s elitism, it would of course be an error to deny that there are degrees of pro-

fessionalization and proficiency with regard to photography (just as in any other sphere of activity), but this is different from declaring, from an external position, the general illiteracy of the public, when the public is in fact engaged in extensive activity with photography. It is only by observing the actual extensive and diverse forms of activity involving photography that we can recognize and acknowledge the degree of learning that has been required of the public. This methodological perspective on the history of photography and education signals an open future: not a fantastic, imaginary, empty utopian future, but one grounded in the recorded history of photography and in a more modest human anthropology. Given the irreducible nature of humans, it is always possible that two people will look at the very same photograph but see, think, and feel different things, and be moved to different and sometimes opposite forms of action. In fact, one does not even need two people; one is sufficient.

NOTES TO PAGES 000-000

INTRODUCTION 1. In following and substantiating Flusser’s claim, the current volume differs from existing scholarship on photography and history. See, in particular, Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Elizabeth Edwards, The Camera as Historian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). See also the special journal issues of History and Theory 48 (2009) and Central European History 48 (2015). 2. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). Subsequent parenthetical page numbers will refer to this text. Questions about photography’s evidentiary and documentary status have been a constant in the discussion of the medium since its invention. They could be read as a response to artists and scholars of photography who, starting in the 1980s, emphasized the imaginary, conceptual, and ideological aspects of the medium. John Tag, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan, 1988), and Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,” in Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965–1975, ed. Ann Goldstein et al. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 247–67. See also Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), and Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón, eds., Photography and Doubt (New York: Routledge, 2016). 3. Vilém Flusser, Jude sein: Essays, Briefe, Fiktionen (Hamburg: CEP, 2014).

4. In this sense, Flusser’s theory is the expression of a certain schizophrenia that characterizes our socialization with regard to photography. When we speed through a crossing to avoid being caught by a speed camera (whose presence we hypothesize), the performative dimension of photography shaping our actions is easily accessible to us, but when it comes to the scholarly discourse (expressed in the existing scholarship on the respective cases, which forms the necessary starting point for my discussion), that discourse tends to concentrate, conservatively and like Flusser’s examples, on the content of the images. 5. Flusser, “The Gesture of Photography,” Gestures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 77. Subsequent parenthetical page numbers will refer to this text. 6. Ibid., 83. 7. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 44–45. Subsequent parenthetical page numbers will refer to this text. 8. One of the central aims of this framework and that of “photographic objects” in particular is to formulate Flusser’s ideas as a process of stabilization and solidification of meaning in social-historical reality. The closest analogy outside of photography is perhaps Reinhart Koselleck’s “historical semantics,” which focuses on political terms. The historical meaning of “race” or “assimilation,” for example, cannot be extrapolated simply by examining the semantic content of these nouns (philology). The content must be placed within the changing historical ground of social reality and the contexts of use. Although every speaker or writer is an individual and subjective component that inheres in every enunciation or locutionary act,

200   Notes to Pages 6–11 all use of language is necessarily based on shared grounds. The social dynamic of the use of language stabilizes the meaning of terms. Following the linguistic turn, this counterintuitive aspect of language—as simultaneously descriptive and constitutive of social reality—has become easier to grasp than is still the case with regard to photography. 9. Subjectivity arises as a critical question in Giorgio Agamben’s treatment of the notion of the “apparatus.” Agamben traces Foucault’s dispositif (in English “apparatus”) to Jean Hyppolite’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of Christianity, in the context of history, and to Heidegger’s Gestell, in the context of technology. According to Agamben (What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009], 1–24), an apparatus is “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions or discourses of living beings” (14). As a result, according to Agamben, the subject is between “the apparatus” and “human beings” (13), and, consequently, an apparatus always implies a process of subjectification (13). As individuals differ from one another, in our context of photography and subjectivity the notion of apparatus only sharpens subjectivity as a question. 10. Flusser, “The Gesture of Photography,” 76. 11. The terms “world” and “reality” are drawn from Luc Boltanski, who in turn draws on Wittgenstein. See Luc Boltanski, Mysteries and Conspiracies, trans. Catherine Porter (Oxford: Polity, 2014), 3. On technology as defining the intersection of world and reality, see Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, trans. Anthony Enns (Oxford: Polity Press, 2009), 43. The constitutive role of photography in history should not be confused with the more partial “education of the eye” in Benjamin’s sense. 12. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 13. Ian Hacking, “‘Style’ for Historians and Philosophers,” Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 178–99. 14. Ibid., 188. 15. Ibid., 189. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 189. For photography in the legal context, see Tal Golan, Laws of Man and Laws of Nature: A History of Scientific Expert Testimony

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); for photography in the scientific context, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 18. Hacking, “‘Style’ for Historians and Philosophers,” 190. 19. Ibid., 191. 20. While the term “performative” was first coined by John Austin in his 1955 lecture series, published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words, performativity has now become a wide and contentious field. As for the present study, I only wish to position it with regard to two different branches of the field of performativity, having to do with representation and with identity. Austin used the word to mean a use of language that brought about an action, contrasting it with the “constative,” which formed a description of the world. Austin’s ideas were later taken up by many philosophers, literary and performance scholars, and others, and the meaning of “performative” has been widened and changed so that it now encompasses subjects and contexts that transcend Austin’s definition, context, or intention, ranging from literary studies to gender studies and the performing arts. Photography is not equivalent to language, and it is questionable whether, for instance, uses of photography could be formally divided into performative and constative categories (that is, photographs that do things as opposed to photographs that describe things). The status of representation in photography further complicates things: Austin’s main foil was the philosophy of the logical positivists, who conceived of language first and foremost in terms of statements that describe the world (the analysis of which was the main task of the philosopher), whereas photography was invented as a technology for the representation of the real. If we think of photography in terms of Hacking’s style, discussed earlier, we thus acknowledge that representation is an ontological component of photography, from which it follows that it is also a component of its performance. Indeed, the subjects I explore are all grounded, albeit in different ways, in social and historical realities in which the representational nature of photography is maybe the most important feature for a performative analysis. If Austin’s notion of performativity has to do with communication and action, another branch of the field is concerned with how performance affects

Notes to Pages 11–14   201 identity. I will not be directly concerned with this notion of performativity, but the chapters do touch indirectly on the mediation of photography with regard to modern Jewish identities. Where Judith Butler, with regard to gender, claims that identity results from its performance (rather than the other way around), I adopt a polluted and less reductionist position, which I draw from Georg Simmel. Simmel, in many respects a precursor of constructivist notions of social identity of the kind that Butler advocates, was not willing to deny the existence of something—a remainder that he did not fully define, but which he sometimes spoke of in terms of individuality. This irreducible remainder was there in the interactive processes of the negotiation of social identity. One of the consequences of this stance, as will become clearer later in this Introduction, is that I am unwilling to exclude from the analysis of photography the issue of the objects to which it was put to use. For an overview of performativity, see James Loxley, Performativity (London: Routledge, 2007); John Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999) (as well as Butler’s Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative [London: Routledge, 1997], where she elaborates on her theory of performativity); and Georg Simmel, “How Is Society Possible?” in Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 6–22. A third branch of the field deals with performance studies, which is less relevant to this study. Apart from studies that focus on performance and the world of entertainment, very few studies have adopted a performative framework in the context of Jewish history. A notable exception is Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). On the field of entertainment, see Andrea Most, Theatrical Liberalism: Jews and Popular Entertainment in America (New York: New York University Press, 2013); and Henry Bial, Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). 21. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Henry Holt: New York, 1938). 22. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed.

Tom Bottomore and David Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 53. 23. I am inspired by the work of Frederic J. Schwartz on the culture of the case: Schwartz, “Architecture and Crime: Adolf Loos and the Culture of the ‘Case,’” Art Bulletin 94.3 (2012): 437–57, and Schwartz, “Brecht’s ‘Threepenny Lawsuit’ and the Culture of the Case,” Oxford Art Journal 41.2 (2018): 219–47. Schwartz emphasizes the shifting and unclear status of images as evidence and as photographs needing to be interpreted and turned into discourse (“Architecture and Crime,” 440). But note that my cases do not include the aspect of public scandal and lawsuits found in Schwartz. See also Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop Journal 9.1 (1980): 5–36, and Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1973); Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977); and Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990). 24. For the discussion of contingency in the context of Jewish history, see my “Georg Simmel’s Logic of the Future: ‘The Stranger,’ Zionism, and ‘Bounded Contingency,’” Theory, Culture & Society 36.5 (2019): 71–94. 25. Quoted in Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (New York: Norton, 2017), 101. 26. There are many photographic albums that include photography and aspects of Jewish history or photographic histories of chapters in Jewish history (often following exhibitions and featuring texts written by curators). But somewhat surprisingly, given the numbers of photographers (artists, commercial photographers, and news photographers) who were Jewish and the unquestionable importance of photography for modern Jewish history, there is only a small amount of sustained historical scholarship on photography and Jewish history. Three particularly important studies relate to the Holocaust in Eastern Europe or to the history of photojournalism in Central Europe: David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs

202   Notes to Pages 14–24 from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Daniel H. Magilow, The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015). 27. The most important steps in this direction have been taken by Michael Berkowitz. For a history of Jews in photography in the British context, see Berkowitz’s rich Jews and Photography in Britain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015). See also Michael Berkowitz and Martin Roman Depner, eds., The Jewish Engagement with Photography (Oldenburg: Bis-Verlag, 2017); Michael Berkowitz, “Jews in Photography: Conceiving a Field in the Papers of Peter Pollack,” Photography and Culture 4.1 (2011): 7–28; Daniel Morris, After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photography (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011); William Meyers, “Jews and Photography,” Commentary 115.1 (2003): 45–48; and Tim Gidal, “Jews and Photography,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 32 (1987): 437–53. 28. Allan Sekula’s framework is closest to the sociological framework I attempt to develop here. See his “Photographic Meaning,” Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 (London: Mack, 2016), 3–32 (quotation on 6). 29. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2017), and L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon, 1998); Kittler, Optical Media, and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). In his Kommunikologie (Munich: Fischer, 1998), Flusser describes media as lacking any specific structural trait independent of their concrete use within a given sociopolitical setting (272). In the earlier Towards a Philosophy of Photography, he states that photography “is hostile to ideology. Ideology is the insistence on a single viewpoint thought to be perfect. Photographers act in a post-ideological way even when they think they are serving an ideology” (38). I return to this question in the conclusion of the book. 30. The literary scholar Caroline Levine has recently developed a somewhat similar approach in the field of literature and cultural studies, where she uses the term “affordances of form.” Drawing on design theory, an “affordance” describes the

potential uses or actions that are latent in materials and designs and acknowledges that shapes and patterns possess a limited range of potentialities. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 9–16. 31. Although I read his chapter after I wrote this section, and he uses different terms, the closest to my orientation here is Douglas R. Nickel’s superb “Three or Four Kinds of Indeterminacy in the Photograph,” in Photography and Doubt, ed. Kriebel and Zervigón, 10–25. What may be my only major disagreement with his account is ontological: Leaning on Hacking, Simondon, and Kittler, I disagree with his opening statement that “doubt is not a property of the photograph: it is a tendency of the human mind” (10). Roland Barthes viewed the essence of photography as being that as a medium it annihilates itself: Showing the thing itself, it becomes visible. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 45. While studying the photograph in terms of disruptions of the image, making the material of the medium obtrusive, Peter Geimer generally omits the world from discussion. Inadvertent Images: A History of Photographic Apparitions, trans. Gerrit Jackson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 7. 32. He refers to this in terms of reading rather than dispositions built into the medium of photography, but in a certain respect the poles Allan Sekula develops in “Photographic Meaning” (21) are related: symbolist vs. realist; seer vs. witness; expression vs. reportage; imagination vs. truth; affective vs. informative; metaphoric vs. metonymic. 33. Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 17. 34. Ibid., 18. 35. Ibid., 19. 36. Ibid., 20. 37. Ibid., 20–22. I draw on Luc Boltanski, Rendre la réalité inacceptable. À propos de “La production de l’idéologie dominante” (Paris: Demopolis, 2008); and Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification. The Economies of Worth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 38. The latest and most comprehensive study is Kriebel and Zervigón, eds., Photography and Doubt.

Notes to Pages 24–32   203 39. Attempts to develop machine technologies for vocal or visual identification and speech-driven human-machine interaction are also an expression of the recognition of the role of repetition in human perception. 40. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), section I, number 242, p. 75. My approach draws on Gunter Gebauer, “The Neapolitan Gesture,” in Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination: The Image Between the Visible and the Invisible, ed. Bernd Huppauf and Christoph Wulf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 157–65. 41. It is sufficient to think about advertisements for diets, laundry detergent, or cosmetic surgery to recognize the special place of photography for the demonstration of “before” and “after.” The complication involved in photography is that a photograph is an image that is made by a photographer, but it is an image of something real. The questions of who establishes the photographic image—combining the image and the real—and, thus, who owns it, can be brought to the surface through cases such as the following. In the 1980s there was a project to protect the coastline in France and the natural landscape nearby. Photographers were invited (and, if admitted to the project, paid) to photograph from the same spot, over a period of several years, under conditions of scientific control. The series would document changes in the landscape. One of the photographers, a prominent photographer named Raymond Depardon, participated in the project but then claimed that the photographs were his, rather than belonging to the agency that funded the project, and demanded copyright. The agency that paid him to take the photographs, however, said that the photographs were of France, and that if they did not belong to the funding agency then, if anything, they belonged to France; this suggested that, as a photographer, Depardon was really equivalent to a lab technician who uses a scientific device to measure the temperature. This controversy illustrates that the interdependency between what is being measured (or in this case, photographed) and the individual who is doing the measuring (or, in this case, photographing) of the object is open to debate. There are many other examples available, from other social contexts. One recent dispute involves an Israeli politician, Yoav Kisch, and a photographer who took his pho-

tograph; another involves the renowned left-wing Israeli novelist Yaakov Shabtai, of whom an early photograph as a soldier was used against his will by a right-wing party in its campaigns. This tension has been built into the history of photography from its inception. For an illuminating study of the changing definitions and evaluations of photography, see Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). For the classic studies of the ownership of photographic images, see Bernard Edelman, Ownership of the Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law, trans. Elizabeth Kingdom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), and Molly Nesbit, “What Was an Author?” Yale French Studies 73, Everyday Life (1987): 229–57. 42. One could relate to stabilization in at least three different, only partially overlapping, ways: stabilization of the photographic image in terms of production and print; stabilization in terms of the object in the frame (which in this book I will relate to in terms of control); and stabilization in the sociological sense of the ability to stabilize an aspect of reality. In Inadvertent Images, Peter Geimer studies a partially related phenomenon of inadvertent apparitions created by the material features of their production. 43. Georg Simmel, “Die Ruine. Ein ästhetischer Versuch,” Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908 Band II (Frankfurt a.M: Suhrkamp, 1997), 124–30. In Chapter 5 we will see the point exemplified in Stephen Shore’s photographs of survivors in the Ukraine.

CHAPTER ONE 1. Jay Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). I am not satisfied with the treatment of Kahn’s Jewish background in the existing literature. Although I understand that this is due to a combination of a lack of information and a wish not to neglect his Jewish background, the result includes shallow and reductive claims by way of discussing Kahn in terms of the history of the Jews of Alsace, the disposition of Jewish bankers to live extraordinarily secluded lives, or the attribution of Jewish values. None of these contributes significantly to our understanding.

204   Notes to Pages 32–39 See Emmanuel Naquet, “Un juif alsacien après 1870: Les anneés Marmoutier,” “Les juifs de France au tournant de la guerre,” and “L’Affaire Dreyfus, un événement fondateur,” in Albert Kahn, 1860– 1940. Réalités d’une utopie, ed. Jeanne Beausoleil and Pascal Ory (Boulogne-Billancourt: Musée Albert-Kahn, 1995), 33–36, 37–41, and 41–45, respectively; and Shelley Hornstein, “Culture sous verre: La maison et le monde dans la collection d’autochromes de tourisme architectural de Kahn,” in Un monde et son double: Regards sur l’entreprise visuelle des Archives de la Planète (1919–1931), ed. Michel Cadé and Isabelle Marinone (Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2019), 137–41. On Kahn in the context of multiculturalism and Jews and the characterization of Jews as cosmopolitan, see Paula Amad, “Un cosmopolitisme expérimental: Les limites de ‘l’Autour-du-Mondisme’ dans les Archives Kahn,” in Un monde et son double, ed. Cadé and Marinone, 79–81. For the broader context, see Sander Gilman, Multiculturalism and the Jews (New York: Routledge, 2006). On antisemitic attacks against Kahn, see Gilles Baud Berthier, “Le métier de la banque,” in Albert Kahn, ed. Beausoleil and Ory, 119–34. 2. Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom, 25. 3. Fondation Albert Kahn, Autour du Monde, par les boursiers de voyage de l’Université de Paris (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1904), 1–3. 4. David Okuefuna, “Introduction,” The Dawn of the Color Photograph: Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 12–13. 5. Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom, 21. Likewise, during the Great War, Kahn believed in the impact of showing the damage and suffering the war had caused. 6. Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 6. 7. Emile Borel, quoted in Amad, Counter-Archive, 31. 8. As Whitney Walton notes, in being simultaneously nationalistic and internationalist Kahn was not different from Cecil Rhodes, who initiated the Rhodes Scholarships, or Pierre de Coubertin, who revived the Olympic Games in 1896. See Walton, Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad: France and the United States, 1890–1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 42.

