David Shneer presents “Making Grief: How a Soviet Photographer Made a Photograph of Holocaust Liberation into an Icon of War’s Human Tragedy”

Posted by fliere on Tuesday, December 12, 2017 in Past Events.

Jewish Studies is proud to co-sponsor this talk by Dr. David Shneer from the University of Colorado.

“Making Grief: How a Soviet Photographer Made a Photograph of Holocaust Liberation into an Icon of War’s Human Tragedy”

March 16, 2017, from 12:10-2:00pm.

Lunch provided.

Garland Hall 101

About David Shneer: 

Called a “pathbreaking” scholar by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Shneer’s research focuses on 20th century European, Russian, and Jewish history and culture.  His newest book, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (Rutgers University Press, 2011), finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and winner of the 2013 Association for Jewish Studies Jordan Schnitzer Prize, looks at the lives and works of two dozen Soviet Jewish World War II military photographers to examine what kinds of photographs they took when they encountered evidence of Nazi genocide on the Eastern Front.

About the talk:

In 1942, Dmitrii Baltermants took some of the first images from the liberator perspective of photographs that document the Holocaust on the outskirts of the Russian city of Kerch. Twenty years later, he went back to his archive of Kerch photographs and produced Grief, what would go on to become one of his most widely published, exhibited, and purchased photographs. This talk examines why this photograph came to serve as a Holocaust photograph and how it functioned as a projection of the peace-loving Soviet Union during the Cold War.