Transcript
[Title: What should we consider when using images in our teaching of the Holocaust?]
[Jaya Carrier: Vice Principal, Westminster Academy] So I think another of the issues that teachers find difficult is the idea about imagery in teaching about this history, and I think that applies to the idea of two things. Firstly, how we make sure that we might use imagery to ensure that we really humanize the people that we're talking about, but also difficulties with deciding about the use of atrocity images in particular.
[On screen: Purpose and learning outcomes]
I think for me, when I'm thinking about this as an educator, the starting point is always: well, what is it that I want to achieve? What is the learning outcome for this? Is it that I want to challenge particular misconceptions that people might have about Jewish people? Is it to do with completely different things? And then I would encourage educators to think about it in that way, such that they can enter the classroom with an informed choice about how they might want to represent people by way of images. And particularly with respect to pre-war Jewish life, I noticed that there was a really big emphasis on that in the gallery.
[James Bulgin: Head of Content, Holocaust Galleries, Imperial War Museum] As you say, in the first space we really wanted to do whatever we could to completely deconstruct the notion that there is, or ever was, a singular group of people called ‘the Jews’. I was chatting to somebody a few years ago who said something which really, really stuck with me; he said you know, within this sector and within the subject, we still talk about ‘the Jews’ without even thinking about it. For us, in the first space we wanted to try and do whatever we could to deconstruct that in a way, which is immediate for visitors just walking into it. So we've sourced over a thousand different images of pre-war Jewish life, in all of its different forms. Because the really important thing about pre-war Jewish life, and Jewish life in general way up to the present day of course, is that there is no such thing as a singular Jewish experience. Jewish people lead completely different lives depending on where they are, their levels of religious observance, you know, the nature of the jobs that they do, and the countries they're in - all of the various different factors that impact all of us.
So we tried really hard to find different ways of doing that; we spoke to archives across the world to find varying images that just capture- each image just captures a flicker of a moment in time. But those multiple flickers of multiple moments in time hopefully do something to suggest the plurality and diversity, massive levels of diversity, of pre-war Jewish life. I think it's really almost dangerous actually to suggest that there is any such thing as a sort of, you know, a prototypical, you know, pre-war Jewish life; of course, of course there isn't. So that's- so that's something that we that we did and we tried really hard to make sure the galleries had at the core of their new approach.
Now the other thing that we did is we took individuals from some of these photographs and put- printed them onto kind of large sheets of glass that exist throughout the opening space, and throughout the galleries too. And that's an idea that we had as a method to try and ask people to think about the fact that these people, captured in a flicker of a moment in time within a photograph, once walked around on this planet in the same way that all of us did. And so of course just by seeing somebody at their actual height, at eye level, doesn't somehow kind of put them back in the world in a kind of a 3D sense, but it at least asks you to sort of think about the fact that they were once every bit as human as you or I are. And I think that seems like a simple thing to do, but somehow sometimes with black and white images, people wearing different kinds of clothes, and different types of places, doing different type of things, it’s somehow all too easy to push them into a different dimension, to say their world is not my world, and of course it is.
[JC] I think that's so powerful for students, and for teachers, to really start to think about in terms of yeah that pre-war Jewish life, and how you might use imagery to invoke that richness and diversity that you're talking about.
[JB] Yeah, and it's also about agency which is the other thing which is really important to us. That there's a tendency within Holocaust narratives to remove agency from Jewish people and Jewish individuals and communities, and to somehow make them completely sublimated within a kind of a perpetrator defined narrative, and to say: these people don't have their own chronology, their only chronology in this narrative is the chronology which the Nazis imposed upon them. And of course, that's a massive problem, that's absolutely not how it was. These people were born into the world with their own chronologies that they were defining for themselves, as we all do, and they had complete agency and choice.
