Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye

Zelizer (Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of the Collective Memory, LJ 11/1/92), who writes regularly for the Nation, has produced an interesting study of the relationship between photojournalism, memories, and atrocities such as the Holocaust. Zelizer argues that photographs became the major part of the journalistic record during World War II, when the reality of the camps could not be conveyed entirely in words. That advance for contemporary photojournalism has created a collective memory of the Holocaust. In addition, Zelizer questions the images' role in representing the past historically and in remembering the past collectively. She also links Holocaust photographs to how people present and perceive present-day atrocities, which are measured against the German horrors and vice versa. She traces the waves of memory about the atrocities and how photographs have been used since the 1950s. Much has been written about the press and the Holocaust, but this is unique in its focus on the collective memory. Recommended for media, communications, and Holocaust collections.AMary F. Salony, West Virginia Northern Community Coll. Lib., Wheeling
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Of all the photographs recording the history of this century, none are as horrifying and shocking as those taken in 1945 of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Zelizer addresses what she calls the mechanics of visual memory and historical record at their broadest level, and she explores how others, such as cultural critic Susan Sontag, have used those "atrocity photos" to link past and present. Among the questions Zelizer asks and answers are, How were those first images of the camps produced and presented? By whom and under what circumstances? How were they received and to what effect? When, why, how, and to what purposes were they co-opted into memory? And in what ways have they persisted as vehicles of collective memory? The author devotes a final chapter to the more recent atrocities in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal actions against the Kurds of Iraq, the massacres in Rwanda and Burundi, and the killings in Bosnia and Algeria, as well as the role that photography played in those barbaric acts. George Cohen

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