Photography

& Culture
Book Review
Volume 4—Issue 2
July 2011 Images in Spite of All:
pp. 225–230
DOI: Four Photographs
from Auschwitz
10.2752/175145211X12992393431458

Reprints available directly from

the publishers
Photocopying permitted by
licence only
Georges Didi-Huberman
© Berg 2011 Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Translated by Shane B. Lillis.

Reviewed by Wolfgang Brückle

I wish there were more books like this. I do not agree with
everything the author says, and he could have made some of his
points in a clearer and more straightforward manner, as I will argue
below. However, he deals with his visual objects in a way that,
beyond the the text’s well-defined scope, should be considered
as a model for other intellectual debates as well. Georges Didi-
Huberman’s book is wide in its perspective and yet well-focused;
it is theoretically challenging and yet historically well-informed; it is
creative in its approach and yet it does not shy away from nitty-
gritty discussions of the arguments raised by other writers against
the author’s own ideas. In short, it is a stimulating contribution to
critical writing on visual culture. What, then, is the book about?
Discussing four photographs from Auschwitz, Didi-Huberman’s text
has its roots in an essay he had been commissioned to write in
2001 for the catalog accompanying an exhibition of photographic
documents of concentration and extermination camps, organized
by photography historian Clément Chéroux (Mémoire des camps.
Photographies des camps de concentration et d’extermination nazis,
1933–1999, Paris, Hôtel de Sully, 2001). Strongly attacked by several
contributors to the French journal Les Temps Modernes for the ideas
presented in that essay, he decided to answer their arguments in
an appendix, thereby transforming the original text into a book-
length treatise that touches on foundational questions regarding
our response to visual documents, our historiographical ethos, and
our capacity and duty to remember the worst atrocities of the
twentieth century. It hardly needs emphasizing that Didi-Huberman’s
book, which was published in French in 2003, positions its author
amidst a debate too complex to be fully covered by art history and
aesthetics. That said, his approach goes way beyond their common
respective realms.

