Janina Struk: A Photographer in the Archive
As a professional documentary photographer and writer with a zeal for critical investigation, research informs my photography, and my photography informs my research.
When I began to work as a photographer I didn’t consider myself a researcher, but I was aware that subject knowledge was imperative if I was to make informed choices about the kind of photographs I needed to take to communicate a particular message.
A photograph is a two-dimensional object; a fraction of a second frozen in time and evidence that the moment existed. In that sense a photograph is objective, but it is also subjective, influenced by the intention of the photographer who makes a series of technical, aesthetic and ethical choices each time the shutter is released, for example which part of the scene to photograph, how best to compose it, then how to achieve the required result – the use of lenses, the angle, distance, the type of lighting and focus. These factors determine how we ‘read’ or understand the moment captured by the camera. But in order to ‘interpret’ a photograph, we must look beyond its lines and tones to what lies outside the frame of the image. The phrases ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ or ‘every picture tells a story’ are only applicable if we already know what the story is by other means. As Susan Sontag has written, ‘photographs do not explain, they acknowledge’.1
My first solo photography exhibition, Washington in a word …,2 was produced as a result of six months of research as photographer-in-residence at Washington New Town in the North East of England.
The brief from my commissioners and funders, the Artist’s Agency and Washington Development Corporation, was to photograph ‘The people of Washington’ and the end product would be an exhibition.
As I had never been to Washington, nor did I know much about the North East of England or new towns, I moved from London into a studio apartment on one of Washington’s award-winning estates, or ‘villages’ as they were called in the town’s glossy public relations brochures. I decided that to get to know the people of Washington I needed to live there.
For the first month I took few pictures as I made notes on my impressions and what I learned about the town. I used my camera as a kind of sketchbook, a way of creating a link with the people I met and exploring the visual possibilities of the area. I spent time speaking to residents in working men’s clubs, cafes and in the community school that had offered me workspace. I also began to familiarise myself with the history of the town.
In 1964 Washington—then largely a coal mining area—had been designated as a new town under the New Towns’ Act 1946. A Development Corporation was put in place headed by officers appointed by central government. The last remaining coalmine had been closed down, apparently on the premise that the coal supply had run out, although former miners would tell me otherwise. Perhaps a colliery did not fit with an image of a new town?
But what is a new town? I discovered that the concept originated in the work of the late nineteenth-century writer Ebenezer Howard, whose book entitled: Garden Cities of To-morrow, published in 1902, formed the basis of this modern movement. In Howard’s utopian vision, a garden city would be the result of the marriage between country and town. It would be a new kind of environment in which people would escape the harsh realities of urban capitalism and live in well-designed homes amidst parks and gardens.
In Thatcher’s Britain3 Washington New Town was far from utopia. The complex roadways constructed for a society in which the majority would have cars seemed virtually empty. Its copious industrial estates built to cater for a socio-economic boom lay in waiting, and its working class population with little disposable income were confined to the ‘villages’ that had little to offer in terms of transport or leisure facilities.
The history of the new town movement and the socio-economic conditions directly informed the type of photographs I decided to take, as well as the structure of the final exhibition. As the research influenced the photographs, so the photographs gave a modern interpretation to the theories of the garden city. In order to emphasise the design and structure of the town I photographed the roadways and villages just after dawn to avoid people or cars. I took portraits of the corporation’s chief officers in their offices in order to give a face to the town’s leading bureaucrats—largely unknown to the population.
I photographed industrial estates and took posed portraits of its workers. I also photographed its young people and to accompany their portraits gave them the opportunity to write their opinions about the town. I was aware that how I chose to photograph my subjects would play a vital role in how an audience would understand or relate to those subjects.
The exhibition consisted of more than 50 black and white photographs. Each image was framed with a relevant quotation taken from Howard or other new town theorists, and the opinions collected from the town’s youth. This structure was based on the idea that since the combination of two elements—country and city—would create a garden city, the combination of image and text would work in a similar way and encourage the viewer to synthesise a meaning from these paired elements.
The response to my work was mixed: some positive, some critical. The school incorporated the exhibition into geography and history classes to inspire discussion among its pupils about the town—its history, structure, design, past and future.
My critics posed questions: where were the pictures of the town’s working class population in their homes? Why had I photographed the chief officers in poses that made them seem remote? How had I managed to take pictures of empty roadways and why? Why had I exhibited photographs of punk rockers (considered anarchic at the time) with their unedited opinions about the town?
