Reading Private Photography

Abstract

Abstract Private photography is one of the types of source material most readily available to historians of the past century. Yet scholars rarely exploit this vast reservoir of visual documents. This article proposes a path toward a more systematic reading of private photography in historical inquiry, which highlights the modes of expression established in the photographs and in the albums. Regardless of the (undocumented) intentions of the photographers—and of the compilers of the albums—these modes disclose their position vis-à-vis the reality they captured, preserved, and arranged in the album. Rather than presenting an obstacle, the “banality” of the scenes is central to my reading of the photographs’ value to historians. As a case study, I consider here private photographs of Jews in Germany of the 1930s. While the Jewish experience in the face of Nazism is hardly an overlooked topic, I argue that analysis of private photography discloses intricacies that have been disregarded or marginalized by historians. In particular, Jewish photographers’ recurrent use of the two modes, pathos and irony, reveals a plethora of understudied reactions both to their growing exclusion from German society and to major trends in the German-Jewish identity discourse of the time.