Photography & Culture Volume 4 Issue 2 July 2011, pp. 225–230

226 Book Review
The argument starts from a sequence of
photographs taken in 1944 by Alex, a Jewish
member of the so-called Sonderkommando,
or special squad, with the help of a few fellow-
prisoners in Auschwitz. Capturing scenes from the
victims’ preparation for their last hour, and from
the direct aftermath of one of the gas chambers
in action, the pictures were smuggled out of the
camp in order to spread knowledge about the
regime of death which the photographer, who
was not to survive, found himself confronted with
on a daily basis. However, the photographs were
not to have any effect on the world’s intelligence
as Polish resistance forces, for unknown reasons,
decided not to forward them; they were
published only after the war, when it seemed they
could no longer provide additional knowledge of
what had happened in the camp. A proof, as a
matter of fact, was no longer necessary, and not
much attention was given to the photographs.
The four glimpses into the hell of organized
genocide did not seem to reveal much anyway:
they were more or less randomly framed, blurred,
and partly obscured in shadowy darkness, all
evidence to their being taken in haste. Didi-
Huberman, however, makes the point that, their
limited informational value notwithstanding,
these pictures must not be neglected. The
photographer’s fear of being discovered may
have had an unfortunate impact on what he
was able to depict. Yet he captured his own
constraints and fear and courage all the better
for precisely this reason. Didi-Huberman’s point
is that we have to find, in those counterintuitive
features of the photographic sequence, indeed
in the photographer’s failure, a gestural quality;
in the masses of black, the mark of a pure “visual
event”; in the phenomenological structure of the
images, an equivalent to how a witness utters
his testimony with pauses, silences, heaviness.
They are, he claims, “more precious and less
comforting” than any possible work of art. This
is an important claim to be made by a critic who,
famously insisting on the life of images and their
Photography & Culture Volume 4 Issue 2 July 2011, pp. 225–230
Wolfgang Brückle
dialectical epistemological power, concentrates
on art historical material in all his other studies.
To be sure, the statement is hard to put to the
test. Yet it is obvious that the debate which
was to evolve around the images in the wake
of Didi-Huberman’s catalog contribution can
be seen as a testing ground for his remark. If,
as he claims, these images form “one of the last
gestures of humanity,” ignoring them may indeed
become a posthumous act of cruelty against the
victims. If his opponents are right, however, only
art can compensate for a gap in our historical
understanding that visual documentation, these
photographs included, cannot bridge. This
antagonism is at the core of the debate on Didi-
Huberman’s approach.
In the first part of the book, Didi-Huberman
embarks on a close reading of the picture
sequence, meticulously reconstructing what
happened in Auschwitz during the time the
pictures were taken, from what position they
were taken, and what the specific situation of the
photographer might have been. This demands
a lot of historical knowledge and a considerable
amount of empathy. Both are abundantly provided
throughout the analysis, which aims at attacking
the discourse of the unimaginable: in Didi-
Huberman’s terms, these pictures give a shape
to the horror. They imagine Auschwitz. They
are, as snapshots, the impersonal and “immediate
givens” of a certain state of horror captured by
light. Yet they also possess the complexity of
intrinsic montage by virtue of the efforts it took
a group of people to make them and because
they form a sequence. They prove, thus, that
neither in historical nor in aesthetic terms is
the discourse of the unimaginable convincing: if
other authors argue, Didi-Huberman claims, that
Shoah images do not give the whole truth (and,
as a consequence, are inadequate), they fetishize
its very idea. If these authors argue that images
are simulacra (hence excluding them from the
realm of history), they fetishize postmodernist
discourse. If, on the contrary, they consider them
Wolfgang Brückle
merely as documents (without exploring their
phenomenological structure), the images are
severed from their specificity and from “their
very substance.” In what is the central argument
of his essay, Didi-Huberman proceeds from
these thoughts to claiming that the testimony
of images is underestimated in our response
to the Shoah, and that in order to nourish our
imagination, it is necessary to give attention to
them in epistemological and ethical terms. Hostile
reactions did not come as a surprise. Since it was
released, Claude Lanzmann’s monumental film
Shoah had been regarded nearly undisputedly
as the definitive aesthetic response to the
extermination of the European Jews. The strategy
had been contrary to conventional documentary
procedures. Famously abandoning all historical
footage for the sake of direct encounters with
survivors, Lanzmann aspired to another order
of authenticity through these survivors’ revived
encounters with their memories. He had even
made it clear that he considered documentary
footage an obstacle to an appropriate
reconstruction of the horror and should they
ever have come within his grasp, he may have
destroyed them. Accordingly, he considered
archival approaches inappropriate and misleading,
and so did Gérard Wajcman and Élisabeth
Pagnoux when they published fierce criticisms
