Zelizer Reading

This reading mainly had to do with the photographs of the Nazi atrocity during the Holocaust. Images helped record the horror in memory after it's concrete signs had disappeared. The pictures became quickly available to newspaper and the rest of the public, and most were the same pictures, just taken at different angles. The photographs had different practives of composition such as, placement, numbers, and gaze. The pictures would capture the results of suffering (death, pain, starvation, etc.), but never the suffering itself.

Placement had to do with the decision of where to palce the evidence of the torture, suffering, and death, which created a layering between the photo's foreground and background. This layering communicated what was supposed to be depcited: survivors, civilians, corpses, etc. However, pictures from this time usually meant pictures of corpses, and they often alternated with witnesses in either the foreground or background. In most pictures, civilians and witnesses were placed in the foreground to try and distract the viewer from noticing the dead corpses in the background.

Numbers were also an enormous detail to the photographs taken. Many and most pictures entailed mass graves, where bodies had just been dumped together, and soon became almost impossible to discifer which body parts belonged to whom. Group images, with a lot more people, tended to be less offensive and graphic, than those of just people alone, being tortured and killed by themselves. This was partly because the people did not want those individuals to have the chance of being identified.

The last practice of these images was gaze, the look of those being depicted. The gaze of the near-dead survivors, whose eyes seemed so glazed over that they did not even realize, nor comprehend, what was going on in front of them. The survivors in these pictures were normally shot from the front, so that they would look like they actually were looking at the camera. However, in sense, these tortured survivors appeared to see without seeing.