Conveying Atrocity in Image Summary

Conveying Atrocity in Image Summary

This article is about how images were used in The Holocaust to convey the horror and utter atrocity of what the Nazis did to the Jewish victims. As the article put, people did not always believe what textual evidence in the war. They needed to be provided with factual photographs; and provided they were. These images did not capture the images of the Holocaust itself, but of the depiction of the final phases: starving sacks of skin that were excuses for human bodies, corpses laid in heaps like bales of hay, and American soldiers gazing in horror of the Nazi’s cruel work. The article talks about how the placement of these factors led to different meanings that the photograph is able to convey. A second factor that changes the meaning of the picture has been the number of bodies in the picture. Some pictures have a starved man staring at the camera in agony, while others have mass piles of bodies where it is hard to tell which limbs belong to which body. These pictures, using number, show both the personal terror and agony of the Holocaust and the monstrosity of the genocide by showing the numerous bodies. A third practice used by the photographs of the Holocaust was gaze. The victims in the photograph always stared directly at the camera or beyond the camera so that they appeared to “see without seeing.” All of these pictures, regardless of how they are used depict a level of horror that that manifested the true evil and atrocity of the Holocaust. Personally I think that pictures, as opposed to textual evidence, leave the deeper impression on its viewers of the two. Pictures, like the ones in the article of the Holocaust, capture the feeling and emotion that words cannot always describe. The horrible images of starving or dead bodies show just how despicable Hitler’s work was in the genocide of the Jews. It gives the 6 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust a face, an emotion and a personality.