19th Century Photography

Improved Essays
The way nations remember their past is extremely important for their future. Certainly there are a lot of different ways a society can remember crucial moments of its history. One of the most efficient and realistic is photography and film. With its emergence in the 19th century photography played a significant role during national conflicts in different countries and World War II. The way a picture can capture a moment cannot be underestimated, as it is one of the most realistic and reliable kinds of evidence one can provide. Photography is a truth-telling technology. War is only one of many subjects that lured early photographers, but it was one that promised a large audience. Conflict photography played a habitual role in the shaping of national identities. The camera could not lie, in the sense that it would record what was in front of it. However, a photograph could also be very misleading, for example, if its caption gave a false provenance or location, so that it seemed to show something that it did not: a training exercise could be misrepresented as a real battle. Captions for photographs published during the war were also censored. But photographs also automatically recorded social history: how people dressed, what they wore, what their buildings and streets …show more content…
As she states this subject has always contained a lot of controversy and thus another view on the life of both civilians and soldiers during this historical period can clarify some misunderstandings. Through Amateur Eyes addresses the ‘problems of hermeneutics’ by looking from a unique perspective at a series of still and moving images taken by German soldiers and civilians, both Nazis and non-Nazis during World War II. A lot of these pictures depict the death campus and the ghettos. They can be understood in terms of their visual instantiation of Nazi ideology and especially the anti-Semitism

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