photograph of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag on
August 30, 1945, became the leading symbol of
Soviet victory. Khaldei conceived and deliberately
staged his picture on the model of American photo-
grapher, Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the Amer-
ican flag being raised on Iwo Jima on February 23,
1945 (itself not a singular picture innocently found).
Khaldei’s conception of photographic truth as a
matter of conviction before documentary ‘‘fact’’ is
the direct inheritance of the history of photography
in Russia and the vigorous debates on photography
in the years following the revolution; at the end
of the twentieth century it found itself compatible
with Western notions of artistic inventiveness, and
so conducive to Khaldei’s canonization as a war
artiste, a photographer whose subject happens to
be war but whose images are deemed to have ‘‘aes-
thetic surplus,’’ in the words of the artist and critic,
Martha Rosler.
Photographs of atrocity remain one of the central
and most difficult bodies of Second World War
photography—pictures that announce abysses to
the point of ‘‘negative epiphany,’’ in Susan Sontag’s
pithy phrase. The prototypical examples of atrocity
remain the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the Shoah, the
murder of some six million European Jews by the
Nazis and their collaborators in various countries.
Photography has brought these atrocities to partial
legibility, proffering visual testimony that is as
incomplete and at times as indeterminate as it is
direct and incontrovertible—in effect, testimony
that has prevailed against the efforts of govern-
ments, including the American and the Nazi govern-
ments, to prevent the creation of pictorial evidence
of their crimes, and to repress and to bowdlerize this
evidence when it does appear.
Initial media coverage in the American press of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki rendered the use of the
atomic bomb continuous with other acts of war,
presenting it as a scientific and military triumph,
withholding not only images of obliteration, but
initially even distant views of the explosions. The
image of the bomb’s euphemistically named ‘‘mush-
room cloud’’ later became an emblem of destructive-
ness triumphant (an image elaborated in subsequent
decades of nuclear testing), quite unlike the views
made from below by Toshio Fukada in Hiroshima
some 20 minutes after the bomb exploded. Japanese
army staff photographer Yosuke Yamahata’s photo-
graphs of Nagasaki made on August 10, 1945, the
day after the bombing, depict a cityscape so deva-
stated that it is at once utterly plain and inscrutable,
an accusatory ruin at the very limits of representa-
tion. By contrast, the American photographer,
Wayne Miller, a member of Edward Steichen’s U.S.
Navy photographic unit, photographed victims of
the Hiroshima bomb in September 1945, making
dramatically lit compositions whose figures are intro-
spective but not visibly distraught, victims who are
cared for, nursed, looked after—who abide under the
watchful gaze of now compassionate perpetrators. A
similarly contemplative approach, but without the
sanguine political implications, is evident inHir-
oshima-Nagasaki ‘61, by the Japanese photogra-
phers, Shomei Tomatsu and Ken Domon, the latter
also a member of the sophisticated collaborative
that produced the powerful photographic elegy,
document 1961.
The discrepancy between seeing and knowing
also figures as a key trope of the photography of
the destruction of European Jewry. Photography
of the ghetto at Warsaw, forming perhaps the most
extensive pictorial archive of any of the multiple
events that comprise the Shoah, comes from several
sources. Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry
made photographs and films of the ghetto falsely
depicting it as a thriving, habitable place, while
pictures of ill, starving Jews in the ghetto’s streets,
made under the auspices of military press units,
were published in popular magazines. The pictures
of Jewish misery on the streets of the Warsaw
Ghetto provide a clear example of the ways that
the meanings of war photographs change depend-
ing on the discourse in which they are embedded:
Nazi propaganda construed such pictures as evi-
dence of the degradation and subhumanity of Jews,
while subsequent generations see in them the effects
of Nazi brutality. Decades after the war, collections
of pictures of the Warsaw Ghetto by discrete Nazi
soldiers such as Heinrich Jo ̈st and Willy Georg
have come to light, as well as by anonymous Ger-
man soldiers, in each case begging the question of
how Nazi eyes structured and encoded the image of
what and how Jewish victims suffered.
Virtually unique in the history of twentieth century
war photography is the work of the Polish-Jewish
artist and photographer, Mendel Grossman, who
intensively photographed the prison enclave for
Jews in Lodz as a captive between 1940 and 1944 (a
more protracted but analogous case might be the
South African photographer, Peter Magubane’s
work from the 1950s–1990s in resistance to the
South African apartheid regime). Employed by the
ghetto administration and undertaking a documen-
tary project on his own initiative, Grossman photo-
graphed the daily labors of Jewish self help—from
cottage industries to the hauling of excrement and the
distribution of food. Surveilling his captors, he clan-
destinely photographed German troop movementsWAR PHOTOGRAPHY