of Didi-Huberman in Les Temps Modernes, under
the auspices of Lanzmann (who is the editor
of that journal).1 Most of their arguments were
designed to support the idea that it is impossible
to convincingly use visual documents of the Shoah
in the rites of remembrance after Lanzmann
established his counter-archival paradigm. Image
fetishism, visual mythmaking, a destruction of
memory is what they believe to be lurking behind
any contary tendency. Hence, both these keepers
of the grail contribute to foster a dogmatic
negative aesthetic on moral grounds.
Didi-Huberman’s is a moral position, too.
Considering the image “the eye of history” in
a sense that surpasses traditional metaphor, he
Photography & Culture Volume 4
Book Review 227
argues, on the basis of his own earlier theoretical
moves in that direction, that the photographs look
at us, and that we have a duty to respond to their
gaze (elsewhere, he says the “very otherness” of
the pictures demands our attention).2 However,
it is not totally clear from his text how far this is
an effect of their phenomenological structure and
where our insight into historical facts is supposed
to join in: it is one thing to say that we are implied
by pictures snatched from a world that aimed at
making them—and, indeed, any picture of it—
impossible; it is another thing to define the kind of
response that is adequate. Didi-Huberman’s own
reconstruction of the events made him prone
to the charge of voyeurism. Anyway, imaginative
insight into the circumstances of their production
cannot be the only response he is after, as his
contribution does not fully correspond to his
very generalized conclusion, which may also be
thought of as the book’s driving principle, that
we have to rethink the concept of the image
after Auschwitz. While there is reason to insist
that the gestural qualities are indeed part of the
meaning, it is still most likely that the author of
the images was not interested in accomplishing
a “pure photographic act without aim.” The
pictures were meant to be evidence; they were
messages expected, by their author and his
supporters, to inform the world. I do not object
to Didi-Huberman’s apotheosis of the human
as being manifested in the photographs. He has
of course a right to claim that there is more
to the images than just facts. When he tries to
come to terms with meaning-making, however,
he shifts between the photographer’s aim and
ours, sometimes attributing to this photographer
and his supporters a redeeming resistance to
the reality of the death camp, in an attempt to
touch the real, and sometimes attributing the
same pursuit of redemption to our response
to his results. Very different montage concepts
are, if at all, at work in the two undertakings, and
very different image concepts as well. In fact, I
doubt that montage can convincingly be argued
Issue 2 July 2011, pp. 225–230
228 Book Review
to be a good term when it comes to describing
either the prisoners’ or Didi-Huberman’s
activities. To say the least, the images’ sequential
structure and Didi-Huberman’s historiographical
approach are both a far cry from how Jean-Luc
Godard confronts seemingly unrelated sources
in Histoire(s) du cinéma, a project discussed at
length and claimed as a methodological paradigm
in the book. Where Didi-Huberman says that
the image touches a real “that reality itself kept
veiled from us,” he is probably inspired by Lacan
though Siegfried Kracauer is the only author
he references in this context. However, he also
stresses that the photographer resisted the
real. Is this why he claims that we are called to
rethink the image after Auschwitz? But how
does this impulse bear on what he sees in the
Auschwitz photographs? Why can he pierce the
screen by virtue of a source-equipped reading
of their phenomenological structure? And why,
if we are to consider a photograph from the
camp as a “scrap of an image” which confirms
the existence of those who are no longer there,
is Roland Barthes’s concept of the photograph
as an index of the that-has-been not relevant
here? Early in his text, Didi-Huberman downplays
the relevance of Barthes’s concept in passing.
However, it is obvious that this specific quality
of the photograph is at stake when it comes
to mourning the Nazi victims via photography.
In a world that, to take up Didi-Huberman’s
own term, is constantly producing lacunae, and
makes imaginary montage a necessary tool for
the aquisition of knowledge, the very idea of the
“scrap” needs more foundation.
Alongside Godard, Walter Benjamin is the
most important author referenced in this context.
Didi-Huberman’s first essay ends with a citation
from Benjamin’s On the Concept of History. In
the second part of the book, the relevance of
Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image to Didi-
Huberman’s own agenda is further developed. In
this, he is not always altogether convincing. There
is room to think that it does not make sense to
Photography & Culture Volume 4 Issue 2 July 2011, pp. 225–230
Wolfgang Brückle
apply Benjamin’s term to single visual images at
all, though it is certainly very relevant when it
comes to explaining Godard’s procedures. What
is more, Didi-Huberman does not seem to follow
Benjamin’s ideas more than Godard’s when it
comes to analyzing the images from Auschwitz. His
imaginative scrutiny will be found praiseworthy by
all readers who do not adhere to the conceptual
totalitarianism advocated in Les temps modernes
(where visual imagination is rejected because it
cannot provide, once and for all, the one whole
truth of the genocide). But does he turn the