9. One source maintains, but without any documentation, that photographs from the Kahn archive were published in National Geographic Magazine but that the archive was not cited as their source. See Gabriele Uelsberg et al., “Vorwort,” 1914—Welt in Farbe: Farbfotografie vor dem Krieg (Bonn: Hatje Cantz, 2013), 9. 10. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Routledge, 1998 [1936]). 11. Winter, Dreams of Peace and Freedom, 22. 12. For this definition of economy, I draw on the first part of Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 18–174. 13. As described in the instructions for the foundation that oversaw the travel fund, which was administered by the Sorbonne with instructions not to divulge the donor’s identity, the grants were intended to enable young teachers chosen from the “intellectual and moral elite of the nation” to enter into sympathetic communication with the ideas, feelings, and lives of other peoples. The travel grants thus combined many of the key ideological currents of the Kahn project, from republican secular pedagogy and French cosmopolitanism to the renovation of scientific positivism from the angle of subjective insight (Amad, Counter-Archive, 32). 14. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 60–61. 15. Amad, Counter-Archive, 50–51. 16. Flore Hervé notes the parallel between Kahn’s photographic project and Ferdinand Brunot’s project of classifying all the world’s languages in his Archives de la parole (Archives of Speech). See Hervé, “Les Archives de la planète, 1909–1931,” in Albert Kahn, ed. Beausoleil and Ory. 17. Gilles Baud-Berthier, “Foreword,” and David Okuefuna, “Introduction,” in Okuefuna, The Dawn of the Color Photograph, 7 and 16, respectively. For a detailed and technically oriented history of color in photography, see Peter L. M. Rockwell and Peter W. Knack, Out of the Darkroom: A Short History of Photofinishing Industry (London: 2 P Press, 2006). 18. Nathalie Bulouch, “The Documentary Use of the Autochrome in France,” History of Photography 18.2 (1994): 143. See also Hervé, “Les Archives de la planète,” 191. 19. Rolf Sachsse, “Bunte Bilder der Welt,” in Uelsberg et al., 1914—Welt in Farbe, 15.

Notes to Pages 39–45   205 20. Ibid.; Uelsberg et al., 1914—Welt in Farbe, 50; Okuefuna, The Dawn of the Color Photograph, 10. 21. Sachsse, “Bunte Bilder der Welt,” 15. 22. Bulouch, “The Documentary Use of the Autochrome,” 143. 23. In an inversion of the conventional understanding, Flusser argues that color photography is even more abstract than black-and-white photography, because between “the green of the photograph and the green of the field a whole series of complex encodings have crept in, a series that is more complex than that which connects the grey of the field photographed in black and white with the green of the field. In this sense the field photographed in green is more abstract than the one in grey.” Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 43–44. 24. On Mariel Jean-Brunhes Delamarre, see her son’s account: “Témoignages visuels: les films réalisés sur la famille Brunhes, le cas du regard d’une mère de Jean-Noël Delamarre par son auteur, JeanNoël Delamarre,” in Un monde et son double, ed. Cadé and Marinone, 99–108. 25. Cadé and Marinone, eds., Un monde et son double, and Trond Erik Bjorli and Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen, eds., Cosmopolitics of the Camera: Albert Kahn’s Archives of The Planet (Bristol: Intellect, 2020). 26. Kipling is cited in the Bulletin de la Société Autour du monde (June 1931), quoted by Paula Amad in “Un cosmopolitisme expérimental: les limites de l’Autour-du-Mondisme dans les Archives Kahn,” in Un monde et son double, ed. Cadé and Marinone, 83. 27. Shelley Rice, “Espace local—Visions globales: Albert Kahn en context,” in Un monde et son double, ed. Cadé and Marinone, 109. Subsequent parenthetical page numbers will refer to this text. 28. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 119. Subsequent parenthetical page numbers will refer to this text. 29. The most important documentation of their relationship is their correspondence: see Sophie Cœuré and Frédéric Worms, eds., Albert Kahn, Henri Bergson. Correspondances (Paris: Desmaret/ Musée départemental Albert-Kahn, 2003). See references throughout Beausoleil and Ory, eds., Albert Kahn.

30. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1994 [1896]). 31. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Dover, 1991 [1911]), 306–7. 32. Amad, Counter-Archive, 97. See also my Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 83. 33. On Bergson’s opposition of snapshots to the perception of movement, see his Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 42. See further Michael S. Roth, “Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory 48.4 (2009): 82–94, especially 84–85; Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 113; and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 25–26. 34. Bergson, Matter and Memory. 35. Marie-Claire Robic, “Jean Brunhes, un ‘géophoto-graphe’ expert aux Archives de la Planète,” in Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde: Regards d’un géographe / regards de la géographie, ed. Musée Albert-Kahn (Paris: Vilo, 1993), 125. 36. Brunhes quoted in Bulouch, “The Documentary Use of the Autochrome,” 143. 37. Ibid. 38. For a list of Brunhes’s awards, see Mariel Jean-Brunhes Delamarre and Jeanne Beausoleil, “Deux témoins de leur temps: Albert Kahn et Jean Brunhes,” in Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde, 105. 39. On the negotiation that led to Brunhes’s selection, see Delamarre and Beausoleil, “Deux témoins de leur temps,” 91–95. Note the central role of photographs in Brunhes’s work even before he joined Kahn’s archive (Robic, “Jean Brunhes, un ‘géo-photo-graphe’ expert,” 113–18). 40. Marie-Claire Robic, “La géographie dans le mouvement scientifique,” in Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde, 52–63. 41. Ibid., 63. For a comparison with German geography, see Sun Yung Yeo, “Décrire la localité face à la mondialisation: Archives de la Planète et Géographie Humaine,” in Un monde et son double, ed. Cadé and Marinone, 70–71. 42. Amad, Counter-Archive, 45. On the academic

206   Notes to Pages 46–54 board of the archive project, see Marie Bonhomme and Mariel Jean-Brunhes Delamarre, “La méthode de missions des Archives de la Planète,” in Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde, 194–201. 43. Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde, 98. 44. Bonhomme and Delamarre, “La méthode de missions,” 201. 45. Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde. 46. Illustrations 45, 46, and 47 in Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde, 148. 47. Reproduced in Stefan Gronert, The Düsseldorf School of Photography (New York: Aperture, 2009), 83. 48. Illustrations 155, 156, and 157 in Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde, 248. 49. Illustrations 152, 153, and 154 in ibid., 247. 50. Marie-Claire Robic, “Administrer la preuve par l’image: géographie physique et géographie humaine,” in Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde, 221–61 (see in particular Brunhes’s own reproduced lectures at the Collège de France, 239–261). 51. In the context of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brunhes discusses Jews as a minority primarily defined as a religious group. Of particular interest is his observation that the Jewish minority is comprised of two groups that are racially distinct from each other (although he immediately goes on to qualify the subjective nature of race). Brunhes is quoted in Robic, “Administrer la preuve,” 250. Brunhes analyzes Jews similarly in the context of the ethnic, national, and religious mosaic of Syria (Robic, “Administrer la preuve,” 289). 52. Robic, “Jean Brunhes, un ‘géo-photo-graphe’ expert,” 125. 53. Didier Mendibil, “Deux ‘manières’: Jean Brunhes et Paul Vidal de La Blache,” in Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde, 152. 54. Quoted from a letter by Brunhes in Delamarre and Beausoleil, “Deux témoins de leur temps,” 107. 55. Milan Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 35. 56. Marie Bonhomme and Mariel Jean-Brunhes Delamarre, “Le champ du monde,” in Jean Brunhes Autour du Monde, 181. On Brunhes’s accompaniment of photographers on their journeys, see p. 183. 57. Miri Eliav-Feldon, Realistic Utopias: The Ideal Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance 1516–1630 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 2. 58. When utopian literature began to reappear

toward the end of the century, it incorporated a wide range of genres; science fiction became a central genre for this literature, and its themes included a new war from which a new and better world would emerge, and the emergence of a different human race, which would replace the existing one based on Darwinian evolutionary processes. See Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell-Wiley, 1987), 33–47; Roland Schaer, “Utopia: Space, Time, History,” in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, ed. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13. 59. The first half of the statement appears as the motto on the book cover. Theodor Herzl, Altneuland: Roman (Berlin: Hermann Seemann, 1902). 60. Bloch wrote Das Prinzip Hoffnung in the United States, between 1938 and 1947, and it was published in three volumes, in 1954, 1955, and 1959, in East Germany. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 61. Kahn’s garden, mentioned earlier, also fits well into the broader framework of contemporary attempts to create architectonic changes in the social environment. The most famous figures in this respect were Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, who created alternative architectonic, urban, and social models on the basis of scientific and other research. See Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 27, 94–146, and 182–257, respectively. “Garden cities” were also created in England based on these ideas, and established in British Mandate Palestine by Zionist settlers. (Ramat Gan was one such city.) Miri Eliav-Feldon, focusing on an earlier historical period, has defined utopia as “a literary work describing an ideal society created by conscious human effort on this earth.” Eliav-Feldon grades utopias on two different scales: “one, from the most radical to the most reactionary, the other from the most idealistic to the most realistic” (Realistic Utopias, 13). The radical-reactionary scale depends on the personal views of the individual analyzing the utopias and on the time in which he or she is writing, as what appears revolutionary in one historical context will be regarded differently in another (13–14). Eliav-Feldon’s second consid-

Notes to Pages 55–61   207 eration applies even more directly to this chapter: The more realistic a utopia, the more interesting it is as a reflection of the true substantial problems of the age (13). Kahn’s projects and institutions do not fit easily into Eliav-Feldon’s classification. The National Committee for Social and Political Studies and the Centers for Social Documentation appear more pragmatically oriented than do the Autour du monde and Archives of the Planet projects, which both appear more idealistic in comparison. With regard to the utopias of the Renaissance, Eliav-Feldon concludes her study by noting the “absence of the bridge leading from reality to perfection” (131). It is on such “bridges,” it is fair to say, that Kahn focused his energy and fortune. 62. In 1924, two years before Warburg started his atlas experiment, the American philanthropist Albert C. Barnes established a museum in Philadelphia (the Barnes Foundation) based on a similar concept of association. Each wall brings together a collection of objects and paintings that have no apparent connection. Gradually, moving from one room to the next, I, as viewer, note the change in my perception: The layout on the walls alters the perception of individual objects, forming links between them, revealing different kinds and forms of commonalities. Shelley Hornstein, too, draws a line among Kahn, Warburg, and Malraux: Hornstein, “Culture Sous Verre,” in Un monde et son double, ed. Cadé and Marinone, 137. For the broader intellectual and biographical context for Warburg, see particularly Michael Steinberg’s introduction in Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 59–109; Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Aby Warburg and Anti-Semitism: Political Perspectives on Images and Culture (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2008); and Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 63. Walton, Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad, 41. For a discussion of scientific photography in this respect, see my “Anthropology, Standardisation and Measurement: Rudolf Martin and Anthropometric Photography,“ British Journal for the History of Science 46.3 (2013): 487–516. 64. William M. Ivins, Jr., The Rationalization of Sight (New York: De Capo, 1973 [1938]).

65. William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 138. 66. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). In a curious way, Ariela Azoulay’s book The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone, 2008) comprises elements of Kahn’s utopian conception of photography along with a postcatastrophic criticism of the Enlightenment project. Azoulay develops a political theory of photography that she calls an “ethics of spectatorship”: a civil contract for photography involving the photographed, the photographer, and the spectator. While this contract is more democratic and reciprocal than Kahn’s project, strangely, the addition of the critical perspective of the Enlightenment leads not to a contraction of the utopian demand made on photography but to far greater utopian expectations than even Kahn’s.

CHAPTER TWO 1. Der Mensch Mein Bruder (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1956). The original can be found, as part of Lerski’s estate, in the Museum Folkwang, Essen. There it is cataloged as 403c/79. 2. Helmar Lerski, unpublished scrapbooks, Museum Folkwang, Essen. 3. On the notion of a complex of questions, see Jean-Paul Dumont, “Sensation et perception dans la philosophie d’époque hellénistique et impériale,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, t. 36, 5 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 4718–64 (here 4718–21). 4. Bruno Latour, “From Fabrication to Reality: Pasteur and His Lactic Acid Ferment” and “The Historicity of Things: Where Were the Microbes Before Pasteur?” in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 113–73. 5. Quoted in Walter Marti, “Metamorphosis as a Provocation,” in Metamorphosis Through Light, ed. Ute Eskildsen (Freren: Luca, 1982), 104. 6. “Helmar Lerski über sich selbst,” in Der Mensch Mein Bruder, 18. 7. For an analysis of Lerski in the context of cinema (including Zionist propaganda film), see Ofer Ashkenazi, “The Symphony of a Great Heimat:

208   Notes to Pages 61–66 Zionism as a Cure for Weimar Crisis in Lerski’s Avodah,” in Three-Way Street: Jews, Germans, and the Transnational, ed. Jay Howard Geller and Leslie Morris (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 91–123. For a recent analysis of Lerski’s photography, see Kathryn Alice Steinbock, “Crisis and Classification: Photographic Portrait Typologies in Early 20th-Century Germany” (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2011), 228–94. 8. Rona Sela, Photography in Palestine in the 1930s–1940s (Herzliya Museum of Art, Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2000), 20 [Hebrew]. In her recent article, “Helmar Lerski, la photographie sioniste et la série ‘Soldats juifs,’” in Helmar Lerski: Pionnier de Lumière, ed. Nicolas Feuillie (Paris: Gallimard and Musée d’art et d’Histoire du Judaisme, 2018), her interest shifts to Lerski in the context of the tension between Zionist institutions interested in propaganda and those interested in art. See also her “The Land of Mirrors,” Ha’aretz, July 22, 2011 [Hebrew], https://www.haaretz.co.il/misc/1.1181774 (accessed 20 August 2018). 9. Guy Raz, “A Yemenite Portrait: Jewish Orientalism in Local Photography, 1881–1948,” in A Yemenite Portrait: Jewish Orientalism in Local Photography, 1881–1948 (Tel Aviv: Eretz Israel Museum, 2012), 29–57. 10. Ulrich Keller made a similar observation concerning August Sander’s photographs. See Claudia Bohn-Spector, In Focus: August Sander— Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 133. Raz located a letter to Lerski in the Central Zionist Archives encouraging him to photograph members of the Jewish diasporas (“kibbutz galuyot”) and especially from the Eastern diasporas (“edot hamizrach”). 11. Anneliese Lerski, “Zwei jüdische Köpfe,” Zürcher Illustrierte 8. 42 (October 1932). 12. On Lilien and Zionism, see Haim Finkelstein, “Introduction,” and Mark H. Gelber, “E. M. Lilien and the Jewish Renaissance,” in E. M. Lilien in the Middle East: Etchings (1925–1908), ed. Haim Finkelstein (Beersheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev/Avraham Baron Art Gallery, 1988). 13. Lilien viewed the camera as a mere auxiliary tool, preparatory to the artist’s creative work, and he minimized or even hid the fact that he used the camera this way. Micha Bar-Am, To Paint in Light:

The Photographic Aspect in the Work of E. M. Lilien (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum/Dvir, 1990). 14. Ibid., 56, n. 65. 15. Erna Lendvai-Dircksen, Ein Deutsches Menschenbild: Antlitz des Volkes (Frankfurt a. Main: Umschau, 1961), vi. 16. For the particulars of the evolution of the project, see Florian Ebner, “Une ‘difficile entreprise’, les visages juifs et arabes de Helmar Lerski,” in Feuillie, Helmar Lerski, 25. 17. Jan-Christopher Horak, “Helmar Lerski: The Penetrating Power of Light,” in Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-garde Cinema (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 68. A similar contextualization for this project is found in Ulrich Keller’s brief discussion of Lerski in the comprehensive introduction to August Sander, Citizens of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 18. On Sander’s relationship to physiognomy, see George Baker, “Photography Between Narrativity and Stasis: August Sander, Degeneration and the Decay of the Portrait,” October 76 (Spring 1996): 76; Matthias Weiss, “Vermessen—fotografische ‘Menscheninventare’ vor und aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus,” in Maßlose Bilder: Visuelle Ästhetik der Transgression (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009), 359. 19. Herbert Molderings, “Fotografie in der Weimarer Republik,” Stationen der Fotografie (Berlin: Nishen, 1988), 7. 20. Lendvai-Dircksen’s linguistic descriptions of the subjects she photographed further underscore the fascist direction taken by her work: “That’s a whole man! His gait is proud and full of energy, his voice has a metallic ring. An unconscious sense of security and calm radiates from his being. Yes, yes—no, no. The image of a leader in the struggles for freedom attaches to this proud, smart head” (Das ist ein ganzer Mann! Der Gang ist stolz und voller Schwung, die Stimme klingt metallen. Unbewusste Sicherheit, Ruhe strahlt aus dem Wesen. Ja, ja—nein, nein. Das Bild eines Führers der Freiheitskämpfe verbindet sich diesem stolzen, raschen Kopf ). Quote in Ulrich Keller, “Die deutsche Portraitfotografie von 1918 bis 1933,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte und Aesthetik der Fotografie (Lahn-Giessen: Anabas, 1977), 50. 21. Lerski, unpublished scrapbooks.

