Photography and Jewish History : : Five Twentieth-Century Cases / / Amos Morris-Reich.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2022 English
• VerfasserIn: Morris-Reich, Amos,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Jewish Culture and Contexts
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.)

It is a sign of the accepted evidentiary status of photographs that historians regularly append them to their accounts, Amos Morris-Reich observes. Very often, however, these photographs are treated as mere illustrations, simple documentations of the events that transpired. Scholars of photography, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the photographs themselves, relegating the historical contexts to the background. For Morris-Reich, however, photography exists within reality; it partakes in and is very much a component of the history it records. Morris-Reich examines how photography affects categories of history and experience, how it is influenced by them, and the ways in which our understanding of the relationship between history and photography can be theorized and reoriented.Morris-Reich here turns to five twentieth-century cases in which photography and Jewish history intersect: Albert Kahn’s utopian attempt to establish a photographic archive in Paris in order to advance world peace; the spectacular failed project of Helmar Lerski, the most prominent photographer in British Mandate Jewish Palestine; photography in the long career of Eugen Fischer, a Nazi professor of genetics; the street photography of Robert Frank; and the first attempt to introduce photography into the study of Russian Jewry prior to World War I, as seen from the post-Holocaust perspective of the early twenty-first century. Illustrated with nearly 100 images, Photography and Jewish History moves beyond a focus on Jewish photographers or the photographic representation of Jews or Jewish visibility to plumb the deeper and more significant registers of twentieth-century Jewish political history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Utopia and Photography circa 1900: Albert Kahn and the Archives of the Planet -- Chapter 2. The Boundaries of Photographic Intention: Helmar Lerski’s “Failed” Project -- Chapter 3. Album of an Extinct Race: Eugen Fischer and Photography -- Chapter 4. Photography for Its Own Sake: Robert Frank and The Americans -- Chapter 5. Photography and Rupture: S. An-sky, Solomon Yudovin, and the Documentation of Russian Jewry -- Conclusion. Photography and Democracy -- Notes -- Index