Vol. 20 · No. 3 · Issue 64 · Fall 2002
Review Essay
The "Ethics of Seeing" Photographs of Germany at War's End

Siobhan Kattago

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Abstract

Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996)

Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)

It is certainly no revelation that ours is a visual culture, a culture of the image and of the copy. Photography has dramatically changed the way in which we experience the present and how think about the recent past. Because World War II was the first event that photo-journalists documented in such detail, its images are important not only for an understanding of what happened but also for a phenomenological study of how we perceive what happened.