Notes to Pages 66–76   209 22. Lerski’s photographs from 1911 to 1914 do not use sharp focus. Due to the exceptional quality of the print and the paper, together with the shades of black and gray, these photographs impress the viewer as being much closer to oil paintings when compared to his photographs from the 1920s and 1930s. These early photographs are indebted to spiritualism, symbolism, and pictorialism. Lerski’s photograph of John the Baptist’s head, for instance, closely echoes Fred Holland Day’s “Seven Last Words of Christ.” Pierre Vaisse, who considers Lerski’s photographs to be antiportraits, sees the origins of Lerski’s style in the American pictorialism of around 1910 and in Lerski’s two other careers as an actor and film photographer. See “Portrait of Society: The Anonymous and the Famous,” in The New History of Photography, ed. Michael Frizot (London: Konemann, 1998), 509. On Lerski’s relationship to pictorialism, see also Nicolas Feuillie, “Helmar Lerski, le pouvoir pénétrant de la lumière,” in Feuillie, Helmar Lerski, 12. 23. Christopher Webster, “‘The Deepest Well of German Life’: Hierarchy, Physiognomy and the Imperative of Leadership in Erich Retzlaff’s Portraits of the National Socialist Elite,” in Photography in the Third Reich: Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda, ed. Christopher Webster (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021). 24. Helmut Gernsheim, Creative Photography: Aesthetic Trends 1839–1960 (New York: Dover, 1962), 178. 25. See Bohn-Spector, In Focus: August Sander, 104. 26. On Sander’s photographic angles and their relationship to then-contemporary trends, see Ulrich Keller, “Preface,” in Sander, Citizens of the Twentieth Century, 4, 7, 10–11. 27. On Sander’s notion of type, see Sander, quoted in ibid., 24. 28. See Bohn-Spector, In Focus: August Sander, 110. 29. On Sander’s use of clothing, objects, locations, and equipment for narrative or identification, see Keller, “Preface,” 29. 30. Florian Ebner, “Verwandlungen in Serie: Die Metamorphose als Experiment, Methode, und Beweis,” in Metamorphosen des Gesichts: Die Verwandlungen durch Licht von Helmar Lerski (Essen: Steidl, 2002), 54–55.

31. Horak mentions that, “after World War II, Lerski lectured in Palestine on American films, disqualifying them as photographed theater. Cinematography, according to him, had to proceed from the phenomenon of light” (Horak, “Helmar Lerski,” 67, 68). 32. Marti, “Metamorphosis as a Provocation,” 102–4. 33. Horak, “Helmar Lerski,” 68. 34. Reinhard Matz, “Photographia absoluta: Zu Helmar Lerskis ‘Metamorphose,’“ Fotogeschichte 8 (1983): 65–68; here 67–68. 35. Horak, “Helmar Lerski,” 70. For the purposes of this comparison, Riefenstahl could also have been replaced with Walter Frentz. For a comparison of Lerski and Frentz, focusing on their films, see Ofer Ashkenazi, “Improbable Twins: The Bifurcating Heritage of Weimar Culture in Helmar Lerski and Walter Frentz’s Kulturfilms,” German Studies Review 40.3 (2015): 527–48. 36. Ofer Ashkenazi, “The Symphony of a Great Heimat,” 91–122. 37. Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 11. For a list of references on the subject, see note 1 on p. 140. 38. Ibid., 35. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 39. 41. Ibid., 42. In a similar vein, Baxandall states that “the form of statement I shall be aiming for is: X can be shown to have had such-and-such a conceptual resource or disposition, functional possession of which by X would be entailed by such-and-such an observable quality in his pictures—observable, at least, by someone aware of this conceptual resource” (76). And “Active ideas do not float, they are brought to bear” (75). 42. Jean-François Chevrier, “Visages-paysages,” in Catalogue Helmar Lerski: Métamorphoses par la lumière (Strasbourg: Les Musées de Strasbourg, 2003). 43. Quoted in Ebner, Metamorphosen des Gesichts, 3 (emphasis added). 44. Lerski, unpublished scrapbooks. 45. Ebner, Metamorphosen des Gesichtes, 52. 46. Quoted in ibid., 3 (emphasis added). 47. Feuillie, “Helmar Lerski,” 16. 48. Ibid., 11.

210   Notes to Pages 76–97 49. Quoted in Ebner, “Verwandlungen in Serie,” 54.

50. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 51. Nissan N. Perez, ed., Helmar Lerski, Working Hands: Photographs from the 1940s (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 2011), 31, 35, 37 for stereotypically Jewish faces, as opposed to non-stereotypically Jewish faces, 53, 61, 67 [Hebrew]. 52. Raz, A Yemenite Portrait, 116. 53. On contemporary art, see Galia Bar Or, “Hebrew Work,” in “Hebrew Work”: The Disregarded Gaze in the Canon of Israeli Art, ed. Galia Bar Or (Ein Harod: Museum of Art, 1998), 11. 54. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 48 and 49. 55. Ibid., 52. 56. Ibid., 53. 57. Feuillie, “Helmar Lerski,” 11.

CHAPTER THREE 1. Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish People (New York: YIVO, 1946), 240. 2. In the current context I am also less interested in the possible intricacies of Fischer’s outlook on race. See Bernhard Gessler, Eugen Fischer (1874– 1967): Leben und Werk des Freiburger Anatomen, Anthropologen und Rassenhygienikers bis 1927 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2000). The earlier biography by Niels Loesch, titled Race as Construct, is even more problematic (Niels C. Lösch, Rasse als Konstrukt: Leben und Werk Eugen Fischers [Lausanne: Peter Lang, 1997]). The best treatment of the development of Fischer’s ideas on race is Amir Teicher’s master’s thesis, “Eugen Fischer’s Scientific Purview: The Development of a Scientific Concept and the Interrelationship Among Science, Society, and Politics in Germany, 1913–1936” (Master’s thesis, Tel Aviv University, 2008) [Hebrew]. See also Teicher’s Social Mendelism: Genetics and the Politics of Race in Germany, 1900–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 36–40. Fischer’s photography has, surprisingly, garnered even less scholarship than have his ideas on race. The only sustained treatment can be found in

Kathryn Alice Steinbock’s dissertation, “Crisis and Classification: Photographic Portrait Typologies in Early 20th-Century Germany” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2011), though she focuses on the early phase of his career. 3. Fischer discusses his use of the term Bastard in a footnote: Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen (Jena: G. Fischer, 1913), 138. 4. Ibid., 58. 5. Ibid., 57–58. 6. Fischer ends “Das Problem der Rassenkreuzung beim Menschen” calling for the adoption of a methodology for the anthropological study of families. Eugen Fischer, “Das Problem der Rassenkreuzung beim Menschen,” Naturwissenschaften 1.1007–1009 (1913): 30. 7. Fischer, Die Rehobother Bastards, 318. 8. Eugen Fischer and Hans F. K. Günther, Deutsche Köpfe nordischer Rasse: 50 Abbildungen mit Geleitworten (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1927). On Günther, see Alan Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 25–41, and my Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 117–55. 9. Eugen Fischer, “Neue Rehobother Bastardstudien,” Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 37.2 (1938): 127–39. On Hans Lichtenecker’s work in southwest Africa, see Annette Hoffmann, “Glaubwürdige Inszienierungen: Die Produktion von Abformungen in der Polizeistation von Keetmanshoop in August 1931,” in Sensible Sammlungen: Aus dem anthropologischen Depot, ed. Margit Berner, Annette Hoffmann, and Britta Lange (Hamburg: Depot, 2011), 61–87. The most famous use of photography for the exploration of aging—focusing on family rather than race, situated in art rather than science, and surely relying on and reinforcing class-based, racial, and gendered assumptions about beauty as it depicts four able-bodied, healthy-looking, apparently middle-class white women over the years—is Nicholas Nixon’s (loving and affectionate) The Brown Sisters: Forty Years (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014). 10. Hoffmann, “Glaubwürdige Inszienierungen,” 231, n. 2. 11. Other examples include Abteilung III, Re-

Notes to Pages 99–104   211 positur: 94, Bestell-Nr.: 39, and Abteilung III, Repositur: 94, Bestell-Nr.: 40 Vol. 1. 12. Viktor Lebzelter, “Über Khoisanmischlinge in Südwestafrika,” Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 34 (1934), Festband Eugen Fischer, ed. Otto Aichel and Otmar von Verschuer, tables xi and xii. 13. Gustav Perret Tafel XXIX; Gustav Perret, “Cro-Magnon-Typen vom Neolitikum bis heute,” Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 37 (1937): 1–100. 14. See Volker Strähle, “‘Rassenforschung’ in Dahlem: Von der Kolonialwissenschaft zur Ausrottungspolitik—das ‘Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik’ (1927–1945),” berlin-postkolonial, 2015, http:// www.berlin-postkolonial.de/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=35:ihnestrasse-22&catid=11:steglitz-zehlendorf (accessed August 2017). 15. Wolfgang Abel, “Über Europäer-Marokkaner- und Europäer-Annamiten-Kreuzungen,” Zeitschrift für Morphologie und Anthropologie 36 (1937): 311–29, and “Bastarde am Rhein,” Neues Volk 2 (1934): 2, 6. Abel was Fischer’s student, an assistant in Fischer’s Dahlem institute, and an ardent Nazi; he took an active part in the sterilization of the children and mothers in the population he studied, and he made anthropological studies (including photographs) of prisoners of war during World War II. 16. On the relationship to Dutch painting, see also Steinbock, “Crisis and Classification,” 97–98. 17. Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, eds., Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (Munich: Lehmanns, 1921), 4:290–91. 18. Eugen Fischer, “Racial Origin and Earliest Racial History of the Hebrews,” pamphlet translated and reprinted by Liberty Bell Publishers (Reedy, WV, 1983), 12. 19. In 1950 Harry Suchalla provided a description of Fischer’s request and their travel. Quoted in Hans-Walter Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen: Das Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik, 1927–1945 (Göttingen: Wallerstein, 2005), 447. According to Suchalla, after he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, the material in its entirety remained in his apartment until the autumn of 1944. For the

administrative and financial details, see Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen, 446, n. 398. 20. Ibid., 448 and n. 401. The whereabouts of the handprints and fingerprints are no longer traceable. The anonymous forms for 169 of the “Lodz Jews” can, however, still be found in Geipel’s estate at the Max Planck Institute. 21. Fischer’s letter of June 10, 1944, to Rosenberg is quoted in Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen, 448. 22. Ibid., 445. 23. The question of the relationship between Kittel’s scholarship and his politics is arguably even harder than for Fischer, as Kittel was the founder and coeditor of the Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1933–1942), which appeared in English translation as the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1964). This ten-volume encyclopedia remains in use to this day in the fields of theology, Jewish history, and early Christianity. The most comprehensive treatment of Kittel remains Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz’s Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft vor der Judenfrage. G. Kittels theologische Arbeit im Wandel deutscher Geschichte (Munich: Kaiser, 1980). 24. Schmuhl, Grenzüberschreitungen, 444. On Lemkin and the history of Völkermord (murder of peoples), see Phillippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2017), 179. 25. Gerhard Kittel, Die Judenfrage (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1933). There was close coordination among the political, intellectual, and scientific fields: Fischer (in the science of inheritance) and Kittel (in biblical studies) recap the ideology of the necessary total extermination (Vernichtung) of the racial Jewish enemy (Feind) that was openly and explicitly formulated in, among other contexts, law (Carl Schmitt) and philosophy (Martin Heidegger) in 1933–34. See Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), in particular the chapter “Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Alfred Baeumler: The Struggle Against the Enemy and His Extermination,” 151–72. 26. See Dirk Rupnow, “Annihilating—Preserving—Remembering. The ‘Aryanization’ of Jewish History and Memory During the Holocaust,”

212   Notes to Pages 104–116 in Cultural Memories: The Geographical Point of View, ed. Peter Meusburger, Michael Heffernan, and Edgar Wunder (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 189–200. 27. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 33. 28. Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 3. 29. Eugen Fischer and Gerhard Kittel, Das antike Weltjudentum. Tatsachen, Texte, Bilder (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1943), 113. 30. De generis humani varietate nativa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1795), 3d ed., vol. 2, 142. 31. Fischer and Kittel, Das antike Weltjudentum, 92. 32. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 46. 33. Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 209–25. 34. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kunst und Rasse (Munich: Lehmann, 1928). 35. A different but related connection among art, medicine, and race was featured in a publication that appeared between the 1928 and 1943 books, namely Entartete Kunst, which appeared in 1937 and in which paintings by the mentally ill, collected by the psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn, were reproduced next to paintings by modern artists, again to suggest their shared structure. On Prinzhorn in this context, see Bettina Brand-Claussen, “Das ‘Museum für pathologische Kunst’ in Heidelberg. Von den Anfängen bis 1945,” in Wahnsinnige Schönheit, Prinzhorn-Sammlung, Ausstellungskatalog Osnabrück, Kulturhistorisches Museum (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 1997), 6–23. 36. For the standard English translation, see The Babylonian Talmud: Seder Nezikin in Four Volumes, trans. Isidore Epstein (London: Soncino, 1960), 4:53–54. 37. Hermann L. Strack and Paul Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch (Munich: Oskar Beck, 1922), I, 832–33. 38. See Alyssa M. Gray, “The Power Conferred by Distance from Power: Redaction and Meaning in b. A.Z. 10a–10b.,” in Creation and Composition:

The Contribution of the Bavli Redactors (Stammaim) to the Aggada, ed. Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 23–69, and particularly 53–60. 39. Moshe Barasch, “The Face of Evil: On the Afterlife of the Classical Theatre of the Mask,” Imago Hominis: Studies in the Language of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 100. 40. Aristotle, Poetics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. and with an introduction by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1459. 41. The identification of ancient sculptures as Jewish based on antisemitic visual and physiognomic assumptions is not limited to antisemitic scholarship. See “How to Recognize a Jew,” Israel Museum Journal 2 (1993): 81–84. 42. Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” Representations 80 (Autumn 2002): 99–118. 43. This corroborates Mary Bergstein’s contention that “all fabricated visual images, including photographs, even as they function as representations, are primarily cultural conceptions rather than simple illustrations or reflections of ideas already in force.” See her “Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture,” Art Bulletin 74. 3 (1992): 498. 44. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 50. 45. Cf. http://medgen.genetics.utah.edu/photographs.htm (accessed September 2021). 46. Jürgen Kunze and Irmgard Nippert, eds., Genetics and Malformation in Art (Berlin: Grosse, 1986). Race is absent from the images but present in the text, semantically connecting the fictitious to the real. The author first mentions race in the context of the Greeks’ invention of “monstrous” (3) or nonexistent (5) races; later refers to genetically malformed dwarves, Negroes, and fools in the seventeenth century (8); goes on to introduce Francis Galton’s eugenics, “when eugenic conceptions served racial and political purposes especially in Nazi Germany” (12); and ends by recoupling genetic deformation and race, stating: “In Nazi Germany, humans with birth defects and genetic diseases, along with members of so-called ‘inferior races’ (especially Jews and Gypsies), [were subjected] to euthanasia and genocide during World War II” (12). (Various errors in the English of the catalog

Notes to Pages 117–121   213 are corrected here, including the fact that the words “Jews” and “Gypsies” were spelled with lowercase letters.) Note the ambiguity with regard to the status of race—as politically wrong and (biologically) fictitious or as (biologically) real—an ambiguity that is epistemologically unavoidable if the genetic specialist cannot conceptually and visually exclude racial from other genetic categories. 47. Siegfried Kracauer touches on this capacity of photography in his 1927 essay “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1995), 47–64. See also Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (1999): 117–45, for a discussion of Richter in a related context. 48. Eugen Fischer, Begegnungen mit Toten: Aus den Erinnerungen eines Anatomen (Freiburg: Hans Ferdinand Schulz, 1959), 9. 49. André Malraux, Le Musée imaginaire (1954; repr. Paris: Gallimard, 1965). For his illuminating discussion of photography, see the English translation, Museum Without Walls, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Francis Price (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967), 77–111.