But it seemed that the most disconcerting and perhaps controversial part of the exhibition was the way in which I used the research—or perhaps that I had carried out research at all. Why were quotations taken from the theories of new towns in the exhibition? It wasn’t what had been expected of a documentary photographer.
The corporation responded by pulling down the shutters on other ‘arts’ projects intended for the town. In an attempt to counterbalance my critical work a photographic competition ran in a local newspaper asking the people of Washington to submit their own view of the town. I seem to remember the winning picture that adorned the corporation’s headquarters was a large colour print that featured ducks on a lake taken during a glorious sunset.
I regarded the corporation’s viewpoint as much to do with their perceived idea of what documentary photography should look like rather than anything else. At the time, the supposed realism of black and white photographs that gave a glimpse into the ‘reality’ of working class lives was a popular subject for the concerned documentary photographer. This was particularly the case at Side Gallery, in nearby Newcastle upon Tyne. At the time, Side was influential in promoting this genre of photography and was renowned for its bleak portrayal of working class life in the North East region of England.4
I doubt that the corporation wanted the gritty realism that adorned the walls of Side Gallery, but there seemed to have been an expectation from my commissioners that I would work in the spirit of the documentary tradition and take pictures of its population at work and play—perhaps also with a public relations gloss. But if photographs are about imparting information, then I decided my exhibition would have to incorporate text about new town theories. I also decided that the precise and systematic construction of the town would be best represented by images that were also constructed and systematically presented. I had also chosen to work in this way to avoid the potential pitfalls of the liberal documentary tradition and what I saw as its voyeuristic nature.
The story of the Washington exhibition highlights the influence that research had on my approach to photography. The photographic assignments and the writing that followed have been a development of that approach. And, as my practical understanding and enthusiasm for photography, representation and history has grown, research has become an increasingly important part of my work.
One of my primary concerns is the influence photographs have on our perception and understanding of history. I began a study into a specific collection of images that analyses how visual representation contributes to how we understand—or misunderstand—a particular subject. My experience as a photographer gave me the practical and analytical skills to begin the research and provided a framework within which to work with historical images that can become separated from the original context thereby affecting the way in which they are interpreted and used.
That study into photographs taken during the Holocaust began in the early 1990s when I started to pursue an inquiry into photographs taken during the Second World War, with a particular interest in Poland. At the time, no significant research had been carried out into images taken during the Holocaust, especially those taken in Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine. In the early days of my research I came across images that seemed to cut across the boundaries of what I perceived war photographs to be about; they did not show the dead strewn on battlefields nor the devastating effects of war on civilians, but a type of photograph I was not familiar with at the time.
One image I came across in an archive in London shows four naked men and a boy standing on the edge of a pit apparently passively awaiting their execution. Surrounding them are seven perpetrators, some armed, some in uniform, some not. A man in uniform on the right-hand side is looking to the camera, seemingly directing proceedings.
I felt ashamed for examining such a barbaric scene, voyeuristic for witnessing their nakedness and vulnerability, and disturbed because the act of looking put me in the position of the possible assassin, but I was also compelled to find out more. Where was the picture taken? Why had it been taken, and by who? Who are the people in the picture? Are they Jews, Poles, Gypsies or communists?
As with many images taken during the Holocaust, this photograph was without provenance, so I asked the archivist who she thought had taken the picture and why? My questions were regarded as surprising and my curiosity somewhat morbid. The sheer barbarity of the scene seemed to prevent any rational thought. Isn’t the fact the photograph exists enough evidence of Nazi crimes? But it could have been an official photograph for the files of the Reich, or a memento for a Nazi or sympathiser. In order to begin to understand what the image showed, I had to find out where and in what circumstances this type of execution could have taken place.
In spite of the lack of information, this photograph has been widely used in books, exhibitions and films about the Holocaust and attributed to many different locations and many different dates. It has become an all-purpose illustration—an icon to the barbarism of the Nazi regime—used as evidence, but by different people towards very different objectives.5
The research into this photograph and hundreds more Holocaust images led me to public and private archives in Britain, Poland, Ukraine, Israel and the USA over a span of almost ten years. The research culminated in my book Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (I.B. Tauris, 2004), which explores various questions including who took the pictures and why they took them. It analyses how the pictures are archived, and who uses them, how and why. These questions, which traditionally been disregarded, are fundamental to begin to understand how to interpret these photographs.
