As part of a broader pictorial turn in the Humanities since the 1990s, there has been an unprecedented scholarly interest in photography. Numerous recent studies in a variety of fields have considered photographs and albums – in more or less methodical ways – as exceptional types of documents, which simultaneously display reality and comment on it. Moreover, they have subjected photographs to a “postlinguisitc, postsemiotic rediscovery” (W.J.T. Mitchell) and expanded the focus to a wider visual culture and spectatorship, ranging from the gaze to practices of seeing.
These studies have introduced new perceptions of photographic narratives as the foundation of shared memory (or “postmemory”) and, indeed, new histories. Scholars of Jewish studies and Jewish history have offered some of the most systematic and inventive demonstrations of photo-analysis that enriches and complicates our understanding of historical experiences and mnemonic practices.
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