CHAPTER FOUR 1. On Frank’s influence on photography in the second half of the twentieth century, see, for instance, the quotations gathered in note 1 of Lili Corbus Bezner, Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 270. For a close study of transformation in the reception of The Americans, see Tina Olsin Lent, “Situating ‘The Americans’: Robert Frank and the Transformation of American Photography” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 1994), and Stuart Robert Alexander, “The Criticism of Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’” (Master’s thesis, University of Arizona, 1986). 2. While Kahn’s archive was comprised of close to seventy thousand photographs, it is estimated that Steichen chose the photographs for the exhibition from roughly six million photographs. Carrie Suhr, “The Family of Man and The Americans: Photographic Perspectives of America in the 1950s” (Bachelor’s thesis, Amherst College,

1992), 6. While some photographers and Frank scholars prefer the photography Frank made after The Americans, the album is more important with regard to the trajectory of photography and of ideologies of vision. 3. On Frank and The Family of Man, see John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 [ex. cat.] (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 16–20; Mark Hinderaker, “The Family of Man and The Americans,” Photography Forum 2.4 (September 1980): 23–28; Suhr, “The Family of Man and The Americans”; Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 155–82; Stuart Alexander, “Robert Frank and Edward Steichen,” and Anne Wilkes Tucker, “Robert Frank and Louis Faurer,” in Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans Expanded Edition, ed. Sarah Greenough et al. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art/Steidl, 2009), 44–52; Jonathan Day, Robert Frank’s “The Americans”: The Art of Documentary Photography (Bristol: Intellect, 2011), 107–11; Kristen Gresh, “The European Roots of The Family of Man,” History of Photography 29.4 (2005): 331–43. Frank also expressed his disregard for human dignity, stating: “I don’t have any respect for anybody that’s in front of my camera. I use them. I manipulate them to suit my purposes. I don’t tell them the truth” (in Dennis Wheeler, “Robert Frank Interviewed,” Criteria 3.2 [1977]: 7). The undermining of humanist dogma, I argue, is at the heart of Frank’s powerful democratic influence. 4. See Ian Jeffrey, “Dystopie und danach,” in Essays über: Robert Frank, ed. Urs Stahel et al. (Winterthur: Steidl, 2005), 63. 5. One early critic accused Frank of being “willing to let his pictures be used to spread hatred among nations”; could this accusation also have been leveled at Kahn’s photographic archive? Greil Marcus and John Cohen, There Is No Eye: John Cohen Photographs (New York: PowerHouse Books, 2006), 106. For a fascinating history of the notion of photography as a universal language, which is particularly hostile to Steichen and The Family of Man, see Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Photography Against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983 (London: Mack, 2016), 77–101, particularly 80–96. 6. Gilles Mora, “Von Walker Evans zu Robert

214   Notes to Pages 122–127 Frank: eine Linie, die sich verläuft,” in Essays über: Robert Frank, ed. Stahel et al., 40. 7. Day, Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” 108. 8. Frank, quoted in Robert Frank: From New York to Nova Scotia, ed. Anne Wilkes Tucker and Philip Brookman (Boston: Little, Brown/ Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, 1986), 83. According to Martin Gasser, like other Swiss of his generation, Frank also toured and took photographs of deprived and destroyed Europe (but those photographs clearly did not gain the importance the album did). See Gasser, “Zurich to New York: ‘Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice . . . ,’” in Robert Frank: Moving Out, ed. Sarah Greenough and Philip Brookman (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1994), 46. 9. Nevertheless, the album’s overdetermination also allows for it to be interpreted in the opposite way, as the quintessential expression of photography as an American national ideology. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 272–78. 10. Georg Seeßlen, “Zeit-Bilder, Lebens-Bilder— Anmerkungen zu den Filmen von Robert Frank,” in Essays über: Robert Frank, ed. Stahel et al., 99. 11. Sarah Greenough, “Resisting Intelligence: Zurich to New York,” in Looking In, ed. Sarah Greenough et al., 3. 12. Greenough, “Resisting Intelligence,” 3. 13. “It made me less afraid and better able to cope with different situations later because I lived through that fear. Being Jewish and living with the threat of Hitler must have been a very big part of my understanding of people that were put down or who were held back.” See Frank’s comments in The Pictures Are a Necessity: Robert Frank in Rochester, NY, November 1988, ed. William Johnson (Rochester, NY: George Eastman House, 1999), 26–27. See also “Im Gespräch mit Robert Frank,” in Robert Frank Hold Still—Keep Going, ed. Ute Eskildsen (Essen: Museum Folkwang, 2000), 108. 14. Martin Buertsch, “Walter Lüthi,” Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, Band 30 (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2009). 15. Kenneth Stow, Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 16. Heinz Roschewski, “Heinrich Rothmund in seinen persoenlichen Akten. Zur Frage des An-

tisemitismus in der schweizerischen Fluechtlingspolitik 1933–1945,” in Studien und Quellen, Band 22 (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1996), 111. See also Jacques Picard, Die Schweiz und die Juden: 1933–1945: schweizerischer Antisemitismus, jüdische Abwehr und internationale Migrations­und Flüchtlingspolitik (Zürich: Chronos, 1997). On Frank within this broader context, see notes 4 and 6 in Gasser, “Zurich to New York,” 51. 17. Christian Schuett and Bernhard Pollmann, Chronik der Schweiz (Dortmund: Chronik Verlag, 1987), 540–41. 18. Gasser, “Zurich to New York,” 41. Gasser also emphasizes that, as “a tolerated foreigner,” Robert Frank was only allowed to perform volunteer work and could not enter any formal training program or earn a salary (42). 19. “This was directly after the war, one could only go to America” (Frank in an interview by Stefan Koldehoff; Robert Frank, “Books and Film, 1947–2014,” special edition of Süddeutschen Zeitung, January 1 2014, 64). 20. In Switzerland, a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt hung over Frank’s bed. James Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 234. 21. See also “Im Gespräch mit Robert Frank,” 113. 22. Jeffrey Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 459. The offer of assimilation, Alexander argues, is fraught with ambiguity: As individuals, members of marginalized out-groups can join the majority society if they leave the negative qualities associated with the group out of public view (they can practice them in their private lives). In practice, however, the majority society never forgets the negative qualities with which the group is associated. 23. Sarah Greenough, private communication, February 2018. 24. Frank intuitively understood the relationship between criticism and power: “The photograph must be the result of a head to head,” he stated, “a confrontation with a power, a force that one interrogates or questions.” Quoted in Sarah Greenough, “Disordering the Senses: Guggenheim Fellowship,” in Looking In, ed. Greenough et al., 124. Unlike many of the Jewish and non-Jewish photographers who were Frank’s contemporaries,

Notes to Pages 127–129   215 and who worked for weekly journals and dreamt of doing art, Frank was financially secure and psychologically able to pursuit his passion. Frank, says David Vestal, “lived down his Swiss middle-class background” (quoted in Bezner, Photography and Politics in America, 212, and Tucker, “Robert Frank and Louis Faurer,” 39). 25. Luc Sante, “Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac,” in Looking In, ed. Greenough et al., 205. 26. Blake Stimson, The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 109. 27. Sarah Greenough, “Transforming Destiny into Awareness: The Americans,” in Looking In, ed. Greenough et al., 184. 28. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 29. Gilles Mora has mentioned Ben Shahn and John Vachon in the United States and W. E. Smith in Wales as clear precedents for Frank. Mora, “Von Walker Evans zu Robert Frank,” 44–45. 30. W. S. Di Piero, “Hold Still—Keep Going: The Later Photographs,” in Robert Frank: Moving Out, ed. Greenough and Brookman, 270. According to Frank, by the end of the 1960s, “people would come by or send me photographs that looked like my photographs. Then I realized there was no more point. I wanted to move on.” Richard B. Woodard, “Where Have You Gone, Robert Frank?” New York Times Magazine, September 4, 1994. 31. Sarah Greenough, “Fragments That Make a Whole: Meaning in Photographic Sequences,” in Robert Frank: Moving Out, ed. Greenough and Brookman, 111. Greenough, “Resisting Intelligence,” 5; for an analysis of what Frank learned from his Swiss mentors, ibid., 11–15; on Brodovitch’s opening of Frank to experimentation in New York, at Harper’s Bazaar, 17–18. 32. On Frank’s “indecisive moment,” see Louise Abbott and others cited in Bezner, Photography and Politics in America, 276, n. 47. On Frank vis-à-vis American art photography of “the perfect print, the sharp, previsualized image that captured ‘supreme instants’—moments when light, form, and the photographer’s techniques were in such perfect harmony that formally a ‘beautiful’ picture was created,” see Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream, 241. Tod Papageorge, “Walker Evans and Robert Frank—An Essay on Influence,” http://

www.americansuburbx.com/2010/07/theory-walker-evans-and-robert-frank.html (accessed June 2017; originally published in 1981 in conjunction with an exhibition at Yale University Art Gallery), is particularly important because it ties the breaking of assumptions and conventions to photography’s simplification of the world (5). Frank himself refers to this in terms of “unlearning” in Robert Enright, “An Interview with Robert Frank: Frank Speaking,” Border Crossings 16.4 [64] (1997): 20. 33. Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art,” in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 19–27. Subsequent parenthetical page numbers will refer to this text. 34. “Life Announces the Winners of the Young Photographers’ Contest,” Life, November 26, 1951, 21, quoted in Greenough, “Fragments That Make a Whole,” 98. 35. Hinderaker, “The Family of Man and The Americans,” 28. 36. For analyses of the album’s technological and technical aspects, including the kinds, sizes and makes of camera, the development, the printing, and differences between editions, see the following: on Frank’s moving from the heavy, square Rolleiflex camera to the 35mm Leica and on decisions with regard to printing, see Greenough, “Resisting Intelligence,” 20, 21; on the printing, see the quote from Sid Kaplan, who printed Frank’s photographs from the 1960s onward, in Day, Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” 29; on Frank’s exploitation of the nature of the film, lenses, and paper available to him, creating “a light whose flares and haloes speak to his viewer’s inner vision,” see Day, Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” 39; on differences between prints in the different editions, see Sarah Greenough, “Blowing Down Bleecker Street: Destroying The Americans,” in Looking In, ed. Greenough et al., 316–19; on the evolution of Frank’s cataloging and categorization of photographs and its importance for understanding his exploration and editorial decisions, see Greenough, “Fragments That Make a Whole,” 100, 112, 116. 37. Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream, 222. 38. Enright, “An Interview with Robert Frank”: “I simply did not want to repeat what I had done.” 39. Greenough, “Disordering the Senses,” 120, 121.

216   Notes to Pages 129–130 40. In his Guggenheim application Frank wrote that “to produce an authentic contemporary document, the visual impact should be such as will nullify explanation”; quoted in Leslie Baier, “Visions of Fascination and Despair: The Relationship Between Walker Evans and Robert Frank,” Art Journal 51.1 (Spring 1981): 56. As Day notes, Frank was continuing in the tradition of Pablo Picasso, who stated that “it’s useless to paint what it’s possible to describe”; the art historian J. Clay, who observed that “beginning with Cezanne, modern art devoted itself to summoning this ‘unmentionable’”; and the prominent American photographer Walker Evans (for whom Frank worked briefly), who stated that “pictures speak for themselves or they fail.” All quotes except for Mitchell in Day, Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” 63; Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? 282. 41. Greenough, “Fragments That Make a Whole,” quoted on p. 106 (this is actually a misquotation, discussed in footnote 26 on p. 123). 42. Johnson, The Pictures Are a Necessity, 43, and Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream, 208. Together with Diane Arbus and William Klein, Frank “set out to photograph more hidden, subtle, or disturbing realities,” exploring the kinds of realities that were excluded from magazines in the 1950s (Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream, 210), “discovering the significance of the tacky, nondescript, scruffy bits of reality that most middle-class Americans ignored or thought of as ephemeral or totally insignificant at the time” (ibid., 233). 43. Edna Bennett, “Black and White Are the Colors of Robert Frank,” Aperture 9.1 (1961): 22. 44. John Tagg, “The Currency of the Photograph,” in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982), 117. 45. Quoted in Greenough and Brookman, Robert Frank: Moving Out, 12. Stimson discusses the inability to distinguish between the effect of the world and the radically subjective perspective of the photographer; Stimson, The Pivot of the World, 128. Frank also refused to create the illusion that the photographs revealed special, privileged information about the people he photographed; Guimond, American Photography and the American Dream, 243. 46. Robert Frank, “Black and White Are the Colors of Photography,” in Photographers on Pho-

tography: A Critical Anthology, ed. Nathan Lyons (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), 22. 47. Bezner, Photography and Politics in America, 2. Frank straddled categories in the visual spectrum, turning political topics into personalized apolitical discourse (ibid., 181), subverting controversial subjects by emphasizing the formal relationship of light and shadow (ibid., 183), and thus blurring the categories of 1950s American photography (ibid., 182). According to Allan Sekula, “Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist” (“Photographic Meaning,” 58). On changes in documentary photography, see Martha Rosler, “Political Aspects of Documentary Photography,” Camera Austria 10 (1982): 81–87; particularly important is the shift from the photographic landscape of the 1930s to the new documentarists who no longer sought to change the world but embraced its terrors and pleasures (ibid., 82). See also Tucker, “Robert Frank and Louis Faurer,” 38, on how published documentary photography intended “to make the picture seemingly transparent, as though a viewer standing next to the photographer would certainly have seen that scene the same way.” “Frank’s ascendancy into the modernist canon parallels this shift in style and taste, as his vision of personal fragmentation triumphantly replaced documentary presumption of truth and social action” (Bezner, Photography and Politics in America, 178). 48. On Frank’s use of serialization to reveal mystery in the everyday, see Greenough, “Fragments That Make a Whole,” 98, 102. On the enigmatic with regard to the album, see Jno Cook, “Robert Frank’s America,” Afterimage 9.8 (1982): 1; Day, Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” 104. Frank noted that his work was about the pattern more than the heroic or decisive moment, about people who perform repetitive tasks, “repeated banalities” (Brian Wallis, “Robert Frank: American Visions” (interview), Art in America [March 1996]: 76). On the use of subtle repetitions and variations in the creation of patterns, see Greenough, “Transforming Destiny into Awareness,”182. 49. Greenough, “Fragments That Make a Whole,” 106 (see also 114–15). 50. Sharon Sliwinski, “Visual Testimony: Lee Miller’s Dachau,” Journal of Visual Culture 9.3

Notes to Pages 133–139   217 (2010): 389–408. Subsequent parenthetical page numbers will refer to this text. See also Carol Zemel, “Emblems of Atrocity: Holocaust Liberation Photographs,” in Image and Representation: Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 201–19. For Miller’s biography, see Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 51. It is helpful to contrast “photographic objects” with “subjective photography,” which is “a type of photography in which the artist has altered the basic material of exterior reality by means of transformations suggested to him by personal vision of the world” (Otto Steinert, exhibition catalogue, Subjektive Fotografie [1951], quoted in Shelley Rice, “Beyond Reality: The Subjective Vision,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Michel Frizot [Cologne: Könemann, 1998], 669). Peter Galassi discusses the ambiguity of facial expression in Peter Galassi, Robert Frank in America (Stanford, CA: Steidl, 2015), 16. 52. Douglas R. Nickel, “Three or Four Kinds of Indeterminacy in the Photograph,” in Photography and Doubt, ed. Sabine T. Kriebel and Andrés Mario Zervigón (New York: Routledge, 2016), 17–18. 53. Personal communication. Others, including prominent scholars, also failed to be enchanted by Frank’s album. Ulrich Keller, The Highway as Habitat: A Roy Stryker Documentation, 1943–1955 (Santa Barbara: University of California Press, 1986), 43. When I mentioned this in a conversation with Tom Mitchell and Joel Snyder in Chicago in 2017, however, their genuine shock and rebuff indicated that they found the suggestion that some of the photographs were boring actually heretical rather than merely erroneous. 54. Robert Frank, “Robert Frank: Letter from New York,” Creative Camera 66 (December 1969): 414. Galassi analyzes the album in terms of the history of book serialization in Robert Frank in America, 32. Frank discovered the exhilarating power of the arrangement of photographs in the summer of 1939 at the Landi 39 exhibition. Greenough, “Resisting Intelligence,” 3. 55. See George Cotkin, “Robert Frank’s Existential Vision,” Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 210–21 (particularly 210–11). Like Samuel Beckett, Frank recognized that the artist has the responsibility to

chronicle alienation and despair, but unlike Sartre, he was careful to avoid becoming committed politically, because he was “suspicious of groups and rules and authority.” (Frank quoted on 211). 56. For a beautiful account of the photography of nothing, of the everyday, and of the banal, see Meir Wigoder, “Street Photography and the Everyday: Perlov as a Passerby,” in Studio113 (May 2000): 62–71 [Hebrew]. The Israeli film director David Perlov was mainly known for his documentary diary, and Wigoder, who focuses here on Perlov’s still photography, suggests that Perlov was probably not acquainted with street photography. Yet Wigoder’s discussion of Perlov’s photographs is the closest I have found to what I mean with regard to Frank’s photographs. Wigoder speaks about them as “boring” (63) and as communicating the “ephemeral [bat-halof ] quality of this reality and the banality that characterizes it” (69), of the “everyday as what is never seen for the first time and therefore flees our consciousness” (64), and that is “therefore both seen and hidden” (64). Perlov’s photographs “capture what is not happening and communicate the emptiness of our surroundings in our everyday life” (69). To achieve such photographs, the photographer must “empty himself of any dramatic intention” (65) to “respond, by way of lack of response, to everyday moments that have always existed, but are never seen” (69). 57. Personal conversations with scholars and photographers. 58. Because “people, relationships, human understanding, even nature were too complex, too ambiguous, too fluid to be summarized in one photograph” (Greenough, “Fragments That Make a Whole,” 109). Frank, then, was preoccupied with the problem of serialization and movement comprised of single images, which Sarah Greenough treats as a question that Frank solved. See Greenough, “Fragments That Make a Whole,” 96–125. 59. On the process of elimination and the negotiation with publishers over the layout of images in the book, the titles and texts in the French and American editions, and their significance, see Greenough, “Disordering the Senses,” 132–33 and 134–39. 60. Frank connects photography as fleeting to photography as “fixing something” by way of memory in Enright, “An Interview with Robert Frank,” 30.

