Overview
Widely regarded as the most haunting image we have of the Holocaust, the photo of a young boy with his hands up being driven from the Warsaw ghetto has served as a touchstone for everyone from the Nuremberg prosecutors to Elie Wiesel, and from Susan Sontag to revisionist ranters on the web. Yet despite its enduring status in both popular and academic circles, this touchstone of inhumanity has elicited surprisingly little sustained commentary. In this book, Richard Raskin provides the first extended consideration of this photo by examining it from multiple perspectives. He begins by attempting to describe it objectively as a photographic artifact, carefully detailing its components and composition. He then presents a history of how it came about: to illustrate a report that SS General Jugen Stroop compiled in 1943, documenting for Himmler how he had crushed the ghetto uprising that spring. The next chapter is devoted to the claims made for the identity of the boy with his hands up, as well as for the other captives and the SS man with the machine gun. The remainder of the book addresses some representative artistic and polemical uses to which the image has been subjected.Synopsis
The photograph that is the subject of Raskin's penetrating case study was taken in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. Basing his work on new research, Raskin (the founder of the Danish journal of film studies P.O.V.) traces the origins of the SS album in which the striking picture first appeared. His study considers the meaning the photo held for the SS elite and explores issues such as the picture's role in a number of works of art, its use in the "war of images" in the present-day Mideast, and the special interest taken in it by Holocaust deniers. Raskin writes for the general reader as well as academics, archivists, and librarians in Holocaust studies, history, Judaica, media studies, and photography. Thoroughly illustrated in b&w and color; distributed in the US by David Brown Book Co. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR