Shaping and reshaping memory: the Łódź Ghetto photographs

Abstract

This article raises questions about the ways that photographs from the Łódź Ghetto have been variously interpreted and contextualized over the years so as to reinforce received — and problematic — paradigms and narratives of Holocaust memory. It considers a subset of photographs taken by three individuals variously positioned vis-à-vis the ghetto and Nazi authorities: the two Jewish professionals, Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross, who shot both official and clandestine images, as they worked within and beyond Łódź’s singular Judenrat-sanctioned archive, and the Austrian amateur, the Nazi accountant Walter Genewein, who was apparently building a self-promoting portfolio. After the war, these images appeared and reappeared in memorial albums, academic publications, and even a novel — The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald — as well as in documentary films, notably Alan Adelson’s Łódź Ghetto and Dariusz Jablonski’s Fotoamator. In taking as its central focus how, and with what preconceptions and assumptions, these scholars, writers, and filmmakers “frame” the Łódź Ghetto photographs, this piece contributes to scholarship on visual Holocaust representation as it pertains specifically to the Nazi ghettos.