Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph, by David Shneer

Abstract

The late David Shneer’s final monograph is an ambitious project: he focuses the entire book on a single iconic image and writes a ‘biography’ of that photograph, beginning with the events leading to its production and examining its continuing significance, from its first printing to the present day. The photograph at hand, simply titled ‘Grief’, depicts the aftermath of a Nazi mass killing following their occupation of Kerch, in Ukraine. ‘Biography’ summarises well Shneer’s approach to this image, as he emphasises the role of its creator, Dmitri Baltermants, in examining its interpretation throughout the twentieth century. Whether taking this photo, editing it or shaping its place in later exhibitions, Baltermants is rarely out of sight in the book. The result of this approach brings together the historical and the personal to provide a full picture of this image at different points in history. Shneer begins his biography before the creation of ‘Grief’ itself, looking at Baltermants’s approach to photography and relevant influences on his work. These include aesthetic and technical aspects of Soviet photography as well as the role and reach of photographs in an early twentieth-century Soviet context. In this framework, Shneer notes how newspapers formed the platform for photographic reports.