218   Notes to Pages 139–144 61. Larry Clark, Tulsa (New York: Grove Press, 1971). On Frank’s establishment of distance, see Martin Gasser, “Robert Frank: Those Goddamned Stories with a Beginning and an End,” in Essays über: Robert Frank, ed. Stahel et al., 28; and Ian Jeffrey, “Dystopie und danach,” 63. This difference between the photographer being inside and outside could also be demonstrated with the English photographer Chris Killip’s album Il Flagrante, which is based on two years of living in and with an economically declining community on the northeastern coast of England during the 1970s and early 1980s. Killip’s photographs also show harsh social realities from within the situation. As for Phil (Phel) Steinmetz, Sekula (“Photographic Meaning,” 66) analyzes his modus as sometimes being an insider, functioning within the logic of the family, and at other moments working as an outsider, with the choice being made in each case according to the ideological responses he wishes to elicit. 62. Larry Clark, Tulsa, preface. 63. For an opposite understanding of Frank as close up and within the situation, a position of sympathy, intimacy and participation, see Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? 280. 64. On how Frank creates the impression of being close to reality, and the aura of reality, see Stuart Alexander, “La Photographie, enfin,” Les Cahiers de la photographie 11/12.3 (1983): 38, 40. On his creation of “near-far” or “deep-space,” see Ann Sass, “Robert Frank and the Filmic Photograph,” History of Photography 22.3 (1998): 251. 65. Greenough et al., Looking In, 33. 66. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 50. 67. Greenough et al., Looking In, 27. In talking about the concrete wall in the background of a different photograph, “Political Rally—Chicago” (discussed just below), Mitchell notes something parallel to my point here: It is “as if he [Frank] were looking for a motif in the world that answered to the material and optical features of his medium” (Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? 285). 68. Robert Frank in Tucker and Brookman, eds., Robert Frank: From New York to Nova Scotia, 66. 69. Quoted in Greenough, “Fragments That Make a Whole,” 218. 70. This photograph has been analyzed in nu-

merous contexts in the past, including in Day, Robert Frank’s “The Americans,” 44–45; Greenough, “Transforming Destiny into Awareness,” 179; and Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? 284, who emphasizes the breaking of the most elementary convention of photography: “Don’t cut off the heads of your subjects.” 71. Philip Brookman, “In the Margins of Fiction: From Photographs to Films,” in Robert Frank: From New York to Nova Scotia, ed. Tucker and Brookman, 83. 72. Stimson, The Pivot of the World, 115. Peter Galassi formulates Frank’s treatment of alienation in terms that echo Michel Foucault, as depicting people as “prisoners of their instruments of freedom” (Galassi, Robert Frank in America, 29). 73. Baier, “Visions of Fascination and Despair,” 57. Furthermore, “Frank exaggerates Evans’ subtle balance between invitation and reticence into a paradoxical juxtaposition of enforced presence and denied access. Thus, Frank deliberately calls attention to the viewer’s presence in order to frustrate not only the viewer’s attempt to participate in but also his ability to understand the scene depicted.” 74. These non-Marxist forms of alienation include alienation between subject and photographer/viewer; alienation between figures within the photographs; and alienation by background and class structure. In a related way Frank also uses light (black voids) to contribute to the sense of threat that pervades many of his photographs. Baier, “Visions of Fascination and Despair,” 59. See also Peter D. Osborne, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel, and Visual Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 130: “We cannot see what they are seeing and therefore cannot share their world. We must remain shut out from the events’ interior meanings. The social world is not disposed to reveal itself to some transcendent viewer. It remains in the possession of its subjects. . . . It teaches that all seeing is partial, circumscribed by self and specific location. . . . Nothing and nobody is linked to a totality or cause,” such as a desire for social reform, the state, or humanism. Alongside the deconstruction of the whole, the title of the album implies confirmation of a whole, which it at the same time challenges; it similarly undermines The Family of Man as a whole. 75. Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows. 76. Stimson, The Pivot of the World, 132.

Notes to Pages 145–151   219 77. See Jean-Claude Gautrand, “Looking at Others: Humanism and Neo-Realism,” in A New History of Photography, ed. Frizot, 613–39. Humanist photography is here characterized by “a certain generosity, optimism, sensitivity to the simple joys of life, an empathy for people in the street, caught in action, and for the symbolism of scenes which suggest a common sense of the wonderful” (613). In terms of genealogy, Frank responded to Cartier-Bresson, who himself was indebted to the Hungarian Jewish photographers André Kertesz and Martin Munkacsi. 78. Frank described his “incredible training” in New York “for the eye and the brain” and “how minute changes could transform the depiction of simple objects” (quoted in Greenough, “Resisting Intelligence,” 18).

CHAPTER FIVE 1. For a wider discussion of this subject, see Steven J. Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry: Memory, History, Identity (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 98–100. 2. In this chapter, and in Chapter 3, where atrocity is either the implicit background (through the “after” of the memory of the Holocaust, in this chapter) or the explicit context (through the archive of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, in Chapter 3) for the discussion, I was led—to conjure features of the history of photography that empirically and conceptually resist and evade representation—to introduce moments of speculative and subjective modes of thought into the account. I am deeply grateful to Jim Downs and Yael Sternhell, who pointed out to me the similarity of what I was trying to do with the work of the African American literary and cultural studies scholar Saidiya Hartman, who, grappling with interconnections between atrocities and representation in the context of slavery, developed the notion of “critical fabulation.” In her seminal article “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman asks: “Is it possible to exceed and negotiate the constitutive limits of the archive?” And her answer is: “By advancing a series of speculative arguments and exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities) . . . I intended both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the

impossibility of its telling.” Even though the empirical and conceptual difficulties with regard to the impossibility of historical representation are not identical, there are parallels between slavery and the Holocaust. I am inspired by Hartman’s courage in probing the limits of historical writing and at the same time impressed with her clear-eyed awareness of the tensions, limitations, and complications such a mode of exploration involves. See Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1–14; the quotation here is from p. 11. 3. Maya Benton, “Introduction,” Roman Vishniac—Rediscovered, ed. Benton (New York: International Center of Photography, 2015), 10–11. 4. Judith Cohen, “A Different Kind of Holocaust Photographer,” in Roman Vishniac—Rediscovered, ed. Benton, 23. 5. Cf. Carol Zemel, Looking Jewish: Visual Culture and Modern Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 102. Of the more than sixteen thousand photos that Vishniac claimed he took, only a few hundred were published during his lifetime. These pictures tell a very specific story of impoverished Eastern European Jews. The analysis of the still-existing photographic negatives makes it clear that Vishniac also took many photos of happy, prosperous, and successful Jews, but these photos did not become public during or after World War II. The published pictures were also partly put into constructed contexts. At the end of A Vanished World, two photos show a man and a boy in a way that suggests they are father and son. However, the negatives show that these pictures were taken in different places at different times and that there is probably no connection between the two, thus raising the question of how authentic the pictures are (Alana Newhouse, “A Closer Reading of Roman Vishniac,” New York Times, April 1, 2010). Vishniac became a pioneer in the field of photomicroscopy (his true passion, according to Norman Baker), but today that work is overshadowed by his photographs of Jewish life before World War II (Norman Baker, “The Curious Microscopist,” in Roman Vishniac—Rediscovered, ed. Benton, 297–300). Maybe the most interesting question for future research on Vishniac pertains to the relationship between Vishniac’s photography and his work in photomicroscopy. This discussion differs from Bernstein’s notion of “backshadowing” as “a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which shared knowledge of the

220   Notes to Pages 152–154 outcome . . . is used to judge the participants . . . as though they too should have known what was to come”: see Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 16. For a discussion of two Jewish Polish photographers operating in the 1920s in this context, see Carol Zemel, “Imaging the Shtetl: Diaspora Culture, Photography and Eastern European Jews,” in Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 1999), 193–206. For the relationship between these photographers and An-sky’s legacy, see ibid., 199–200. 6. Eugene M. Avrutin and Harriet Murav, “Introduction,” in Diaspora and Visual Culture, ed. Mirzoeff, 10. 7. For An-sky and the idea of “return,” see David G. Roskies, “S. Ansky and the Paradigm of Return,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), 243–60; Nathaniel Deutsch, “Thrice Born; or, Between Two Worlds: Reflexivity and Performance in An-sky’s Jewish Ethnographic Expedition and Beyond,” in Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse, ed. Jeffrey Veidlinger (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2016), 27–44. In returning to Jewish subjects and objects, thereby generating a sense of distance, An-sky fits the paradigms laid out by Richard Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 1998), 155–85, and Ezra Mendelsohn, Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2002), 118–49. 8. See Jeffrey Veidlinger, “Introduction,” in Going to the People, ed. Veidlinger, 4. On Jewish civil society in Russia more generally, see Jeffrey Veidlinger, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2016). 9. See Matityahu Minc, “I.G. Bloch and the Battle of Polish and Russian Jewry Against Discrimination,” Gal-Ed: On the History of the Jews in Poland 19 (2004): 13–27 [Hebrew]. 10. Steven J. Zipperstein, “Introduction: An-sky and the Guises of Modern Jewish Culture,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Intellectual at the Turn of the Century, ed. Gabriella Safran and Steven J. Zipperstein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 3–4.

11. Andrej Pavlovich Subbotin, In the Jewish Pale of Settlement: Excerpts from Economic Research in Western and Southwestern Russia in 1887 (St. Petersburg: Publishing of “Ekonomicheskii zhurnal,” 1890 [А.П. Субботин, В черте еврейской оседлости: отрывки из экономических исследований в западной и юго–западной России за лето 1887 года, СПб: Издательство “Экономического журнала,” 1888 Вып. 1; 1890. Вып. 2]). The first edition was published in 1888, the second in 1890. See also Gur Alroey, “Demographers in the Service of the Nation: Liebmann Hersch, Jacob Lestschinsky, and the Early Study of Jewish Migration,” Jewish History 20 (2006): 266–68. As Alroey demonstrates, Hersch and Lestschinsky developed sociological and demographic models on the basis of these earlier studies that directly corresponded to those formulated in Central Europe by Arthur Ruppin. 12. Brian Horowitz, “Spiritual and Physical Strength in An-sky’s Literary Imagination,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky, ed. Safran and Zipperstein, 116. 13. Gabriella Safran, Wandering Soul: The Dybbuk’s Creator, S. An-sky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3. 14. For an elaboration of this point in the context of Zionist thought, see Dmitry Shumsky, Beyond the Nation State: The Zionist Political Imagination from Pinsker to Ben-Gurion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). 15. Echoing the Russian populists’ call to “go to the people and tell it the whole truth to the very last word,” An-sky employed the talmudic quotation, “Go out and see what the people do” (BT Eruvin 14b) as the epigraph for his 1908 manifesto “Jewish Folk Creativity.” For an English translation of this work, see Haya Bar-Itzhak, Pioneers of Jewish Ethnography and Folkloristics in Eastern Europe (Ljubljana: Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2010), 27–74. 16. Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 123–25. 17. Corrin Zeevy-Weill, “The Search for Lost Innocence: A Biography,” in Back to the Small Jewish Town: An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 1912–1914, ed. Rivka Gonen (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1992), 16 [Hebrew]; Safran, Wandering Soul, 193.

Notes to Pages 154–156   221 18. Safran, Wandering Soul, 193–94. For An-sky as humanist, see Isaiah Trunk, “S. Ansky the Great Humanist of His Generation,” Die Zukunft 89.11 (1980): 341–43 [Yiddish]. 19. Safran, Wandering Soul, 188. 20. Ibid., 191. For Weissenberg, see John Efron, Defenders of the Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 91–122; Amos Morris-Reich, “Jews Between Volk and Rasse,” in National Races: Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840–1945, ed. Richard McMahon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 175–204. 21. As Shternberg noted, “It is extremely important for Jewish history to clarify the question of the Jewish race”: see Benjamin Lukin, “From Narodism to the People: S. An-sky—An Ethnographer of East European Jewry,” in Jews in Russia: History and Culture Transactions on Jewish Studies, History and Ethnography 3, ed. D. A. Elyashevitch (St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg Jewish University, 1995), 131–32 [Russian]; Sergei Kan, Lev Shternberg: Anthropologist, Russian Socialist, Jewish Activist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 216–18. 22. Avrutin and Murav, “Introduction,” 11–12. 23. For the historical context, see Marina Mogliner, “Between Scientific and Political: Jewish Scholars and Russian-Jewish Physical Anthropology in the Fin-de-Siècle Russian Empire,” in Going to the People, ed. Veidlinger, 45–63. 24. For Felix von Luschan’s photography, see Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 30–35; Andrew Evans, Anthropology at War: World War I and the Science of Race in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 150–78. For the Jewish context, see Margaret Olin, “Jews Among the Peoples: Visual Archives in German Prison Camps During the Great War,” in Doing Anthropology in Wartime and War Zones: World War I and the Cultural Sciences in Europe, ed. Reinhard Johler, Christian Marchetti, and Monique Scheer (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010), 255–77. For Franz Boas, see Ann Maxwell, “Modern Anthropology and the Problem of the Racial Type: The Photographs of Franz Boas,” Visual Communication 12.1 (2013): 123–42. For Rudolf Martin’s anthropometric photography, see Amos Morris-Reich, “Anthropology, Standardisation and

Measurement: Rudolf Martin and Anthropometric Photography,” British Journal for the History of Science 46.170 (2013): 487–516. 25. For Yudovin’s biography, see Carol Zemel’s book review of Photographing the Jewish Nation in Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture 6 (2012); Alexander Ivanov, Experiments of a “Young Man for Photographic Works”: Solomon Yudovin and Russian Pictorialism of the 1910s (St. Petersburg: Center Petersburg Judaica, 2005), 4; idem, “The Making of a Young Photographer: From Ethnography to Art,” in Avrutin et al., Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 29. For the broader context of Russian Jewish art at the time, see Ruth Apter-Gabriel, Tradition and Revolution: The Russian Renaissance in Russian Avant-Garde Art, 1912–1928 (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1987). 26. Ruth Apter-Gabriel, The Jewish Art of Solomon Yudovin (1892–1954): From Folk Art to Socialist Realism (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1991), 5 [Hebrew]. 27. Ibid., 6. For Yudovin’s development as an artist, see ibid., 8–9. 28. I rely here on Benjamin Lukin, “An-ski Ethnographic Expedition and Museum,” The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, https:// yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/An-ski_Ethnographic_Expedition_and_Museum (accessed August 2020). 29. An-sky himself observed: “Over 2000 photographs of ancient synagogues and interior decorations, Jewish historical buildings, monuments, types, domestic, etc.” See John Bowlt, “Ethnic Loyalty and International Modernism: The An-sky Expeditions and the Russian Avant-Garde,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky, ed. Safran and Zipperstein, 315. Benjamin Lukin estimates the number to be two thousand: Benjamin Lukin, “An-sky’s Way in Jewish Ethnography,” in Back to the Small Jewish Town: An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 1912–1914, ed. Rivka Gonen (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1992), 46. Isaiah Trunk puts it at six hundred: Isaiah Trunk, “Unknown Material from the ‘An-sky Expedition’ in the Years 1912–1916,” Galed 9 (1982): 8 [Hebrew]. 30. See Zemel’s review in Images, 3, and Ivanov’s analysis of the portrait of the “Rabbi’s family, Ostrog” (plate 10).

222   Notes to Pages 160–172 31. Valeri Dymshits, “Brothers and Sisters in Toil and Struggle: Jewish Workers and Artisans on the Eve of the Revolution,” in Photographing the Jewish Nation, ed. Avrutin et al., , 62. 32. An-sky published an article on “Blood Libel in Jewish Folklore” in a Russian journal within the framework of the widespread discussion of the Beilis blood libel in 1912: see Benjamin Lukin, “An Academy Where Folklore Will Be Studied: An-sky and the Jewish Museum,” in The Worlds of S. Ansky, ed. Safran and Zipperstein, 290. See Joachim Neugroschel, “Introduction,” in The Enemy at His Pleasure: A Journey Through the Jewish Pale of Settlement During World War I, ed. and trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002), xvi; Safran, Wandering Soul, 189. 33. See Alex Valdman, “Usable Past for an Uncertain Future: On the Historiographical Impulse of the Jewish Intelligentsia in Post-1905 Imperial Russia,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 16 (2017): 15–34. 34. Dymshits, “Brothers and Sisters in Toil and Struggle.” 35. A selective list of studies on gender in the context of Eastern European Jewish history includes: ChaeRan Freeze, Jewish Marriage and Divorce in Imperial Russia (Waltham, MA/Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 2002); Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 50–92; Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: Marginality and Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society, trans. Saadya Sternberg (Waltham, MA/Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 2004); Shaul Stampfer, “How Jewish Society Adapted to Change in Male/Female Relationships in 19th/Early 20th Century Eastern Europe,” in Gender Relationships in Marriage and Out, ed. Rivkah Blau (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2007), 65–83. 36. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brooklyn: Zone, 2007). 37. Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 1–76, photographs on 110–11. 38. Ivanov, “The Making of a Young Photographer,” 30.

