Professor Dorota Glowacka Presents on Women’s Bodies in Holocaust Photographs

Dorota Glowacka (Professor of Humanities, University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada), Visiting Scholar at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research a public lecture entitled “(Re)Framing Gender: Representations of Women’s Bodies in Holocaust Photographs” on April 25, 2023. Professor Glowacka spoke about how images of women taken during and after the Holocaust conformed to conventional notions of gender and sexuality. She also explored how perspectives of gender affected the postwar circulation of these images in the Holocaust memorial landscape. To conclude her lecture, Professor Glowacka considered the ways in which we can view these images outside of gender norms and reinstate the agency of the photographed women.

Professor Glowacka began her lecture establishing the role of photographs during mass violence. The photographs that Professor Glowacka analyses in her lecture were taken in extreme conditions: ghettos, concentration camps, and killing sites. Professor Glowacka anchored her lecture in the deep analysis of photographs from the liquidation of the Jewish community of Liepaja in Škēde, Latvia taken by perpetrators, and from Auschwitz, taken by Henryk Makarewicz, a Soviet liberator.

Perpetrators shot photographs in Eastern Europe during the mass shootings of Jewish women, men, and children. When perpetrators took photographs of Jewish women at sites of mass murder – usually when they were in various stages of undress – it was another form of violence, Professor Glowacka argued, and even a kind of sexualized violence. Throughout her presentation, Professor Glowacka examined gendered power relations and how this power is transmitted through visual media.

Henryk Makarewicz photographed Auschwitz upon it’s liberation in winter 1945. Trained as a photographer, his documentation of German crimes was also stylistically curated. Professor Glowacka shared a series of four photographs culminating in the image of a dead, naked woman. Her analysis of this photograph included how the pose made the unnamed woman look alive and how Makarewicz positioned the camera in such a way that you cannot see other dead bodies and the realities of the camp. Professor Glowacka examined the composition of the photograph and compared it to the established art form of nude portraiture of women. The liberating gaze remained under scrutiny as Professor Glowacka questioned what the liberators chose to document and how there was an aesthetic impulse even when surrounded by the remnants of mass violence. Through this, Professor Glowacka argued that aesthetic conventions permeate the documentation of the Holocaust and in doing so, it aestheticizes the realities of mass violence.

The second part of Professor Glowacka’s lecture focused on the ways in which these photographs are used in commemoration practices in the post-Holocaust memorial landscape. They are used in books, museums, and lectures to educate people about the horrors of the Holocaust. Professor Glowacka discussed their use, circulation, and modifications through practices such as cropping. These photographs and the women they capture are constantly being reimagined and recontextualized.

Lastly, Professor Glowacka asserted that there is a way to look at these photographs in a way to grant “testimonial agency” to the women that were photographed. Resisting the urge of focusing on female beauty, it is possible to address the power that these women had by looking at how the women’s gazes were animated by the flash of the camera. Beyond the male gaze and gendered norms, these women gave testimony of the crimes they were victim to. In Professor Glowacka’s closing remarks, she reminded us that the women in these photographs have the last word in their stories.

In the Q&A that followed Professor Glowacka’s lecture, there were discussions about the sonderkommando photos from Auschwitz and how these photos were retouched in commemoration projects and the role of cropping and how this practice hinders the agency of photographs’ subjects. Professor Glowacka also reflected on the pedagogy of showing photographs of naked women and photographs taken during mass violence in educational settings.