So, for example we use footage from one family, called the Bed family, which is a Dutch Jewish family he went on holiday in the years before the war, and we showed their entire holiday film, unedited on its own screen within the opening space, because in watching the way that they engaged with this, there is something in their existence. You know, they were obviously from the Netherlands and they, their way of life probably would be quite familiar to a lot of us, and so, you know, they are quite close. And we see, we see this really interesting and important dimension to their film where they move the camera around and we become really aware of the part the camera plays in the way that they're sort of constructing their relationship to it and their experience of each other and the holiday, and it's a really kind of familiar way of framing experience. That they, you know, they keep on grabbing the camera off each other and it shakes as one of them drops in and out of shot, and they are living lives completely unmediated by what's to come. In that, in that space in the galleries we don't, we don't say what that is. We do later on in the galleries, and what happened is they were all deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and none of them, none of them survived. And it's really hard, it's really tough watching that film knowing that, but you really do get a sense of people who perfectly reasonably living lives, unencumbered by what's to happen, unencumbered by narratives of persecutions.
[On screen: Considering the use of atrocity images]
[JC] I think though, as I mentioned, the issue of images for educators is a two-pronged one, wherein we've spoken about the pre-war Jewish life and the fact that images can really help us in, in snapshots invoke some of that really important rich culture. But on the other hand I think something that we grapple with when we're thinking about delivering this in the classroom is how we might deal with really difficult or atrocity images, and using those with students.
[JB] Yeah, I mean I think it's absolutely right and these are exactly the same kind of thoughts and conversations and dialogues that we were having. You know, when we started on the project we consulted really widely actually, about this specific image. Because of course there is a whole school of thought within, you know, Holocaust historiography, and specifically kind of the ethics of representation around Holocaust imagery, there's a school of thought that says that these images should not be seen. You know, these reduce the people within them to sort of faceless anonymized victims, and by showing that the photos we’re somehow, in some way, kind of re-perpetrating, you know, or perpetuating the atrocity. And you know, I have a lot of sympathy with that position, I, you know, I understand it and it's something we thought about a lot.
Interestingly, when we consulted, I was really surprised, and this was probably some of the broadest consultation we did: we did it with scholars, we did it with just general community groups, we did it with various family members, you know, people who have objects within our collections and that kind of thing, and far more besides. And the consensus really widely aligned with your kind of hypothetical student voice, which was to say: but these exist, and so people need to see them and understand them. I think for me the really important thing is that when we're using imagery of this nature, is that it always needs to be very, very clearly contextualized. I think there has been a problem historically with using graphic images of atrocity as a kind of a shortcut to engender a sense of kind of shock. You know, to say: isn't this terrible? Look at this! You know, this is a horrific illustration of what, of what, you know, the Nazis did. And actually that's a problem.
[On screen: Considering the photographer]
I think, there's far more research around these images now, there's far more of a sense of where they came from, I mean, importantly: who took them. Which is a really important thing as well; these photos didn't just come out of the ether, somebody chose to frame them in the way that they did. And so I think for us within the galleries, we tried not to use kind of large graphic imageries, we tried to use very specific images in very specific instances, and to give those images real context.
[JC] I think as well, what you were saying about who took the image and how it was framed; that is such a core and important skill for any historian or any aspiring historian in a history classroom to really get to grips with. And I think some of the images used in the galleries, such as the ones about defacing Jewish shops, could be quite helpful for students to kind of unpack in terms of the provenance, as well as the actual content of the image.
[JB] Yeah exactly, I mean because I think when you look at this, any picture, you know, the first question is always, you know, who took this and why? What is it that they're capturing, and why do they want to capture this? We use one image in the galleries of a boy who's being forced to deface, as you say, his father's shop by painting the word ‘Jude’ onto the front of the shop, and he's kind of mid brush stroke as he's doing it and there's this, there's this image of this, of this kid, you know, crouching down with the paintbrush in his hand, painting this. And looming over him there's this, kind of, this, a man, you know, there's some bullish grotesque man who's sort of peering down on him. Clearly the boy is doing this under duress, clearly the man is the one who's, you know, telling him to do it. And then all around the periphery there are these, you know, as we said, in this flicker of this moment of time, there's this group around them who are sort of sneering and smiling and laughing, watching this thing, and you just think, you know, my god. This poor kid, this is, this is an inversion of everything that we would like to believe a civilized society is about, i.e. you know, adults taking care of, supporting, nurturing children. And yet somebody's chosen to freeze this moment in time and to capture this moment, and this man has made this choice.
