Trespassing Through Shadows. Memory, Photography & the Holocaust

New. Focusing on a wide range of photographic displays and museum installations as well as such films as Shoah and Schindler's List, Liss questions the role of photography as social practice. She critically analyzes the transformations that documentary and more intimate photographs undergo as they are mediated through contemporary exhibition techniques, both at the institutional level of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and in the hands of a group of contemporary artists and photographers including Art Spiegelman, Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman, Christian Boltanski, Suzanne Hellmuth and Jock Reynolds, and Anselm Kiefer. Documentary photographic approaches to historical and contemporary suffering are facing a serious crisis in postmodern analysis. As Andrea Liss uncompromisingly shows, this crisis is specially acute in the contemporary artistic and museological remembrance of the Holocaust. Motivated by an effort to rename and rehumanize the victims, s~ving them from the obscene images taken by the perpetrators and disseminated in postwar representations, Trespassing through Shadows is inspired by a feminist ethics of care, empathy, and respect. A moving, concerned, and generous book., Ill. bn: 20+, Ill. colori: 12+. 152pp. …