Tofts, Alice
(2023)
Talking with images: using private photographs from the Imperial War Museums’ Photograph Archive to explore the experiences and intergenerational memories of Holocaust victims, survivors and their families.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
This thesis examines photographs from private collections of Holocaust survivors which were copied and displayed by Imperial War Museums (IWM) in the period from the mid-1990s to 2021. It explores the collections within, and between the families of Holocaust survivors, IWM’s Photograph Archive and IWM’s two permanent exhibitions: The Holocaust Exhibition and The Holocaust Galleries, which opened in 2000 and 2021 respectively. It responds to growing interest in pertinent fields of academic research in studying private collections of photographs to further understand Jewish experiences and memories of life prior to, during and following the Holocaust. It responds to three main concerns related to the study and use of private photographs. The first is that private photographs are a problematic source in historical and biographical research, the second that they appear as ‘banal’ and stylised reflections on the world and the third, how do private photographs help connect or engender empathy in those who did not experience the Holocaust with those who did.
The first four chapters each focus on one Holocaust survivor and their private collection. Each chapter examines individual and familial memory and, the family’s public engagement with memorial cultures and IWM. They employ a transgenerational approach to understand how different generations understand, construct, and then communicate the past through private photographs, testimony, photo narratives and testimony. The first chapter focuses on the collection of Ruth Locke’s childhood in Dachau, Germany. The second chapter examines the collection of Esther Brunstein who grew up in Łódź, Poland. The third focuses on that of Lea Goodman from Kraków, Poland. The fourth chapter examines Jan Imich’s collection who also grew up in Kraków. Although these four chapters highlight very different experiences and memories, they all emphasise that private photographs’ meanings can be fluid, opaque, surprising and sometimes paradoxical. The fifth chapter focuses on IWM’s Holocaust Galleries and the ways that curators have collected and displayed private photographs and testimonies. By doing so it highlights the opportunities, challenges and limitations of transforming familial memory into a museum archive and exhibition. This thesis emphasises the complexity of using private photographs as historical sources and museum objects and, in doing so, encourages rather than deters, others from investigating this rich and under-studied visual source.
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