photographs into dialectical images? I do not
think so. I am tempted to say that Lanzmann,
who sought “the abolition of all distance between
past and present” in his film, actually came closer
to Benjamin’s concept.3 Didi-Huberman, in his
attempt to pay tribute to the photographic act of
the victims, gets absorbed into a reconstruction
of the event: we may or may not think of this as
a practice modeled on the remembrance of the
Passion, but it is certainly a contemplative gaze. To
support his methodological point, Didi-Huberman
relies on the view, offered in Benjamin’s concept of
history, that the past is marked by a secret index
which refers to redemption, conserving for us an
echo of voices now extinguished. We can find in
this an echo, too, of Benjamin’s own earlier History
of Photography, with its reference to what “cannot
be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to
know” the name of a person “who was alive there,
who even now is still real and will never consent
to be wholly absorbed in art”.4 If this effect is
relevant for the dialectical image as conceived
by Didi-Huberman, then Barthes’s that-has-been
certainly is as well. Hence, photography as a
medium reappears at the source of remembrance.
It occurs to me that Didi-Huberman could have
profited from considering this. Anyway, rethinking
images of the Shoah and rethinking the image in
general terms after the Shoah still seem to be very
different issues in his book.
In another recent study on the power of
images to absorb history, and to challenge
Wolfgang Brückle
sensitive beholders, Didi-Huberman finds much
to praise in Alfredo Jaar’s decision not to exhibit
extensive graphic photographic picture sequences
he had taken in Rwanda after the Tutsi massacre
in 1994.5 Jaar created elliptical installations instead,
and in them Didi-Huberman finds the dialectics
of the image and an art of counter-information,
an art conceived to challenge the disinformation
that surrounds us. One may argue that Didi-
Huberman’s reasoning should also apply to
our four images from Auschwitz. Appreciating
Jaar’s abstinence from the conventions of the
documentary and his decision to concentrate,
in one of the installations, on a mass of identical
images of the eyes of a survivor, we find
ourselves in the company of Lanzmann, who
also concentrated on portraits of those people
who had seen the horror of the gas chambers
with their own eyes. Yes, there is the issue of the
human gesture in Alex’s photographs. However,
Didi-Huberman insists that every picture, if
appropriately beheld, is an act rather than a
thing. We may accept this claim, but then the
question is what really fundamentally changes,
after Auschwitz, in our response to pictures. If
appropriately considered, the reference to Jaar
and the Rwandan genocide tells us that it is hard
to find stable criteria as to whether it is right to
show atrocity images. As a gesture, both positions
make sense. If applied rigidly, however, both may
turn to nonsense. It seems to me that while Didi-
Huberman makes an essential contribution to the
discourse on how we can imbue the Auschwitz
photographs with historical meaning, he is
less convincing in his attempt to draw general
conclusions from his case. This does not make
the second part of the book, full of important
observations on the uses and aesthetics of images,
less interesting. As was made clear above, I think
Didi-Huberman’s book is very stimulating; it
invites the reader to engage in a debate that has
consequences for many neighboring fields. To be
sure, Images in Spite of All has its shortcomings
Photography & Culture Volume 4
Book Review 229
and is also slightly overlong, as Didi-Huberman
reiterates his thoughts, verdicts, and sentences
time and again. In fact, the argument unfolds in
a somewhat disorganized, meandering way. But
readers won’t mind too much. Didi-Huberman
gives them ample opportunity to rethink their
notions of the act of taking photographs, the
documentary, the ethics of atrocity pictures and
the good and bad uses to which they are put.
Notes
1 Claude Lanzmann, Le monument contre l’archive
[Interview], Les Cahiers de Médiologie, no. 11, 2001,
pp. 271–9, p. 274; Gérard Wajcman, De la croyance
photographique, in: Les Temps Modernes, 56, 2001,
no. 613, pp. 47–83; Élisabeth Pagnoux, Reporter
photographe à Auschwitz, ibid., pp. 84–108. For
a general appraisal of the debate, see Ralph
Buchenhorst, Der Fotograf in der Gaskammer:
Zu einer Debatte über die bildliche Darstellung
der Shoah, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine
Kunstwissenschaft, 53, 2008, pp. 261–83.
2 Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce
qui nous regarde. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1992.
3 Cf. Marc Chevrie and Hervé Le Roux, Site and
Speech: an Interview with Claude Lanzmann about
Shoah [1985], Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”, ed. Stuart
Liebman, Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007, pp. 37–49.
4 Cf. Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography
[1931], in: Selected Writings Vol. 2, part 2, 1931–1934,
eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith.
Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,
1999, pp. 507–30, 510.
5 Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, 2006. L’image brûle,
Penser par les images: autour les travaux de Georges
Didi-Huberman, ed. Laurent Zimmermann. Nantes: C.
Defaut, pp. 11–52.
Wolfgang Brückle is Senior Research Officer,
Department of Art History and Theory, University
of Essex.
Issue 2 July 2011, pp. 225–230