39. Ivanov, Experiments of a “Young Man for Photographic Works,” 5. 40. Ibid., 6. 41. Ibid., 7. 42. Ivanov, “The Making of a Young Photographer,” 33. For Yudovin’s method of oil printing to give the photographs a pictorial flavor, see ibid., 34. 43. Ivanov, Experiments of a “Young Man for Photographic Works,” 9. 44. For Talbot’s role in the development of photography for scientific goals, see Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 125–26, 130. 45. In an album An-sky prepared in 1913 entitled “Photos of the Jewish Expedition Named After Baron Horace Osipovich Ginzburg, 1912, July 1– October 15,” for example, most of the 49 photos are dedicated to Jewish handicrafts. The album is held in the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) in St. Petersburg (collection 2152). 46. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 160; idem, “Theorizing Heritage,” Ethnomusicology 39.3 (1995): 369. 47. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 143–50. 48. Benjamin Lukin, private communication, August 2018. 49. Rivka Gonen, “An-sky in Jerusalem,” in Back to the Small Jewish Town: An-sky and the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, 1912–1914, ed. Rivka Gonen (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1992), 9 [Hebrew]. 50. Bowlt, “Ethnic Loyalty and International Modernism,” 314. For An-sky’s interest in the primitive in Paris, see Safran, Wandering Soul, 89; Mikhail Krutikov, “The Russian Jew as a Modern Hero: Identity-Construction in An-sky’s Writings,” in The Worlds of S. An-sky, ed. Safran and Zipperstein, 119. 51. Safran, Wandering Soul, 204. For Struck’s drawings, see Noah Isenberg, ed., The Face of East European Jewry: Arnold Zweig with Fifty-Two Drawings by Hermann Struck (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Cf. also Amos Morris-Reich, Race and Photography: Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876–1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 93–97.

Notes to Pages 172–194   223 52. Safran, Wandering Soul, 230–31. 53. Neugroschel, The Enemy at His Pleasure, 116. 54. Ibid., 6. 55. Ibid. 56. Safran, Wandering Soul, 249–50. 57. Ibid., 251. 58. Shahar Bram, A Memento: Poetry, Photography, Memory (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2017) [Hebrew]. 59. Harold Pinter, Ashes to Ashes (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 48–49. Compare with Samuel Hirszenberg’s painting The Wandering Jew, which graphically relates to the same associative level between Jews and catastrophe. Produced in 1899, prior to the Holocaust, it also demonstrates the interpenetration of photography and other forms of image. This is a thread running through these collected cases. 60. Stephen Shore, Survivors in Ukraine (New York: Phaidon, 2015). 61. Ibid., 8. 62. For another comparative analysis of Yudovin’s photographic and graphic work, see Zemel’s review in Images, 4. 63. David G. Roskies, ed., The Dybbuk and Other Writings by S. Ansky (New York: Schocken, 1992). 64. Safran, Wandering Soul, 269. See also Carmit Guy, The Queen Took the Bus: Hana Rovina and “Habima” (Tel Aviv: Yediot Aharonot, 1995), 47–48 [Hebrew]. 65. For a recent reassessment of the play and its production in the Russian, German, and emerging Hebrew contexts, see Shimon Levy and Dorit Yerushalmi, eds., “Do Not Chase Me Away”: New Studies on The Dybbuk (Tel Aviv: Assaph and Safra, 2009) [Hebrew]. 66. See Shelly Zer-Zion, Habima in Berlin: The Institutionalization of a Zionist Theatre (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2015), 36–37 [Hebrew].

CONCLUSION 1. Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 7. 2. Margaret Olin and I address this question in our “Epilogue,” in Photography and Imagination, ed. Amos Morris-Reich and Margaret Olin (New York: Routledge, 2019), 193–98.

3. Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 5. 4. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000), 8. Recent work on language as a communication technology moves in a similar direction, viewing language as a form of instruction of the imagination and advancement in the technology (language) as requiring increasing imagination. Daniel Dor, The Instruction of Imagination: Language as a Social Communication Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 27. 5. Flusser refers to the “apparatus-operator complex,” which drives all contemporary social and technological change. The term “complex” is used to signify that there is no substantial reason for differentiating between the operator and the apparatus, as the operator functions in terms of the apparatus. See Andreas Stroehl, “Introduction,” in Vilém Flusser, Writings, ed. Andreas Stroehl and trans. Erik Eisel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xii. For an elucidation of the term “apparatus” in Flusser, see Martha Schwendener, “The Photographic Universe: Vilém Flusser’s Theories of Photography, Media, and Digital Culture” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2016), 114. 6. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 59. 7. In the last of his trilogy on communication theory, Flusser determines that writing has little or no future: Vilém Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future? trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 8. From a historian’s perspective, it is also projected backward. In a similar vein, Kaes notes in From Hitler to Heimat: “The further the past recedes, the closer it becomes. Images, fixed on celluloid, stored in archives, and reproduced thousands of times, render the past ever-present. Gradually, but inexorably, these images have begun to supersede memory and experience. . . . They function for us today as a technological memory bank. History, it would seem, has become widely accessible, but the power over memory has passed into the hands of those who create these images” (ix). 9. Vilém Flusser, “Das Politische im Zeitalter der technischen Bilder,” Volkszeitung, August 17, 1990.

224   Notes to Pages 194–198 10. Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, 56. 11. Flusser determines that “the people that are shouting and sounding alarms today, the Che Guevaras and Khomeinis, and those who count as revolutionaries are really entertainers. They are spectacular, and the spectacle they present assists the images in dispersing us more and more effectively” (Into the Universe of Technical Images, 66). 12. From the vast scholarship on Warburg, I cite here a couple of important recent publications: George Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017; see also his Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018]), and Michael Steinberg’s es-

say in Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 59–109. 13. On the contrast between Flusser’s humanism and the self-professed antihumanism of Friedrich Kittler, see Peter Schaefer, “Vilém Flusser’s Philosophy of New Media History,” New Media & Society 18.8 (2011): 1391. 14. Flusser, “What Is Communication?” in Flusser, Writings, 4. 15. Flusser, Writings, 19 (emphasis added). 16. Luc Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). 17. Vilém Flusser, Post-History, ed. Siegfried Zielinski and trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2013), 54.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abel, Wolfgang, 99, 211n15 Adams, Ansel, 135, 143 Adorno, Theodor, 56 African Americans: Frank’s empathy for, 27, 147; photo­graphs in W. E. B. Du Bois, Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A, 168 Africans, in Fischer’s Rehobother Bastards and “Neue Rehobother Bastardstudien,” 88–92, 94–100, 102 Agamben, Giorgio, 200n9 aging, use of photography for study of, 94–95, 210n9 Akiva, Rabbi, 110 Albert-­Kahn Museum, France, 38, 46 Alexander, Jeffrey, 126, 214n22 Amad, Paula, 33, 34–35, 40, 43 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC), 151 An-­sky, S.: biographical background, 152; “Blood Libel in Jewish Folklore,” 222n32; collection of Jewish folklore and founding of Jewish ethnography organ­ization, 153–54; commitment to demo­cratic po­liti­cal values, 188; development of Zionist views in response to vio­lence against Jews, 172–73; The Dybbuk, 182–84; intent to create Jewish museums in Rus­sia, 156; “Jewish Folk Creativity,” epigraph, 220n15; and tension between Jewish culture and assimilation, 153. See also An-­sky, S., Archive of Rus­sian Jewry in Pale of Settlement An-­sky, S., Archive of Rus­sian Jewry in Pale of Settlement, 17, 187; dialectic distance from subjects, 171–72, 176; dispersion of archive photo­graphs throughout twentieth ­century, 155–58; estimated number of photo­graphs taken, 156, 221n29; goal of documenting

the “vanis­hing world” of Pale of Settlement, 149–50, 170–71, 176; goal of renewal of Jewish culture, 152–53, 183; interest in folklore and traditional aspects of Jewish culture, 11, 172; orientation to f­ uture, 184; “Photos of the Jewish Expedition Named ­A fter Baron Horace Osipo­v ich Ginzburg, 1912, July 1–­ October 15,” 222n45; and response to antisemitic discourses, 161–62; scientific view of proj­ect, 154; suspension of expedition ­a fter outbreak of WWI, 172–73; transformation meaning of ­a fter Holocaust, 117; use of archive photo­ graph for fund­rais­ing, 173; vision of role of Jews in ­f uture Rus­sian society, 54 anthropometric photography, 70, 88–89, 155, 167 antisemitism and racism: critical comparisons of antisemitic images to Lerski’s “Jewish and Arab Types” proj­ect, 65–72, 190, 191; and Jewish identity in postwar Eu­rope, 122–27; in photo­graph of Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews, 173, 175; response to in An-­sky’s Archive photo­ graphs, 161–62, 173; and scientific racism, 105; use of photography to support ideologies of, 21, 25; and World War I atrocities, 172–73. See also Fischer, Eugen; Fischer, Eugen, Das Antike Weltjudentum (with Gerhard Kittel) “apparatus”: Flusser and, 7, 8, 186, 194, 223n5; and subjectification, 200n9 Apter-­Gabriel, Ruth, 157 Aristotle, 4, 114 Ashkenazi, Ofer, 72 assimilation: era of, 168, 188; and Jewish-­Russian life, 153; Swiss discourse of, 124, 126, 214n22 Austin, John, 20020 Azoulay, Ariela, The Civil Contract of Photography, 207n66

226  Index Baier, Leslie, 144 Baker, Norman, 219n5 Barasch, Moshe, “The Face of Evil,” 113, 113–14 Barnes, Albert C., 207n62 Baron, Hans, 84 Barthes, Roland, 77, 133, 202n31 Baud-­Berthier, Gilles, 38 Baudelaire, Charles, 44 Baukus, Helena, 98 Baxandall, Michael, Patterns of Intention, 73, 209n41 Becher, Hilla and Bernd, 46, 48; control over photo­ graphs, 48–50; gas tanks in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, 1963–67, 48–49, 49; and serialization, 48 Behne, Adolf, Über “entartete Kunst,” 73 Ben Dov, Yaacov, Yemenite Jew with Grand­son, 82, 84 Benjamin, Walter, 85, 200n11 Benton, Ma­ya, 151 Bergson, Henri: Albert Kahn and, 37, 43–44; and “attentive recognition,” 44; “The Cinematographic Illusion,” 43; L’Evolution créatrice (Creative Evolution), 43; “movement-­ image” and “time-­image” in Matière et mémoire (­Matter and Memory), 43–44 Bergson, Mary, 212n43 Bern­stein, Michael Andre, 219n5 Bertillon, Alphonse, 46 Bialik, Haim Nachman, 183 Billerbeck, Paul, 110 black-­a nd-­white photo­graphs, association with historical past, 40 Blacks, Fischer’s definition of as racially inferior, 91. See also African Americans Bloch, Ernest, The Princi­ple of Hope, 53–54, 206n60 Bloch, Jan, A Comparison of the Physical Subsistence and Moral Condition of the Population in the Jewish Pale of Settlement and Elsewhere, 153 Bloch, Marc, 36 Blossfeldt, Karl, 48 Boas, Franz, 52, 155 Bolshevik Revolution, 54, 184, 200n11 Boltanski, Luc, 9, 187, 197, 198 Bourdieu, Pierre, Photography: A Middle-­Brow Art, 127 Bram, Shahar, A Memento: Poetry, Photography, Memory, 177

Brandt, Bill, 135 Brauer, Erich, 62 Brunhes, Jean: Archives of the Planet scientific director, 15, 20, 32, 33, 45; chair in h ­ uman geography at Collège de France, 36–37, 205n39; classification scheme for ­human geography, 44, 45–46, 54, 135; humanistic conception of geography, 45; on the Jewish minority, 206n51; lectures on Bosnia-­Herzegovina, 52– 53; orientation to f­ uture, 184; photographic focus on the typical, 20, 45; photography as “demonstrative proof,” 46–52; photography as objective evidence of subjective observation, 44–46, 50–52; and transformation of ­human vision through Archive, 55 Brunot, Ferdinand, 204n16 Buber, Martin, neo-­Hasidism, 172 Butler, Judith, 200n20 Camus, Albert, 135 Cartier-­Bresson, Henri, 128, 151, 219n77; “right-­ moment” photo­graphs, 136 Cassirer, Ernst, 84 catastrophe/rupture, 17, 27, 150, 178, 184, 223n59; postcatastropic perspective, 32, 34, 207n66 categorization: po­liti­cal, 189–91; psychological, 189, 191–93 Central Archives for the History of the Jewish ­People, Giv’at Ram, Jerusalem, 157–58 Central Eu­ro­pean racial photography, 88–89. See also race: racial-­t ype photography Chagall, Marc, 172 Chevalier, Georges, 47 Chevrier, Jean-­François, 73–74 Clark, Larry, Tulsa, 139, 141 Clauß, Ludwig Ferdinand: gender ideology, 94; Old Jew from Aleppo, 69–70, 70; völkische ideology, 69–70, 72, 76–77 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 39 Coen ­brothers, 135 Colette, 40 color photography technologies, 39 commercial photography, prominence of Jews in ­later nineteenth ­century, 14 communication: change in understanding of a­ fter 1945, 56; Flusser’s hierarchy of, 48, 156, 196; photography as means of, 54, 55–57 complication of vision, 19, 21, 30, 67, 138–39, 142, 148 control: and anthropometric photography, 90, 155,

Index  227 167, 170; and art photography, 134; of image, 11; over photo­graphs, 48–50, 133, 203n42; and transformation of vision, 44; two-­sided, 46 criticism, and power, 214n24 critique, sociology of, and photography, 11, 121– 22, 126, 145, 147, 185, 187, 192, 198 Curie, Marie, 37 Cuville, Fernand, 41, 47 Da Vinci, Leonardo, Mona Lisa, 29 Day, Jonathan, 121–22 Delamarre, Mariel Jean-­Brunhes, 40 demo­cratic/antidemo­cratic polarity, and photography, 8, 186, 188, 190–91, 196–97 Depardon, Raymond, 203n41 Der Querschnitt, 109 Derrida, Jacques, 56 Devi, Mira, 40 Dewey, John, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 11, 198 Didi-­Huberman, Georges, Images in Spite of All, 201n26 digital photography, 8 digital revolution, 57 dignity, h ­ uman, and photography, 22–23, 33–34, 120–21, 178, 213n3 dispositions, of photography, 18–20, 26, 27; complication of vision, 19, 30, 67, 138, 148; differing relationships of photo­graph and the real, 19–20; normal versus grotesque, 19, 20, 114, 132, 170 documentary films, colorization of, 40 documentary photography: and au­t hen­tic repre­ sen­ta­tion, 66, 129; changes in, 216n47; Frank’s transformation of, 16, 121, 128, 216n47; and social imaginaries, 115 doubt, about the truth of photography, 1, 6, 24, 131, 194, 202n31 Downs, Jim, 219n2 Dubnow, Simon, 153–54 Du Bois, W. E. B., Types of American Negroes, Georgia, U.S.A., 167–68; photo­graphs of a young African American man, frontal and profile ­a ngles, 168 Duchamp, Marcel, 84–85 Dudin, Samuil, 169 Dumont, Louis, 22, 23–24, 168 Dunant, Henry, 31 Dutertre, Alfred, 33

Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews (Ostjuden): ambiguity of situation a­ fter 1945, 125; humiliation and killing of, 1941 (Rabbi Ber [Dov] Erlich [Sloshny]), 173, 176; mass murder of, 177; photo­graph from antisemitic publication, 173, 175; Vishniac’s focus on, 151, 219n5; Yudovin’s image of, 151, 159–67, 170, 172–82 Ebner, Florian, 62 education: and exploration and inquiry, 197–98; and photography, 2, 192–93, 197. See also vision, and photography Einstein, Albert, 37 Eliav-­Feldon, Miri, 55–56, 206n61 Engels, Friedrich, 54 Entartete Kunst, 212n35 Eu­ro­pean Community, foundation of, 38, 56 Evans, Walker, 128, 216n40 “ex nihilo” objects, 134 exploration and inquiry: difference between folkloristic and anthropological modes of, 176; and education, 197–98; and relationship between photography and Jewish history, 12, 14; versus scientific experiment, 11; of “types,” 172. See also Frank, Robert “Face of the Nation” proj­ects, 65–70 fascist aesthetics. See gender: racialized gender aesthetics First Intifada, 1987, 14 Fischer, Eugen, 133, 137, 188; definition of Jews and Blacks as racially inferior, 91, 102, 103; and destruction of photo­graphs of Jews from private archive, 95, 103; Deutsche Köpfe nordischer Rasse (German Heads of the Nordic Race) (with Günther), 69, 91–94, 93, 102, 103; Encounters with the Dead, 118; gender ideology, 94; Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (co-­editor), 102; ideology of biological and racial in­equality expressed in photography, 11, 16, 20, 21, 22, 57, 87–119, 94, 120, 148, 190, 191; internal contraries, 22–23; and Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for ­Human Ge­ne­tics, 91; lack of compassion in photo­graphs, 117–18; mixed-­race families, photo­graphs and genealogical charts of, 89– 90, 90, 176; “Neue Rehobother Bastardstudien,” 94–100, 96, 97, 98, 99; observation based solely on vis­i­ble traits, 90–91; photographic intentions and social use of photo­graphs, 89; photo­graph of by D. H. Gewande,

