Images to imagine: The importance of the importance of studying the Shoah archives
Abstract
This paper studies the importance of facing the archives of tragedy, especially those produced by its victims, against a historiographical tradition that, in the name of the unimaginable, of the unrepresentable of the tragedy –often focused on the horror of the Nazi Holocaust–, rejects the study of visual vestiges. We approach it through the reflections of the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman in his work Images in Spite of All, where he analyses four photographs taken in 1944 in Auschwitz by a Jewish prisoner. It will be necessary to rethink the way to confront these documents. Their cognitive potential, and their importance for ethical and political praxis, will not be understood if we don’t go into the necessary work of imagination. The knowledge, before the image, before that reality that urgently needs to be understood, needs an active role of the observer, a gaze that recognizes the pain behind it, the possibility of an unfinished time.
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