Photography as Political Practice in National Socialism - introduction

Through analysing a large body of personal photos the project aims to:

• understand how politics and lived experience intermingled
• tackle the problem of the “perpetrator gaze” shaping our visual imagination of National Socialism and the Holocaust today
• develop new exhibition designs, pedagogies, and a new Massive Online Open Course to bring other ways of seeing to the fore.

Project background

Photographs crucially defined National Socialism for contemporaries as well as later generations. Yet outside some instances of formal propaganda, scholars have paid little attention to photos – with ethical consequences that continue to affect the ways we remember Nazism and its victims today.

Millions of photos were taken in this period by hobbyist and casual photographers; an estimated 10% of Germans owned a camera in 1939, many more participated in the practice. These photos are records both of people's engagement with the dictatorship, and of their efforts to distance and separate themselves from it. They are evidence of the interaction between ideology and subjectivity, of politics and lived experience: materially, because many albums mixed personal photos and ideological artefacts, eg, newspaper cuttings, and metaphorically, because many people positioned themselves in and through photos, as participants in public life under Nazism, at political events and rallies, in organised leisure programmes, child evacuations, volunteer and compulsory labour services, or in the war. Some photos also offer insights into alternate private worlds that individuals sought to construct as a refuge or a place of separation from politics. In the case of Jewish Germans, photos show different emotional dispositions, contracting social spaces, narratives of emigration and escape, or experiences of persecution, in ways that challenge the official photographic record.

Advisory board

• Michael Wildt (Professor for Modern German History at Humboldt University Berlin)
• Daniel Wildmann (Director of Leo Baeck Institute London and Senior Lecturer in History at Queen Mary University of London)
• Tim Cole (Professor of Social History and Director of Brigstow Institute at the University of Bristol)
• Alan Marcus (Associate Professor at Neag School of Education, University of Connecticut)
• William Niven (Professor in Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University)
• Judy Cohen (Photo Archivist and Chief Acquisitions Curator at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)