228  Index Fischer (continued) 100–102, 101, 102; photo­graphs of Jews a­ fter outbreak of WWII, 102; post-­Holocaust reputation as racist pseudoscientist, 88; priority of bloodlines over appearance, 91; and racial characteristics in pro­cess of aging, 94–95; “Racial Origin and Earliest Racial History of the Hebrews,” 102–3; Rehobother Bastards, 88–92, 102; separation of racial/medical photography from anthropological control, 90, 115; Sophia Wienyaart née van Wyck, photo­ graphs of, 95–96, 97; spread of photographic practices by students and colleagues, 98–100; study of race in terms of Mendelian inheritance, 88–91, 116; support for “final solution,” 103, 211n25; Volk, 92. See also Fischer, Eugen, Das Antike Weltjudentum (with Gerhard Kittel) Fischer, Eugen, Das Antike Weltjudentum (with Gerhard Kittel), 16, 103–9; attempt to create image of eradicated Judentum, 5, 13, 16, 103–9, 114, 116–18; comparison of ancient Egyptian and Jew from Lodz, 106–9, 108, 111, 113–14; distortion of partial quotation from Talmud, 105, 110, 114, 117; and grotesque images of laughing devil, 113, 114–15; implication and implicature of photo­graphs, 105; Jews of Lodz, mea­sure­ment and photographing of, 103; layout strategy of pairing art objects with h ­ umans, 109–15, 116; legacy of photographic practices, 116–19; manipulation of photo­graphs of Jews, 110–15, 111, 112; photo­graphs of Roman masks as caricatures of Jews, 111, 112, 114; portraits from Fayum region of Egypt, 105–6, 106, 107, 113 Flusser, Vilém: background and biography, 3–4, 195; on ­f uture of writing, 194, 223n7; Kommunikologie, 202n29; Into the Universe of Technical Images, 185, 224n11. See also Flusser, Vilém, ­Towards A Philosophy of Photography Flusser, Vilém, ­Towards A Philosophy of Photography, 2–9, 18, 94, 115, 173; and “apparatus,” 7, 8, 186, 194, 223n5; on color photography, 205n23; and “decoding” of photo­graphs, 6, 7, 193; definition of photographic image, 4–5, 195; and demo­cratizing effects of photography, 188, 196–97; doubt, and medium of photography, 6; and freedom, 7–8, 186; hierarchy of communication, 48, 156, 196;

and ideology, 202n29; methods of discourse, 42–43; and performativity of photography, 5, 173, 187, 193, 194–95; and photographic literacy, 8–9, 194, 195, 197–98; and photographic matching of four-­dimensional world to two-­ dimensional abstraction, 4–5, 7, 104, 133, 140, 151, 177–78, 184, 186, 187, 193–94; photography and new form of imagination, 4, 133, 189, 193–98; and photography as changing the world, 3, 10, 149, 184, 185; and photography as component of real­ity, 1, 133, 185, 193–94; and photography as historical event, 7; and photography as technology, 9; and Walter Benjamin, 4; and world/”out ­t here,” 4–5, 7–8, 194 folklore, Jewish: An-­sky’s interest in and collections/writings of, 11, 152–54, 172, 222n32; view of as “cultural trash,” 171, 183 Foucault, Michel, 56, 186, 200n9, 218n72 framing of photo­graph, 130; Frank’s use of, 131, 140, 142, 144–45; Miller’s use of, 131–32 Frank, Herman, 124 Frank, Manfred, 124 Frank, Robert, 151, 155, 215n30, 217n60; avoidance of po­liti­cal commitment, 217n55; biographical background, and photography, 122–27, 214n8, 214n13, 214n18; decision to leave Eu­rope, 124–26, 214n19; empathy for African Americans in photo­graphs, 27, 147; filmmaking, 13; first “Flusserian” photographer, 16; Landesgemeinde Hundwill, 123; postassimilationist Jewish identity, 127, 146, 147, 190; rejection of Steichen’s ­Family of Man, 121, 128, 130; and “training” in New York, 219n78; understanding of relationship between criticism and power, 214n24. See also Frank, Robert, The Americans Frank, Robert, The Americans, 20, 156, 214n9; breaking of photographic conventions, 127–30, 135–36, 215n32; critical reception of, 126–27, 217n53; dystopian vision, 121; and expansion and complication of vision, 119, 138–39, 142, 148; exploration of nothing, 134–38, 193, 216n42; and facial expressions, 138–40; funding for proj­ect, 197; gender ambiguity, 145, 187; gender and race, connection between, 147; and intentional deficiencies and deformations, 128–29, 158; invitation and denial of access to viewer, 218n73; and “objects ex nihilo,” 140–43; perspective on 1950s American society, 126–27, 188; “pho-

Index  229 tographer jokes,” 142; and “photographic objects,” 16–17, 28, 121, 130, 133–34, 143–45, 148, 190; photo­graphs as both document and component of real­ity, 86, 129, 133, 143, 147; and photography “for its own sake,” 129, 148; reduction of three-­dimensional image to two-­ dimensionality, 128, 142–43; separation and alienation, expression of, 140, 142, 144–47, 218n61, 218n74; and serialization, 130, 136, 137–38, 216n48, 217n54, 217n58; and street photography, 134; and subjectivity and individuality of photography, 21, 23, 127, 129, 135; and “symbols,” 129; technological and technical aspects of, 215n36; undermining of categories of American photography, 216n46; use of black voids, 218n74; on visual impact of photo­graph, 216n40. See also Frank, Robert, The Americans: PHOTO­GRAPHS Frank, Robert, The Americans: PHOTO­GRAPHS: “Butte, Montana,” 138; “Charleston, South Carolina,” 138; “Chattanooga, Tennessee,” 138; “Court­house Square, Elizabethville, North Carolina,” 138; “Detroit,” 136, 137, 138–39; “Drugstore—­Detroit,” 145–47, 146; “En Route from New York to Washington, Club Car,” 139–40, 141; “Factory—­Detroit,” 138; “Los Angeles,” 143; “Metropolitan Life Insurance Building—­New York City,” 142– 43; “Parade—­Hoboken, New Jersey, 143–45, 218n70; “Picnic Ground, North Carolina, 138; “Picnic Ground—­Glendale, California,” 134–35; “Po­liti­cal Rally—­Chicago,” 143, 218n67; “Ranch Market—­Hollywood,” 138, 142; “St. Petersburg, Florida,” 140, 142 freedom: and determinism, 195–96; and ­human creativity and agency, 7, 185–86 Frey, Dagobert, “Dämomie des Blickes,” 113 Friedlander, Lee, 126, 142; “Albuquerque, New Mexico,” 133 Füssli (Orell) Photochrom, 42 Gadmer, Frédéric, 41, 47 Galassi, Peter, 218n72 Galton, Francis, 46, 155 “Garden cities,” 206n61 Geimer, Peter, 203n42 Geipel, Georg, 103 gender: in An-­sky’s Archive of Rus­sian Jewry, 162–63, 165–66; gender ambiguity, Frank and, 145, 187; gender and per­for­mance of

identity, 200n20; gender and race, connection between, 147; gendered assumptions about beauty, 210n9; and Kahn’s economy of proj­ ects, 40, 42, 187; racialized gender aesthetics, 71–72, 91–94, 165, 187; and social roles of photog­raphers, 131–32 Ge­ne­tic Clinic, Ha’emek Medical Center, Israel, 116 ge­ne­tics: Ge­ne­tics and Malformation in Art (Kunze and Nippert, eds.), 116, 117; Mendelian inheritance, Fischer’s study of race in terms of, 88–91, 116. See also Fischer, Eugen Ge­ne­tics and Malformation in Art (Kunze and Nippert, eds.), 116, 117, 212n46 genre, photographic: and “photographic objects,” 133–34; scientific, 152, 155, 167 Gewande, D. H., Dr., Portrait of Eugen Fischer, 100–102, 101, 102; juxtaposed with The Geographer (Vermeer), 101, 102 Goebbels, Joseph, 193 Graim, Mikhail, 170 Greenough, Sarah, 123, 129, 217n58 Grohmann, Herbert, 103 Günther, Hans F. K.: German Heads of the Nordic Race (with Fischer), 69; and racial components of German and Jewish p ­ eople, 69, 76–77, 85, 109 Habima Theater, Tel Aviv, 183 Hacking, Ian, 202n31; and changes in style, 9–10, 18, 188–89, 191, 198, 200n20; Historical Ontology, 9–10, 13, 192 Harper’s Magazine, 128 Hartman, Saidiya, “Venus in Two Acts,” 219n2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 200n9 Heidegger, Martin, 135, 143, 200n9 Hervé, Flore, 204n16 Herzl, Theodor, 81; Altneuland, 53; Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews), 54; Zionist movement, 15, 53 Hirszenberg, Samuel, The Wandering Jew, 223n59 Hoffman, Annette, 95 Holland, Fred, “Seven Last Words of Christ,” 209n22 Holocaust: and catastrophe rupture, 17, 27, 150, 178, 184, 223n59; effect on meaning of pre-­ WWII photo­graphs, 117, 170, 173–78, 184, 219n2; parallels with slavery, 219n2; photo­ graphs from liberated Dachau, 130–33 Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, 150 Horak, Jan-­Christopher, 65, 71

230  Index Horkheimer, Max, 56 Howard, Ebenezer, 206n61 humanism/post-­humanism/antihumanism, 34, 64, 71, 72, 82, 145, 158–60, 167–68, 190, 219n77 Hyppolite, Jean, 200n9 idealization, 63, 121, 147, 169, 182, 7184 identity, and photography: exploration and inquiry of, 15; and performativity of photography, 200n20; separation from appearance, 77, 82, 87; and “type,” 69; and visibility, 11, 13, 15, 139 identity, Jewish, in postwar Eu­rope, 122–27 ideology/ideologies, and photography: defined, 21–22, 88; gender, 40, 42, 94, 145, 147, 162–63, 165–66, 187; and methodological triad of photography, 20–26; and photographic objects, 1, 9, 18, 27–30; racial in­equality, 15, 87–119; and utopian thought, 34, 53–54; of vision, 18–26, 186; völkische, 65–67, 69–70, 72, 76–77, 208n20 imagination: photography as new form of, 4, 133, 189, 193–98; photography’s effect upon, 16, 115–16, 122, 191; structural change in, 194, 223n8 Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture, 156 intention, photographic, 7–8; and con­temporary art and culture, 82–86; and Lerski, 60, 71, 72–82 Internet and social media, dissemination of photographic images through, 15 Israel Museum, 157 Ivanov, Alexander, 168–69 Ivins, William M., 56 Jabotinsky, Vladimir, 173 Jakobson, Roman, “On Realism in Art,” 128 Jewish Enlightenment, 170 Jewish history: and catastrophe rupture, 17, 27, 150, 178, 184, 223n59; and general (non-­Jewish) history, 14; historical categories, 188; historiography, 14; and history of democracy, 188; and identity in postwar Eu­rope, 122–27; through cases, 12–18. See also antisemitism and racism; Holocaust; Yemenite Jews; Zionism Jewish history, and photography: attempt to separate the “new Jew” in Palestine from visual features, 13; and countering of anti-­Jewish images and ste­reo­t ypes, 170; and effect of Holocaust on meaning of pre-­W WII photo­ graphs, 117, 170, 173–78, 184, 219n2; histor-

ical scholarship on, 201n26; and image of Jew as extinct race, 5, 13, 16 (See also Fischer, Eugen); and redefinition of Jewish history and experience, 5, 11, 17, 147 Jewish Museum, Petrograd, 155–56 Jewish Orientalism, 61–64, 76 “Jewish type,” po­liti­cal category of, 189; effects of photography on, 170, 190–93; in Western imagination, 191. See also Lerski, Helmar, “Jewish and Arab Types” proj­ect; race: racial-­ type photography; Yemenite Jews Kaes, Anton, 223n8 Kafka, Franz, Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), 76 Kahn, Albert, Archives of the Planet, 119, 135, 148, 156, 172, 193, 213n2; accessibility, 34; and Bergson, 43–44; characteristics of photog­ raphers, 35; and Enlightenment ideals, 56; and Flusser’s methods of discourse, 42–43; gender and, 40, 42; and globalization and multiculturalism, 42–43, 204n8; goal of demonstrating h ­ uman similarities to promote world peace, 11, 15, 20, 21–22, 31–33, 44–45, 54, 87, 120, 188, 189–90, 197; goal of transformation of h ­ uman vision, 32, 33, 44–45, 52–53, 55, 127; h ­ uman dignity in photo­graphs, 33–34; Kahn’s agency with regard to the photo­graphs, 32–33, 54; Lumière autochrome technology, 38–40, 46, 54; orientation to f­ uture, 184; and pattern-­ setting, 54–55; and photography as means of communication, 54, 55–57; and photography’s ability to focus gaze on the “East,” 48; photos of architecture, landscapes, and churches and ­castles, 40, 41, 42; photos of bridges in Af­ghan­ i­stan, France, Italy, and Algeria, 47, 48; photos of entrances, 50, 50–52; photos of young boys, 50, 50–52; related network of proj­ects and institutions (See Kahn, Albert, economy of proj­ects); and serialization, 52; tensions and contradictions of proj­ect, 22–23, 34–35, 53–54; undefined po­liti­cal vision, 35; utopian concept of photography, 206n61, 207n66 Kahn, Albert, Economy of proj­ects, 187; as bridges between utopian vision and real­ity, 55–56; Centers for Social Documentation (Les centres de documentation sociale), 37, 38; endowed chair in h ­ uman geography at Collège de France, 36–37, 45, 54; National Committee

Index  231 for Social and Po­liti­cal Studies (Comité national d’études sociales et politiques, or CNESP), 37; Organisation de coopération intellectuelle (Organ­ization for Intellectual Cooperation), 37–38; Société autour du monde (Around the World Club), 36–37, 40, 42, 204n13; utopian garden, 36, 206n61 Katzir, Shaul, 14 Kertesz, André, 219n77 Killip, Chris, Il Flagrante, 218n61 Kipling, Rudyard, 42 Kirshenblatt-­Gimblett, Barbara, 171, 200n20 Kisch, Yoav, 203n41 Kittel, Gerhard, 16, 87, 202n31; The Jewish Question, 104; support for “final solution,” 211n25; Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, 211n23. See also Fischer, Eugen, Das Antike Weltjudentum (with Gerhard Kittel) Kittler, Friedrich, 18, 133 Koselleck, Reinhart, 199n8 Kracauer, Siegfried, 85–86, 117 Kramer, Jane, 178 Küen, Heinrich, 39 Kundera, Milan, Immortality, 52 Kunze, Jürgen, 117 landscape, dependence on gaze, 28 language, as a communication technology, 223n4 language of light: as antihumanistic technique in 1930s, 71, 72; Lerski’s use of, 66, 70–73, 209n31 Latour, Bruno, 60, 74 Lavrov, Petr, 152, 153, 154 Lazarus, Moritz, and Võlkerpsychologie, 24 Lebzelter, Viktor, 99 Le Corbusier, 206n61 Lemkin, Raphael, 104 Lendvai-­Dircksen, Erna: “Bauer aus der Erzgebirge,” 66; Benjamin on, 85; Das deutsche Volksgesicht, 65; differences from Lerski, 66; gender ideology, 94; pictorialism and photographic impressionism, 66–67; völkische ideology, 65–67, 72, 208n20 Leningrad State Museum of Ethnography of the ­Peoples of the USSR (GME), 156 Léon, Auguste, 41, 47, 50 Lerski, Anneliese, 62–63 Lerski, Helmar, 11, 125, 155; belief in “in ­every ­human being every­t hing can be found,” 60, 66, 74; belief in photographer as deter-

minant of photographic image, 15, 19, 74, 77; comparisons with “Face of the Nation” photog­raphers, 65–70, 71–72; controversy surrounding photography work, 60–61, 70–71, 84; and demo­cratic po­liti­cal values, 188; dissociation of image from referent, 15–16, 20–21, 58, 62, 74, 77, 85, 86, 129; early photographic practice, 209n22; filmmaking, 13, 71, 209n31; gain and loss of real­ity, 70, 71, 74, 86; goal of destabilizing prejudices of viewers, 69–70, 86; humanistic and pluralist outlook, 64, 82; intentions, photographic, 60, 71, 72–86; “language of light,” 66, 70–73, 209n31; mirror technique (highly contrastive lighting), 58, 59–60, 66, 77; “new Jew,” photo­graphs of, 81–82; optical precision of photo­graphs, 66; Orientalism, 61–64, 65; photo­graphs of ­people in natu­ral and social environments, 82, 83; photo­graphs of Yemenites, 69, 85 (See also Lerski, Helmar, works); prominence among photog­raphers in 1930s and 1940s Palestine, 58, 82; recasting image of single person, 58; and recontextualization, 83–84; self-­described modernist, 84 Lerski, Helmar, “Jewish and Arab Types” proj­ect, 58; audience understanding as grounds of failure, 25–26, 72, 86, 193; critical comparisons to antisemitic images of Jews, 65–72, 190, 191; intention to focus on original types, 65, 76; pos­si­ble series drawn from the photo­ graphs, 78, 78–79, 79, 129–30 Lerski, Helmar, works: Avoda (film), 61, 72, 81; “Jewish Heads,” 62–63, 69; Jewish Yemenite man, 69–70, 70; Köpfe des Alltag (Everyday Heads), 65, 74, 74, 76, 77, 83; Man, My B ­ rother, 59; photo­graph of John the Baptist’s head, 209n22; Portrait of a Jewish Yemenite man, 59, 59–60, 61–62, 64, 65, 71–72, 76–78, 82, 85; Scene in the market, 82, 83; Verwandlungen durch Licht (Metamorphoses Through Light), 65, 71, 75, 76, 83; “Working Hands,” Jewish collectives or working communities, 80–82, 80, 81, 87 Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity, 104 Levine, Caroline, 202n30 Lichtenecker, Hans, 94–95, 97, 98; Archiv aussterbender Rassen, 95, 117 Life magazine, 128 light: language of, 66, 70–73, 209n31; and mirror technique, 58, 59–60, 66, 77