I began to research and write Private Picture: Soldiers’ inside View of War (I.B. Tauris, 2011) partly as a result of unearthing a large number of personal snapshots taken by German soldiers while researching Photographing the Holocaust. The main question these snapshots posed was the following: If German soldiers had taken pictures of their crimes, then other soldiers must also have taken pictures in other wars. My research in public and private archives, as well as interviews with soldiers, showed this indeed was the case in almost all wars. During the Boer War (1899–1902) and the First World War (1914–1918) soldiers used cameras to record their personal memories of conflict; as did more recently the Israeli Defence Forces in Palestine and at the time of writing the book the story about the pictures taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq filled the press. This investigation led me to ask a further question: what effect could a wider appreciation of these soldiers’ pictures have on the popular perception of the genre of war photography?
The thoroughness and doggedness of my research relies in part on asking questions of a photograph. I use primary sources and do not rely on published work either in print or on the Internet. Not asking the correct questions of photographs can lead to false conclusions or to reading them in incorrect or inappropriate ways. This continues to be the case with Holocaust images. They are sometimes accredited with incorrect captions, no captions at all, or are put to multifarious uses including for propaganda purposes.
Traditionally, photographs have not been subjected to such scrutiny. Historians have rather tended to regard them simply as evidence, an illustration to support a text. The idea that photographs can be considered as a text, as well as a rich source of information that adds to our knowledge of history, is not a widely held viewpoint.
When I was invited to speak about Photographing the Holocaust at a conference of historians at East Anglia University some years ago, my participation was considered as innovative by participants. To an historian a photograph is considered of secondary importance to written documentation and photography not a subject for investigation.
This point is illustrated by an exhibition first displayed in Hamburg in 1995 entitled War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–44. As its title suggests it took as its subject the crimes committed by German soldiers during the Second World War in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It included more than 1000 photographs, some taken by soldiers.
For more than two years it travelled through Germany and Austria until a historian alleged that some of the pictures did not show what the curators had assumed they did: people shown as corpses in photographs taken in Western Ukraine had been murdered by German soldiers. The historian alleged that they were already dead when the Germans arrived, and that Russians had murdered them. A moratorium into the authenticity of the photographs began. After almost a year of rigorous research by a panel of eminent historians a report concluded that only a few of the images had questionable or inaccurate captions, yet the exhibition was discredited and subsequently closed down.
During my research into this exhibition and in order to get to the root of this complex story I travelled to Hamburg to interview historian Hannes Heer. He admitted that they (the historians) had sometimes used photographs on the basis of what they assumed they showed. He said: ‘[As historians] we had no knowledge, nor had we thought about what a photograph is, how dangerous it is, how ambiguous it is and how it can be used in different ways. For historians a photograph is simply evidence.’6
I am sometimes asked whether I consider myself as a historian, a photographer, a photo-historian, a researcher or a journalist. The answer is that there is something of all these disciplines in my work. The practice of documentary photography is an interdisciplinary practice that, in order to understand the subject and take well-informed pictures requires background research and good communication skills as well as technical ability. As a writer my study into photographs is enriched by this knowledge and fuelled by an insatiable curiosity about photographs, their history and provenance, how they are interpreted and used, and what we can learn from these fragments of the past.
© Copyright: Janina Struk, January 2016
Notes
1 Susan Sontag quoted in Janina Struk (2004). Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence. London: I.B. Tauris, p. 4.
2 Creative Camera, no. 229, January 1984, pp. 1218–1219.
3 Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990) Britain witnessed two major recessions, a rapid programme of privatisation, a sharp decline of industry—particularly in the North of England—and a dramatic increase in poverty, inequality and the number of unemployed.
4 Janina Struk (1987). ‘Northern Mythologies’, Creative Camera 6, pp. 30–31.
5 ‘A Photograph from the Archives’, pp. 2–15 in Struk, Photographing the Holocaust; see also The Guardian, ‘The Death Pit’: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2004/jan/27/photography.museums.
6 For a detailed account of this exhibition see: ‘How Pictures Can Haunt a Nation’, pp. 89–108, Janina Struk (2011). Private Pictures: Soldiers’ Inside View of War. London: I.B. Tauris.