and executions. In the ghetto’s morgue he secretly
photographed the corpses of the dead in the hope of
aiding in their identification; in the streets and at the
gates of the ghetto he photographed the continual
deportations of those condemned to the death camps
of Chelmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Grossman’s
project survived the war intact, hidden in a wall in
his apartment (Grossman himself died in a death
march from Lodz in 1944), and was transported to
Palestine, only to be largely destroyed in the Israeli
war of independence in 1948.
Virtually no photographs exist of any of the six
death camps in operation (Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka).
The Auschwitz Album, a collection of pictures made
by an unknown German officer during the ‘‘selec-
tion’’ process on the Birkenau train platform, re-
mains a notable exception. On the other hand,
several collections of photographs made during
the 1941 Nazi execution campaigns across the wes-
tern parts of the Soviet Union reveal not only
the extent to which ordinary German soldiers (not
the SS alone) participated in atrocities, but also the
desire of Nazis, despite official prohibitions, infor-
mally to represent their crimes, and sometimes to
use photography to humiliate victims. The Wehr-
macht photographs prefigure cases in subsequent
wars in which pictures of war crimes were made
gratuitously and not intentionally as indictment.
Two telling later examples in this connection are
the pictures by the American photographer, Ron
Haeberlee just prior to the massacre of 347 inno-
cents by American troops in the Vietnamese village
of My Lai on March 16, 1968, and the photographs
made by occupying U.S. soldiers while torturing
detainees in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib in
- In the first case, the photographs act as a
threshold into the (imagined) confluence of indivi-
dual madness and official prerogative, and in the
second case, as tokens of imbecilic torturers’ per-
ceived impunity.
For many viewers, the photography of atrocity
stands as the paradigmatic example of war photo-
graphy that indicts war itself. Specifically, the
photography of the atomic bomb and Nazi genocide
is understood to stand not just for the mass murder
of targeted victims, but for distinctly twentieth cen-
tury ambitions in warfare—the effort to kill ‘‘scien-
tifically,’’ and the effort to kill totally, not just to kill
but to kill off, not just to defeat but to annihilate.
Still, the cultural logic that endows photography
with the capacity to confirm evil infrequently looks
to photography to irrupt (much less to lead) politi-
cal imagination. The photography of atrocity gen-
erally testifies retrospectively, often as a contest
between metonym and symbol, and only occasion-
ally in an effort to detail crimes against humanity,
crimes considered ‘‘necessary’’ to look at. Which
corpses represent ‘‘humanity’’ is, of course, not a
question photographs answer. The German photo-
grapher, Armin T. Wegner’s photographs of Arme-
nians murdered during the First World War, or the
thousands of remorseless mug shots made of con-
demned Cambodians just prior to their murders in
the Tuol Sleng prison between 1975–1979, or the
French photographer, Gilles Peress’ photographs
of the fratricide in Bosnia in his 1994 book,Farewell
to Bosnia, and in Rwanda in his 1994 book,The
Silence, all show a choice of victim, but all depend
on a solvency of political discourse to reveal the
genocidal crime they show.
The Cold War between the United States and the
Soviet Union, which formed the chassis of global
geopolitics from 1945 until the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991 and fuelled proxy wars on
every continent, ensured steady work for photogra-
phers drawn to conflict areas, and the creation of a
veritable industry of war imagery. The war in Korea
(1950–1953) was extensively photographed by civi-
lians and photographers attached to the American
military, though publication was limited from the
beginning, and severely so after the first six months.
The limited visibility of the war meant suppressed
recognition of its signal complications, many of
which became central to the wars of subsequent
decades in Southeast Asia, Central America, Af-
ghanistan, and Iraq: the ill-preparedness of U.S.
troops, the crimes of armies allied with and under
the guidance of the United States, the struggle of
soldiers to distinguish civilians from enemy comba-
tants, and the extent of the death and carnage vis-
ited upon civilians. The upshot was a distancing
effect well suited to the emergent ideology of U.S.
postwar hegemony: ‘‘Mr. Public,’’ wroteUS Cam-
erain 1951 with unselfconscious prescience, ‘‘likes
to sit back in his chair and have things done for him
without having to expend more than a minimum of
energy and that, minus danger.’’ At the same time,
the comfortable remoteness of the war was set off
against a decidedly more psychological portrayal of
combat in the pictures that did appear in the work
of Max Desfor, Carl Mydans, Bert Hardy (whose
pictures of South Korean war crimes were explicitly
censored), and especially the American photogra-
pher, David Douglas Duncan. Duncan’s photo-
graphs inLife,U.S. Camera, and particularly his
1951 book,This Is War!established him as the
prototypical post World War II combat photogra-
pher, at once perceptive and macho, independent-
minded and identified with (if not implicated in) theWAR PHOTOGRAPHY