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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2017
I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be persecuted by the highest levels of the state. I ended up uncovering the social history of Soviet Jews and their relationship to photography, as I also explored how their training in the 1920s and 1930s shaped the photographs they took during World War II.
1. I want to thank Peter Pastor, who knows the history of the Budapest ghetto quite well, for having read my contribution closely and given me feedback.
2. No film photograph is taken by “anonymous.” Anonymous or “unattributed” simply means that a name has not been attached to the image. Photographic convention frequently emphasized the documentary image over the produced photographic object by obscuring the photographer.
3. Painters respond visually to violence as well in their work (Pablo Picasso’s Guernica is only the most well-known example), but they are generally not hired by the state as evidence gatherers.
4. Shneer, David, “Is Seeing Believing?: Photographs, Eyewitness Testimony, and Evidence of the Holocaust,” East European Jewish Affairs 45, no. 1 (2015): 65–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.