Rescuing the gaze of the witness. “Testimonial photography” as a way of exposing Holocaust trauma

Abstract

In this paper, we dive into the possibilities that exist when trying to represent the profound pain the Holocaust caused, assuming that, after the Shoah, occidental societies underwent a rupture with the traditional ways (mainly artistic) of exposing people’s feelings or fears. The extermination caused such suffering that it became deeply embedded in the cultural imaginary, causing a trauma that led to a crisis of representations. However, next to this alleged incapacity of art (in a normative or aestheticizing kind of way), other approaches emerged to deal with the exposing of the suffering. One of them was the testimony, the narrative of a survivor’s individual experience, who were determined to tell their story to prevent the disaster from happening again. We suggest that there is also a type of photography, that we called “testimonial”- opposite the “propagandistic-artistic” and the “circumstantial”-, that constitute the honest way of representing/exposing trauma. We can find a clear example of this “testimonial image”, which is far away from the conception of photography as art, in the series of pictures taken by a group of Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in August of 1944. Through the barthesian concepts of studium and punctum and always taking into account Todorov’s “exemplar” use of memory, we analyze the images to prove that, like survivor’s testimonies, they involve the total subordination of the desire of producing an aesthetic object to the need of showing/giving proof -even if that meant putting their own lives at risk- of what was happening in the camps, and thus, stopping the massacre.