SPECTRAL EVIDENCE This page intentionally left blank SPECTRAL EVIDENCE 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. 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. Includes bibliographic references and index. Psychic trauma—Pictorial works.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 -Lódź Ghetto and Dariusz Jablonski’s Holocaust Documentary Fotoamator 127 Conclusion 179 Notes 183 Index 207 This page intentionally left blank 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 Quarterly 96 (Fall 1997), and in Representations 69 (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. 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, 2 I n t r o d u c t i o n arrest the gaze and captivate the imagination because they guarantee no way out of the photographed instant. In specific cases, this passive refusal of the image conflicts directly with the photographer’s intention to cast the lived experience of time as an uninterrupted process of unfolding. I focus my analyses on this tension in order to develop ways of seeing that might be considered testimonial.
All of the photographs examined in this book bring into view a striking gap between what we can see and what we know. The testimonial stance assumed here requires the strategic—though by neces- sity incomplete—renunciation of viewers’ virtually automatic predisposi- tion to link particular sights to familiar historical contexts and narratives. By reminding viewers that the model of history-as-narrative is a construction, the photographs in this book can visually stage experiences that would oth- erwise remain forgotten because they were never fully lived. From photography’s beginning in the nineteenth century to the pres- ent, critics have engaged various scanning mechanisms and theoretically an- chored reading protocols to identify “historically constructed ways of seeing” in an attempt to prevent the photograph from enmeshing the viewer in the medium’s illusion of a “frozen moment.”1 In the photograph, time it- self seems to have been carved up and ferried, unscathed, into the viewer’s present; critics don conceptual and explanatory frames like tinted lenses to master this uncanny impression, maintaining a proper emotional and cog- nitive distance from the subject in order to map the picture onto an episte- mological grid that structures the field between viewer and photograph.
The viewer is supposed to be safely grounded in the present over here, while the photograph is assumed to refer to a prior moment that can be kept safely apart over there. But photographs are unsettling. Some images bypass painstaking attempts at contextualization and deliver, straight up and ap- parently across the gulf of time between viewer and photographically mum- mified past, a potent illusion of the real. The illusion of a slice of time, as anyone who has become lost in a photograph can verify, seems to surpass what is commonly thought of as reality itself.
Before we can confront the images themselves, we need to grasp theoretically how it is that photographs can seem more real than reality itself. Certain critics have explained the photograph’s impression of reality as a mere mechanical trick, an artificial and deliberately staged “effect of the real.” By creating the illusion of immediacy, they argue, photographs hide the fact that the medium itself has fundamentally shaped the habits of look- Introduction 3 ing we employ to establish an event’s veracity. In spite of this important crit- ical debunking of photography’s claim to be the most accurate, and hence most truthful, mode of representation—two separate claims that collapse into one on photography’s flat surface—we continue to perceive photo- graphs as records of what is. We might know that Trotsky was meticulously airbrushed out of a famous image of the Soviet Politburo after a Stalinist purge, that a photo of a beautiful beach has been digitally enhanced with the technical equivalent of MSG, and that a landscape shown in an advertise- ment was created not by nature but by binary code.
Nonetheless, we relate to the depicted sights as if they were real. “Aha,” we think “Stalin was actu- ally fairly short,” or “That sandy beach just swarms with blueish crabs at midday.” And when we see those crabs we don’t think—even though we know it—”What a clever manipulation of chemicals (or pixels)!” In spite of our knowledge, the things we see in photographs seem real to us. Just as the river where I step is not the same, and is, so I am as I am not. —Heraclitus When we think of the reality caught in a photograph as a “slice of time” or a “frozen moment,” we paste the image into a particular type of his- torical understanding.
When viewed as frozen moments, photographs be- come flat, shiny squares lifted from an incessant current that surges ever forward beyond their borders. According to this understanding, photo- graphs only artificially halt the flux of time that, in reality, carries us forward from event to event in an unstoppable stream. This is the conception of time and history as narrative, as an unfolding sequence of events, the longue durée of twentieth-century French historian Fernand Braudel. However, this his- toriographical concept dates back to a much earlier era, to the ancient Her- aclitean notion of time-as-river.
Heraclitus’s famous metaphor occurs in a fragment I cite here in the deliberately strange translation Brooks Haxton uses to “clear away distractingly familiar language from a startling thought.” The river where you set your foot just now is gone—those waters giving way to this, now this.2 Heraclitus’s notion of history as a flowing river, a radical and still perplexing notion, was restricted in the nineteenth century, when major his- torians thought to grasp the past by channeling its events into stories of co- herent, continual, consecutive epics. In keeping with this quasi-Heraclitean 4 I n t r o d u c t i o n model of historical time, photography can be understood as a device that me- chanically freeze-frames virtual chunks of a time that is, in reality, always moving on. A swirl of forms of all kinds was separated off from the totality. —Democritus However, because the Heraclitean conception of the world and his- tory holds time to be always continuous, the development of automatic picture-taking in the nineteenth century—that is, the camera’s ability to “stop time”—prompted considerable anxiety.
The medium of photography seemed to furnish evidence—by means of magnifications, shutter speed, and lighting—that the world of appearances is not continuous, not at all flowing, not a river. Instead, it seems to reveal a world in which time is splin- tered, fractured, blown apart. As if to respond to the challenge produced by the invention of photography, another conception of time and history was regaining prominence. The idea of historical time as continuous was coun- tered with a notion of history that imagines time, in a striking image, as an invisible event, a decisive moment that requires a new conceptual frame- work.
Ulrich Raulff has shown that these two “incommensurate and mutu- ally exclusive. notions of the nature of temporality” are really two images, two imagined scenarios of the way historical time happens.
