Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma

219 Pages·2002·3.62 MB·English

by  Ulrich Baer

S P E C T R A L E V I D E N C E
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S P E C T R A L E V I D E N C E
T h e P h o t o g r a p h y o f T r a u m a
Ulrich Baer
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or
information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the
publisher.
This book was set in Janson Text and Rotis Sans Serif by Graphic Composition,
Inc., Athens, Georgia.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baer, Ulrich.
Spectral evidence : the photography of trauma / Ulrich Baer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographic references and index.
ISBN 0-262-02515-9 (hc. : alk. paper)
1.Photographic criticism. 2.Psychic trauma—Pictorial works. I.Title
TR187 .B34 2002
770'.1—dc21
2001059611
Contents
Introduction:Toward a Democritean Gaze 1
1 Photography and Hysteria: Toward a Poetics of the Flash 25
2 To Give Memory a Place: Contemporary Holocaust Photography and
the Landscape Tradition 61
3 Meyer Levin’s In Search/Mikael Levin’s War Story:
Secondary Witnessing and the Holocaust 87
4 Revision, Animation, Rescue: Color Photographs from the -Lódz´
Ghetto and Dariusz Jablonski’s Holocaust Documentary Fotoamator 127
Conclusion 179
Notes 183
Index 207
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Acknowledgments
An early version of chapter 1 appeared in The Yale Journal of Criticism 7
(1994), and different versions of parts of chapter 2 appeared in South Atlantic
Quarterly96 (Fall 1997), and in Representations69 (Winter 2000). I am grate-
ful to Yale University, Duke University Press, and the Regents of the Uni-
versity of California for their permission to reprint these materials.
Kind permission to reproduce the photographs from D.-M. Bourne-
ville and Paul Régnard, Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière: Service de
M. Charcot(Paris, 1876–1880) and the Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière
(1889) has been granted by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medi-
cal Library at Yale Medical School. I am grateful to Mikael Levin, Dirk
Reinartz and Scalo Publishers, Klaus Malorney, the Jewish Museum of
Frankfurt (Germany), and the National Museum of Photography, Film, and
Television (United Kingdom) for permission to reproduce images.
I have gratefully received material support from the Remarque Insti-
tute at New York University, the DAAD–German Academic Exchange Ser-
vice, which allowed me to conduct research in German, Polish, French, and
American archives. A year-long fellowship from the J. Paul Getty Trust
made it possible for me to complete this book.
I am grateful to Esther DaCosta Meyer, Martin Morris, and Thomas
Lacqueur for taking an interest in my work. For comments on earlier ver-
sions of the manuscript I thank Susanne Baer, Cathy Caruth, Karen Davis,
Lance Duerfahrd, and Jared Stark. Michael Lobel and Eyal Peretz encour-
aged me to rethink key issues and over a number of years enthusiastically
discussed all aspects of the argument with me. Avital Ronell and Peter T.
Connor offered editorial and conceptual suggestions in the New York
viii A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s
seminar on issues in critical thinking. Bernd Hüppauf shared various in-
sights into photography with me. Chinnie Ding proofread the manuscript.
Roberta Clark’s unfailingly constructive and altogether splendid edi-
torial suggestions clarified much, and improved the entire book.
Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Niobe Way, for her unwavering
help, conceptual insights, and support of this work. Her capacity to see oth-
ers’ experiences in the most incisive yet respectful way is a daily inspiration.
Introduction: Toward a Democritean Gaze
To ask whether a photograph is analogical or coded is not a good means of
analysis. The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential
force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time.
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
The gesture of photography is the search for a standpoint, for a world view: it
is an ideological gesture.
—Vilém Flusser, Standpunkte
This book is about photographs that force viewers to consider experiences
that resist integration into larger contexts. It asks whether we can paste pho-
tography into the album of historicist understanding, as several critical ap-
proaches do. To stress the inadequacy of treating photographs as random
snapshots from an imaginary continuous loop of time and life, I focus on
images revealing experiences that have not been, and possibly cannot be, as-
similated into such a continuous narrative. Through analyses of these pho-
tographs of events and individuals that, for various reasons, have been cast
out of the forward-sweeping movement of history, I underline the urgent
need for a conceptual reorientation. Only if we abandon or substantially re-
vise the notion of history and time as inherently flowing and sequential will
we recognize what we see or fail to see in these photographs.
To be sure, these images hold no revolutionary or eschatological
promise to halt time. Rather, they expose as a construction the idea that his-
tory is ever-flowing and preprogrammed to produce an on-going narrative.
As roadblocks to an ideology that conceives of history as an unstoppable
movement forward, the photographs compel viewers to think of lived expe-
rience, time, and history from a standpoint that is truly a standpoint:a place
to think about occurrences that may fail, violently, to be fully experienced,
and so integrated into larger patterns. These images, taken by scientists,
artists, and amateur photographers for quite different purposes and uses,