It is a sign of the accepted evidentiary status of photographs that historians regularly append them to their accounts, Amos Morris-Reich observes. Very often, however, these photographs are treated as mere illustrations, simple documentations of the events that transpired. Scholars of photography, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the photographs themselves, relegating the historical contexts to the background. For Morris-Reich, however, photography exists within reality; it partakes in and is very much a component of the history it records. Morris-Reich examines how photography affects categories of history and experience, how it is influenced by them, and the ways in which our understanding of the relationship between history and photography can be theorized and reoriented.
Morris-Reich here turns to five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect: Albert Kahn’s utopian attempt to establish a photographic archive in Paris in order to advance world peace; the spectacular failed project of Helmar Lerski, the most prominent photographer in British Mandate Jewish Palestine; photography in the long career of Eugen Fischer, a Nazi professor of genetics; the street photography of Robert Frank; and the first attempt to introduce photography into the study of Russian Jewry prior to World War I, as seen from the post-Holocaust perspective of the early twenty-first century. Illustrated with nearly 100 images, Photography and Jewish History moves beyond a focus on Jewish photographers or the photographic representation of Jews or Jewish visibility to plumb the deeper and more significant registers of twentieth-century Jewish political history.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Utopia and Photography circa 1900: Albert Kahn and the Archives of the Planet
Chapter 2. The Boundaries of Photographic Intention: Helmar Lerski’s “Failed” Project
Chapter 3. Album of an Extinct Race: Eugen Fischer and Photography
Chapter 4. Photography for Its Own Sake: Robert Frank and The Americans
Chapter 5. Photography and Rupture: S. An-sky, Solomon Yudovin, and the Documentation of Russian Jewry
Conclusion. Photography and Democracy
Notes
Index
Über den Autor
Amos Morris-Reich is Director of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism and Professor at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University.
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