Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma - Media - Book Review

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Paul Tebbs

Ulrich Baer

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002

The temporal disjunctures that typically characterize photography on the one hand, and traumatized memory on the other, appear to move in opposite directions: traumatic memory manifests itself as a psychic disruption in the present that points repeatedly backwards to its origin in the unreconciled past; and the photograph, a document from the past, endlessly announces the future. The constitutive absences of the two phenomena are, so to speak, located at differing ends of the temporal register. Ulrich Baer's Spectral Evidence however, provides a persuasive critical framework arguing for an instructive symbiosis between the two: both trauma and photography reveal a break between experience and comprehension.

The first chapter analyzes Charcot's infamous photographs of female hysterics in the Salpetiere, but the book is thereafter devoted to imagery relating to the Holocaust. In a chapter entitled "To Give Memory a Place," Baer examines photographic representations of concentration camp sites through the work of Dirk Rienartz and Mikael Levin. The most impressive chapter concerns some relatively unknown color slides taken by an accountant named Walter Genewein in the Lodz Ghetto and their use in the film Fotoamator by Dariusz Jablonski. The movement of the camera across the still-images, Baer suggests, "mimics the Nazi's terrifying searches for people to be murdered," but also brings into view a hidden presence and grafts forgotten people into memory.

Baer's reading of trauma is largely conventional and his approach to photography draws heavily on others, such as Walter Benjamin and Vilem Flusser's philosophies of photography. But the analysis of visual examples and the clarity with which the consequences of this analysis are drawn (particularly for historicist approaches to photographic meaning) marks this book out as a valuable contribution to photographic theory.

This is slightly marred by the occasional over-determination of an event's significance through its rendering into metaphorical form. For example, while discussing a picture taken by Genewein of a line of boys, the author suggests that the location of the sun behind the photographer's head, reveals how the Nazi regime "fancied itself" as "the manifestation of a superhuman source of light." On another occasion, a faulty slide with a "red-brownish hue," which is known to have been returned by Genewein to Agfa for reprocessing, is referred to by Baer as "the proverbial blood on the Nazi photographer's hands and slides." In the context of this book, where the problem of being correctly aligned to truth is the central concern, such over-freighted metaphor damages the integrity of the argumentation, and risks itself moving askance from truth. The contingency of the circumstances revealed in these images, which Baer persuasively argues can free the individual lives of the Jews in the camps from the Nazi gaze, also c annot help but reveal something of the lives of the Nazis themselves. It is arguably through such banalities that the humanity of those responsible for the Holocaust is revealed in an implicate way. Given the general sensitivity and intelligence of Baer's writing, this recourse to a mode of rhetoric poses its own unfortunate questions about failures to see, truth, reference and language. Such lapses are however rare.