Abstract
In thinking about photography, we need to keep two of its key constitutive features constantly in sight of each other. We need to consider not only photography’s indexical relation to its referent, but also its inevitable selectivity, both in its choice of content and in its framing of that content. This applies particularly to past photography: what photographs show and do not show of the past. In this stimulating and challenging book, Silke Helmerdig is concerned with a notable absence in the narrative of the past in Germany during the period following the Second World War. That absence is Jewish life, and the book explores the role of photography in contributing to its invisibility in the postwar period. She is also concerned with how photography can help construct a future in which Germans and Jews walk on common ground. Can this common ground be found in what has previously been unrecognised and for that reason absent, that is, German–Jewish relationships after the war? These relationships may have been inconspicuous, but they certainly existed, and within them is the might-have-been and the might-be, offering at least a tentative alternative to the brutal temporal interval that was the Third Reich and the Holocaust. In this alternative is a ‘could be’ that can be taken a blueprint for the future. This applies to photography by relating what it captures, the definite presence of what was there when the camera took the picture, to that which it points towards, the ‘could be’ or ‘will be’, or in other words the possible futures that existed in the past. Here, photography is selective in another sense, inviting us to think about not only what it shows but also what it hides. Helmerdig begins with a philosophical discussion of commemoration, history and historiography in their relation to photography. She draws on Nietzsche for history, Kracauer and Benjamin for both history and photography, because all three ‘located the importance of history for the future in oblivion, in the invisible, the absent or the forgotten’ (p. 26). She then moves to examine the past played by documentary photography in historical engagement with the Holocaust in postwar Germany. The key issue is how to transmute the failure of the documentary photography text into making what is absent tangible. This can be done by sufficiently contextualising it. Throughput the book, what Helmerdig is after is a shift from seeing photography as a mechanical recording of reality, which speaks for itself, to seeing photography as an aesthetic representation, speaking of itself. The challenge in this lies in countering the objectivist dogman of documentary photography with a new subjunctive tense, as for example may be realised through montage, bringing different times, places, and events into a new subjective order. We may then see the past as not simply and irrevocably consisting of ‘what has been’, but also, in using the past as a resource for the future, of ‘what could be’. In guiding us towards this recognition, Helmerdig urges us to return ‘to the moment when the future was still free to become, before it became the past as it was’ (p. 194).