232  Index Lilien, Ephraim Moses, photographic idealization of Yemenite Jews, 62, 63, 63–64, 64, 208n13 Linnaeus, Carl, 170 literacy, photographic, 8–9, 194, 195, 197–98 Livingstone, Jane, 129 Lukin, Benjamin, 162 Lumière, Auguste, 39 Lumière b ­ rothers’ autochrome technology, 38–40, 44, 46 Lüthi, Walter, 123 Magilow, Daniel H., The Photography of Crisis, 201n26 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 155 Malraux, André, Le Musée imaginaire, 118, 118–19 Mannheim, Karl: Ideology and Utopia, 54; opposition between ideology and utopia, 34, 53 Martin, Rudolf, 155 Marx, Karl, 54 Matz, Reinhard, 71 memory objects, 177, 178 Mendele Moykher-­Sforim Museum of Jewish Culture, Odessa, 156 Mendelian inheritance, Fischer’s study of race in terms of, 88–91, 116 Mendjeritsky, Tsyila, 156, 157 methodological triad, photography, 192; disposition, 18–20; ideology, 20–26; photographic objects, 26–30 Miethe, Adolf, Kaiserpanorama method, 39 Miller, Lee, 11; framing, use of, 131, 132–33; and photo­graph as documentary and as form of expression, 130; photo­graphs from liberated Dachau, 130–33, 131 Mitchell, Tom, 217n53 Mitchell, W. J. T., 129, 218n67 modernist German photography, 84 Moholy-­Nagy, Laszlo, and photograms, 84–85, 129 Mondzain, Marie-­José, 104, 108 Mora, Gilles, 215n29 Morris-­Reich, Amos, Race and Photography, 59, 88 Munkacsi, Martin, 219n77 Museum Folkwang, 62, 72, 78 Museum of an Extinct [Jewish] Race, Prague, 104 Museum of the Jewish Historical and Ethnographical Society (EIEO), 155, 156 Nachtsheim, Hans, 103 Namibia Scientific Society, Windhoek, Namibia, 95 Narodnik ideas, 170

nationalism, 13, 34, 188, 189, 204n8; “Face of the Nation” proj­ects, 65–70 Nazism, 58, 71, 122–23 neo-­Hasidism, 172 “new Jew”: attempt to separate identity from visual features, 13; formation of image, 58, 81–82 Nickel, Douglas, “Three or Four Kinds of Indeterminacy in the Photo­graph,” 133–34, 202n31 Nippert, Irmgard, 117 Nixon, Nicholas, The Brown S­ isters, 210n9 “noise,” 145, 147, 160 Nordau, Max, 81 nothing, photography of, 134–38, 217n56 numbers, of photo­graphs: in An-­sky’s Archive of Rus­sian Jewry, estimated, 156–58, 163, 221n29; in Frank’s ­a lbum, 130, 138, 156; in Kahn’s archive, 130, 156 “objects ex nihilo,” 140–43 Okuefuna, David, 38, 39 Olin, Margaret, 115 Outerbridge, Paul, “Egg in Spotlight,” 133–34 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 76 Pagis, Dan, 177 Palestinians, pre-­Israeli state: photographed as preconceived image of “Holy Land,” 61. See also Yemenite Jews Panofsky, Erwin, 84 Parr, Martin, 142 passport photo­graphs, and authentication of identity, 10 Passy, Frédéric, 31 Pasteur, Louis, 60 Peignot, Charles, 65, 76 perception, and photo­graphs, 2; built in to act of taking or using photo­graph, 25, 113; change in perception of object depicted, 24, 30; change in perception over time, 26; lack of documentation of, 24–25; and reconstruction of surrounding social and historical realities, 26; and repetition, 24, 203n39; subjectivity of, 6–7 Peretz, Isaac Leib, 153 performativity, and photography: and An-­sky’s use of photo­graphs of Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews, 173; and creation of relations between objects, 115; Flusser and, 5–6, 173, 187, 193, 194–95, 199n4; projection as, 69; and repre­sen­ta­tion and identity, 200n20

Index  233 Perlov, David, 217n56 Perret, Gustav, “Cro-­Magnon-­Typen vom Neolitikum bis heute,” 99, 99–100, 105, 109 photograms, 84–85 photographer: as determinant of photographic image, 15, 19, 74, 77; distancing from subject, 140, 144, 171–72, 173, 176–77, 184, 218n74; and “objects ex nihilo,” 134, 140–43; “photographer jokes,” 142; positioning on “inside and outside,” 183–84, 218n61; and question of owner­ship of image, 203n41; as reactive agent, 2; and social norms, 131–32; subjective perspective of, 11, 21, 23, 44–46, 50–52, 86, 127, 129, 135, 143, 216n45 photographic objects, class of, 2, 9, 26–30, 199n8, 217n51; and dependence on gaze, 28; and exploration of nothingness, 134; and genre, 133–34; increasing de­p en­dency on the photo­g raph itself, 5; and matching of image to world, 4–5, 140, 151, 187; and “objects ex nihilo,” 140; as outcome of repetition, 24 photography: as an event, 17; and “before” and “­a fter,” 149–50, 152, 176, 203n41; and categorization, 189–93; and complication/ transformation of vision, 2, 15, 19, 21, 30, 32, 33, 44–45, 52–53, 55, 67, 119, 127, 138–39, 142, 148; as component of history, 1, 9; and contingency and doubt, 1, 2, 24, 131, 199n2; demo­cratizing effects of, 8, 186, 188, 190–91, 196–97; educational capacity of, 2, 192–93, 197; and ideology, 20–26, 161; and imagination, 4, 115–16, 122, 133, 189, 191, 193–98; institutionalization of, 197; as instrument of critique, 147; and matching of four-­dimensional world to two-­dimensional abstraction, 4–5, 104, 133, 140, 151, 177–78, 184, 186, 187, 193–94; as means of communication, 54, 55–57; as new style of reasoning, 2, 9–11, 122, 186; and opportunities for questioning, 11, 185; as a philosophical technology, 2; relationship to real­ity, 1, 10, 19–20, 67, 72, 86, 133, 147, 170, 185, 189, 193–94; re­sis­tance to deconstruction, 110–11, 114; scientific genres in 1880s and 1890s, 155; and stabilization of the object, 28–29, 30, 203n42; and study of “race,” 65–70, 88–94 (See also race); “trained vision” methods in post-­W WI era, 167; and typicality and the exotic, 23. See also dispositions, of photography; identity,

and photography; ideology/ideologies, and photography; perception, and photo­graphs; performativity, and photography photomicroscopy, 219n5 Picasso, Pablo, 216n40 pictorialism or photo-­impressionism, 66–67, 168, 169, 209n22 Pinter, Harold, 145, 147; Ashes to Ashes, 177–78 portable camera, and changes in user of, 18 postassimilationist Jewish identity, 127, 147, 190 Pouchet, Félix-­Archimède, 60 Prinzhorn, Hans, 212n35 Prokudin-­Gorski, Sergei, 39 Proust, Marcel, 44 Quertfeld, E., Das deutsche Lichbild, 73 race: discourses of in 1920s and 1930s, 85; ideology of racial in­equality, and photography, 15, 87–119 (See also Fischer, Eugen); photographic study of, 65–70; racial-­t ype photography, 66, 88–89, 155, 159–62, 163, 165, 166–67 (See also Lerski, Helmar, “Jewish and Arab Types” proj­ect; Yemenite Jews) Radlov, Vasily, 155 Ratzel, Friedrich, 45 Raz, Guy, exhibition of Yemenites as photographed in pre-­Israel Palestine, 61–62, 64, 76, 208n10 real/reality/world “out ­t here,” and photography: differing relationships of photography with real, 19–20, 67, 72, 170; and matching of four-­dimensional world to two-­dimensional abstraction, 4–5, 104, 133, 140, 151, 177–78, 184, 186, 187, 193–94; and photographic objects, 4–5, 140, 151, 187; and photography as altering the real, 3, 10, 149, 184, 185; photography as component of real­ity, 1, 133, 185, 193–94; reconstruction of the real through perception, 26; and utopian vision, 55–56; and world/”out t­ here,” 4–5, 7–8, 194 Reims cathedral, details from, 113 Rekhtman, Ayrom, 173 Rembrandt, 85 remote control, and changes in user of tele­v i­sion, 18 Re­nais­sance, German debate about return to, 84–85 Renger-­Patzsch, Albert, 48, 84–85 repetition, and perception, 24, 203n39 return, to the p ­ eople, 17, 150, 152–54, 170–72

234  Index Retzlaff, Erich, 65; Das Antlitz des Alters (The Face of Age), 67; Die von der Scholle (­Those Who Till the Earth), 67; German man, 66; photographer of the Volk and of the Third Reich, 67; and photography’s direct relationship to the real, 67, 72 Rice, Shelley, 40, 42 Riefenstahl, Leni: gender ideology, 71–72, 94; Triumph of the W ­ ill, 72; völkische ideology, 72 “right-­moment” photo­graphs, 128, 136, 140 Rosch, Eleanor, 191–92 Rosenberg, Alfred, 103 Roth, Philip, The ­Human Stain, 28 Rothmund, Heinrich, 124 Rubner, Tuvia, 177 Rus­sian Museum, 156 Rus­sian photographic repre­sen­ta­tion of Jewish themes, 168–70 Sachsse, Rolf, 39 Safran, Gabriella, 162, 173 Saint-­Exupéry, Antoine, 129 Sander, August, 48, 208n10; Antlitz der Zeil (The Face of Our Time), 65, 67, 77; Benjamin on, 85; “Citizens of the Twentieth C ­ entury,” 67; focus on types, 49–50, 69; Innkeeper, 67–69, 68; optical sharpness with ele­ments of naturalism, 67–69; photographic study of German society, 65; and projection as performative, 69 Sante, Luc, 127 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 135 Schmuhl, Hans-­Walter, 103 Scholem, Gershom, 117 Schultze-­Naumburg, Paul, Kunst und Rasse, 109, 109–10, 114 Schwartz, Frederic J., 201n23 Sekula, Allan, 18, 42, 193, 218n61; “Photographic Meaning,” 202n28, 202n32; “two-­sided control,” 46 Sela, Rona, 61, 64, 76, 81, 208n8 serialization of photo­graphs, 20, 26, 48, 52, 130, 136, 137–38, 216n48, 217n54, 217n58 A Serious Man (Coen ­brothers’ film), 135 Shabtai, Yaakov, 203n41 Shahn, Ben, 215n29 Shaw, George Bernard, 39 Shneer, David, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes, 201n26 Shore, Stephen, Survivors in Ukraine, 178–79; from pages 116–17 of, 179 Shternberg, Lev, 154

Simmel, Georg, 44; and aesthetic experience of ruins, 29; and dialectic distance, 171–72; notion of social identity, 200n20; Philosophy of Money, 12; and Verdichtung, 24 Simondon, Gilbert, 18, 133, 202n31 Sliwinski, Sharon, 130, 133 “small difference” generation, 125–26 “small Holocaust,” 184 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 168 Snyder, Joel, 217n53 social/cultural photography, 155 stabilization: and history, 13; of the object, and photography, 19, 28–29, 30, 187–88, 191–92, 203n42; of perception, 6, 26 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 183 Steichen, Edward, 39; The ­Family of Man, 15, 118, 120–21, 130, 213n2; and universality of vision, 127 Steinmetz, Phil (Phel), 218n61 Steinschneider, Moritz, Wissenschaft des Judentums, 104, 117 Sternhell, Yael, 219n2 Stieglitz, Alfred, 39, 42 Stimson, Blake, 127, 144, 216n45 Strackm Hermann, 110 Stravinsky, Igor, Rite of Spring, 172 street photography, 126, 133–34, 217n56 Struck, Hermann, 172 Subbotin, Andrej Pavlovich, In the Jewish Pale of Settlement, 153 subjectivity, and photography, 193, 195, 200n9; and “apparatus,” 200n9; Brunhes and, 44–46, 50–52; Frank and, 21, 23, 86, 127, 129, 135, 143; and viewer perception, 6–7 Switzerland, and restrictive immigration policy ­toward Jewish refugees, 123–24 Szarkowski, John, Mirror and Win­dows, 144 Tagore, Rabindranath, 40 Talbot, Henry Fox, The Pencil of Nature, 170 Tanner, Alain, 60 Tchernichovsky, Shaul, “I Believe,” 82 technology: “apparatus-­operator complex,” 223n5; and Frank’s The Americans, 215n36; ideology, and photography, 1–2, 9, 19, 59–60, 187, 191; language as, 223n4; Lumière autochrome technology, 38–40, 44, 46; “philosophical,” photography as, 2, 10, 18; photography as, 9, 10, 19, 200n20; structuring of users and objects, 18; and subjectivity, 150; technological

Index  235 determinism, 6–7, 195–96; for vocal or visual identification and speech-­driven human-­ machine interaction, 203n39 Trachtenberg, Joshua, The Devil and the Jews, 113 Tversky, Amos, 13 Uspensky, Gleb, 154 utopia: defined, 206n61; and ideology, 53–54; nineteenth-­century shift from lit­er­a­ture to utopian platforms, 53; and photography, 14, 31; in science fiction lit­er­a­ture, 206n58. See also Kahn, Albert Vachon, John, 215n29 Vaisse, Pierre, 209n22 Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 183 van Gelderen, Martin, 84–85 Vermeer, Johannes, The Geographer, 101, 102 Vernadskii National Library of Ukraine, 156 Vidal de La Blache, Paul, 45 Virchow, Rudolf, 155 Vishniac, Roman, A Vanished World, 150–51; focus on impoverished Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews, 219n5; photo­graph, 1937, Jewish social space, 165; photo­graph of a shoemaker, Warsaw, 1937, 181, 181; sponsorship by American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC), 151 vision, and photography: complication/transformation of, 2, 15, 19, 21, 30, 32, 33, 44–45, 52–53, 55, 67, 119, 127, 138–39, 142, 148; ideology and, 18–26, 186 völkische ideology, 65–67, 69–70, 72, 76–77, 208n20 von Luschan, Felix, 155; type photo­graphs, 1903– 1914, 166, 167 von Steiger, Eduard, 124 Walton, Whitney, 204n8 Warburg, Aby, 191, 195; “Mnemosyne Atlas” (Memory Atlas), 55, 207n62 Weinreich, Max, 88 Weissenberg, Samuel, 154 Wiesal, Elie, 150 Wigoder, Meir, 217n56 Winograd, Gary, 142 Winter, Jay, 32, 35, 38 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 25, 200n11 Wolff, Paul, 65 Wöllflin, Heinrich, 44 World Wide Web, 31, 57 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 206n61

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 150 Yemenite Jews: and assumptions about racial ­constitution of con­temporary Jewry, 76–77; as image of biblical Jew, 61–64; photo­graphs of, 59, 59–60, 61–64, 63, 64, 65, 69–70, 70, 71–72, 76–78, 82, 84, 85; in racial discourses of 1920s and 1930s, 85 Yeshurun, Avot, 177 Yudovin, Solomon, photographic documentation of Jewish communities in the Pale of Settlement, 11–12, 17, 20, 87, 98, 117, 128, 138, 173; clustering of visual features, 27; comparison with Vishniac’s work, 151; cropping of pictures, 157; and dialectic distance, 27, 171–72, 173, 176–77, 184; folklorist approach, 153, 177, 189; ­future orientation, 184; and gender, 162–63, 165–66; graphic interpretation of photo­graphs, 179–82; humanistic treatment of subjects, 158–60, 167–68; image of Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews as traditional and observant, 151, 172, 179; material items, methods for photographing; merging of internal and external contexts, 161, 170; “photo-­impressionist” pictorialist portraits, 168, 169; post-­Holocaust transformation in meaning of photo­graphs, 117, 170, 173–78, 184; racial-­t ype and Jewish productivity photo­graphs, 151, 159–62, 163, 165–66, 170, 179; rejection of exoticization, 170; relationship between photo­graphs and real­ity, 170; scientific genres of photo­graphs, 152, 154, 167. See also Yudovin, Solomon, works Yudovin, Solomon, works: “An orphan sleeping in the synagogue,” 164, 166–67; C ­ hildren in a parquet factory, 1912–1914, 170, 171; Frontal view of Man, 158, 158; Group photo­graphs, 1912–1914, 173, 174, 175; Jewish blacksmith, 159–60, 163; Old ­woman, 1912–1914, 168, 169; Photo­graph of a shoemaker, 1912–1914, 180; Profile of Man, 157, 158–59, 165; Profile of old ­woman, 1912–1914, 168, 169; “Students in a Talmud Torah, Dubno,” 173–78, 174; Woodcut remaking of photo of the shoemaker from the series “The Past,” 181–82, 182; Young ­women (frontal view), 159, 160, 162; Young ­women (profile), 159, 159, 161, 165 Zionism: photography, and ideology and politics, 82–83; Yemenite Jew as conduit for biblical Jew, 62 Zweig, Arnold, 73