Professor David Shneer will be giving a talk on Flatiorns Terrance at Golden West on Thursday, Sept 29th at 10:30 am.

Grief: How One Photograph Helped Define the History and Memory of the Holocaust 

In 1942, the Soviet Jewish photographer Dmitrii Baltermants became one of the first Holocaust liberator-photographers when he documented the Nazi mass murder of Jews and Sinti Roma outside the city of Kerch.  The image appeared widely shortly after the site’s discovery both within the Soviet Union and abroad.  Twenty years later, when Baltermants brought the photograph out of his archive, it now served a very different purpose.  No longer a historical document of Nazi atrocities, Baltermants, who had become one of the Soviet Union’s key cultural diplomats, turned his photojournalistic document into a stunning art photograph called “Grief" to be exhibited around the world as a memorial meditation on violence.  This talk will focus on Grief’s journey from the pages of magazines and Cold War era exhibitions to the white washed walls of the Museum of Modern Art where it appeared in the 2000s as Grief sat at the juncture of history and memory.