But that photo was taken in Vienna in 1938, just after the Nazis had occupied the country. And actually that is a very specific moment of anti-semitic violence. You know, what happened in Vienna was virtually without precedent at that stage in pre-war and Nazi persecution. So that photo doesn't just testify to this absolutely abhorrent act of, you know, violence I suppose, to this boy and intimidation, it also testifies to what happened at that specific moment in time. And what happened in Vienna at that stage certainly emboldened the Nazis to begin to radicalize their preconceptions about what could be done to Jewish people, and what people would tolerate. And so, what we see within the specific context of that photo is far broader than just the shock value of seeing a grown man doing this to a young kid. And the fact it's his father's shop as well is, you know, is a really important detail, so we, within the galleries, we make sure that information is there.
[JC] I guess the other thing that is interesting in terms of teachers, is this idea about how that- how a student might bring their own experiences, and therefore they might need to be in some way safeguarded or cared for when looking at more challenging or atrocity images. You've got a lot of just, a lot of stills, a lot of photography and there are some atrocity images. I'm interested to know about why you chose some of those particular things.
[JB] It is, it is complex, I think. For me, and certainly our approach as an organization and within the new galleries, is that it's all about clarity and kind of warning, I suppose, or contextualization, in that sense, and not just in terms of the historic contextualization of the images but also the contextualization of what people are about to see. So we have, you know, we have, in our in our final space at the gallery, we have an edit of a film called German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, which was made for- made by the Allies just after liberation, as a sort of a record of Nazi atrocity, which wasn't completed at the time but was completed by IWM in 2014. And the content in it is extremely graphic. I mean, you know, really, really, really disturbing, really affecting. And when IWM put the film together, when they screened it in cinemas as it was shown at the time, there was somebody who came on at the start and said, you know, you know, member of staff, member of the team, who would go on and say, you know, this is really difficult, and if you want to leave then you should, and people did. And you know, the first time I went to see it, I thought well, I've seen a lot of these things before, you know, I don't enjoy it but I feel like prepared, and it shocked me. So in this gallery we're using that film, but we've made the decision to remove some of the elements of that film. Because the reality is, we're not watching it in a cinema. Initially, I thought we would use the whole thing as a, kind of an object almost, and I watched it again, I thought, we're not, we can't provide sufficient context for some of this content. It's too much, this isn't the right place for it. But we can't take all of that out either, because it's important and somehow by removing that stuff we're removing really critical parts of the record. So we tried to strike a balance, to contextualize those things, but we've also tried to include warnings about what people are about to see, so that they know, you know. And I think the reality is, this is, this is a narrative of mass murder and I think that's really important, we need to be really clear about that and not shy away from some of those things. But I think it's also important to not just suddenly bombard somebody with something they're not expecting to see.
[JC] All of this makes me think as well, another angle to explore with students is about what it's like to be you, what it's like to have these big questions to grapple with in terms of the use of images or the use of objects in a gallery, and therefore how you might go about choosing it and what that's like almost, professionally.
[JB] Yeah I mean, when we started on this project we had huge lists of objects that we wanted to use, and a huge list of photos and films, and we had to make decisions about what to use and what not to use. And obviously those decisions were informed by conversations with experts in in this country and in various different institutions across the world, but also by our, kind of, our own, you know, knowledge and experience and expertise. But I think it is really important to engage with the fact that we had to edit the narrative, and that means that the version of this history that we present in these galleries is, I would like to believe and I do profoundly believe, authoritative insofar as it's been informed by a large volume of experts and a huge amount of reading and research. And I think the idea that history is this huge kind of volatile, dynamic mass of information which is constructed on images, and accounts, and archives, and different sources, and different types of sources. And each one of us, as we engage with it, is just finding a different path through it. It is, you know, I think, in its own way, kind of really energizing and I think, I would hope that's something which teachers can find to kind of inspire students as they engage with, not just this subject but for all of history really.
[JC] Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much, it's been so great to talk to you about images, your choices in the gallery. And I know that with the Holocaust Learning Programme here, any concerns in terms of student safeguarding, in terms of emotional or difficult reactions to some things which are more challenging, that they're in such safe hands with the learning team here, who I know really, really do support students, both before the gallery, in the gallery, and even after the gallery. So, thank you so much.
In part three we'll be exploring some of the issues around time pressure, and what to choose and how to structure the curriculum in terms of the Holocaust.
IWM
